UNCLAIMED

THE LOCKED ROOM

Kael Vorren kept a schedule the way other men kept promises.

Six-fifteen, the shower ran on the other side of the house. Six-forty, boots on the stairs, even and unhurried. Seven, the front door, and then silence until the surveillance drones' morning pass murmured overhead like clockwork breathing.

I learned this in the first three days, the way I'd learned to read a room full of people who could report me for the wrong expression. Not because I cared where he went. Because a schedule was information, and information was the only currency I had left.

By day four, I knew he left one door in the house locked.

It sat at the end of the hallway, plain and grey like every other door in this house, except this one had a keypad instead of a handle, and Kael's fingers moved too quickly over it for me to catch the code, even standing in the doorway of my own room, pretending to fold laundry I didn't own yet.

"You're up early," he said, without turning around.

I hadn't heard him stop.

"Compact citizens rise at six," I said. "I read the pamphlet."
That almost-smile again, gone before it fully arrived. He tucked something into his jacket - a thin folder, grey, unmarked - and the keypad door clicked shut behind whatever room it guarded.

"There's a market pass in the kitchen drawer," he said. "Third District women shop Tuesdays and Fridays. You'll want to use it before the good stalls close."

"You're telling me my schedule now too?"

"I'm telling you the schedule that already exists. I didn't write it." He paused, and something in his face shifted - not quite guilt, but adjacent to it. "For what it's worth. I don't enjoy watching people learn the shape of their own cage."

It was the most human thing he'd said to me. I filed it away with the signature, the "survive this," the folder he carried like it weighed more than paper should.

The market was exactly what I expected and nothing like what I'd imagined.
Rows of state-approved stalls, identical awnings, prices posted in the same government typeface as the pairing notice that had started all this. Women in grey moved between them with the practiced efficiency of people being watched, which they were - cameras on every post, an Enforcer patrol every hundred meters, bored and routine.

But underneath that, if you knew how to look, there was a second market running quietly inside the first.

An old woman selling dried herbs pressed an extra paper packet into my hand when I paid for cooking spice - folded small, tucked beneath the receipt. I didn't open it there. I'd learned that much already, even without anyone teaching me.

"New wife," she said, not a question. Her eyes flicked to the barcode at my wrist, then away, fast. "Third District women get sick easy this time of year. Some herbs help. Some don't." A pause, deliberate. "Depends what you're sick of."
I understood her before I understood what I was agreeing to.

"I'm sick of a great many things," I said.

She almost smiled, the same fleeting kind Kael did - like open expression itself had become a rationed resource in the Compact, doled out only to people you trusted not to report you for it.

"Come back Friday," she said. "Ask for the chamomile."

That night, I unfolded the paper packet in the privacy of my closet, candle lit, door checked twice.

It wasn't herbs. It was a name and an address, written in pencil so it could be rubbed out fast if the wrong hands found it.

Reyna Okafor - Third District Clinic - ask about the widows' ledger.

I didn't know what a widows' ledger was. I didn't know Reyna Okafor. But I recognized the shape of the thing being offered to me - the same shape as my father's file, the same shape as a locked door with a keypad Kael didn't want me near.

Someone in this district was already doing what I hadn't yet worked out how to start.

I thought about the folder Kael had carried out that morning, thin and grey and deliberately unremarkable. I thought about the room he kept locked in a house he'd told me, almost gently, not to learn the shape of.

Whatever was behind that door, I intended to find out.
And whatever Reyna Okafor's ledger was, I intended to find that too.
For the first time since the courier had knocked on my door with a clipboard and a stranger's name, I felt something other than dread settle into my chest.

It felt, uncomfortably, like purpose.