Chapter 19: Eastbridge’s Welcome
Chapter 19: Eastbridge’s Welcome
They were kind to me. That’s the part I still find difficult.
The gate guards wore matching grey, which after two weeks of scavengers in mismatched armour looked like civilisation itself. They didn’t shove anyone. A woman ahead of me was carrying a child and one of them took her pack for her and gave it back on the other side, and when my turn came the sergeant looked at my face for slightly too long — everyone does — and then just said, "Weapons on the tray, hands out, you’re fine," and waved me through into the light.
Inside there was a canvas intake hall with heaters. Heaters.
"Sit down before you fall down," said the woman at the first table. She had reading glasses and a clipboard and the specific exhausted patience of a person who had done this eleven thousand times. "When did you last eat properly?"
"I don’t— a while."
"Right." She wrote something. "Bench three. Don’t argue with the medics, they bite."
They put a blanket on me. They gave me a mug of water and then a second one when I finished the first too fast, and a bowl of barley and lentils with actual fat in it, and I ate it with my hands shaking so badly that the woman opposite pretended very hard to be looking somewhere else.
A medic cleaned the gash under my ribs, which had gone red at the edges, and packed it properly with a sterile dressing and gave me four days of tablets in a paper twist. She unwound the filthy strips off my palms and made a face at them and redid both, and asked me twice whether I’d hit my head, and told me to sleep on my side.
Decontamination was a canvas booth, a bucket of warm grey water, and lye soap. I stood in it and scrubbed a fortnight off my skin and had to lean on the frame for a while afterwards.
Then a young man with a tablet asked me to register.
"Standard processing," he said. "Name, level, class if you’ve got one, next of kin if you have anyone in the settlement. It’s for the roster — if you don’t exist on the roster you can’t be allocated a bunk, and then you’re sleeping in the transit yard, and the transit yard is awful, honestly."
"Adrian Vale. Level four." I hesitated. "No class listed."
He didn’t blink. Half the people in that hall were lying about something.
"Sign for intake support and temporary accommodation." He turned the tablet. There was a paragraph in grey type and a box. "It just means you accepted the help and you’re not going to claim later that we jumped you at the gate. People do."
It’s a receipt, I thought. For soup.
I signed it.
I noticed things. I want that on the record, because I’ve since had to live with the accusation — including from myself — that I walked into it with my eyes shut.
The residents wore bands. Fabric, buckled at the wrist, with a number stamped on a metal tab: 0114, 0870, 1332. Not the intake people. The residents. I watched a work crew come back through the inner gate at shift change and they moved like men at the end of a twelve-hour day in a mine, inside a settlement with walls and floodlights and functioning heaters, and I couldn’t make those two facts sit next to each other.
When a guard walked down the middle of the hall, conversation didn’t stop, exactly. It dropped a register. Every table did it at once, without looking up, the way birds do.
And an older man at the end of my bench — 0870, three fingers missing on his left hand — watched me sign the tablet and said, quietly, "Son. Before you take the bunk, you want to ask what the—"
A grey uniform stopped at the end of the row. Not aggressively. He just stood there and looked at the ceiling.
"—what the weather’s like," the old man finished. He went back to his bowl and did not speak to me again.
I noticed all of it. I was also warm for the first time since the Merge, with food in me and clean dressings and a cot with a real mattress six metres away, and I had watched a man die tonight because I arranged it, and there is a limit to how much a mind will process before it simply stops accepting deliveries.
I’ll ask in the morning, I thought.
I got four hours. Then a different young man with a different tablet shook my shoulder, apologised for waking me, and said there was one last piece of processing.
"Your account," he said.
"My what?"
He turned the tablet round.
VALE, ADRIAN — 1447
Gate processing — 40
Security screening — 25
Decontamination — 30
Potable water (3 units) — 45
Nutrition (2 units) — 120
Medical: dressing, antiseptic, antibiotic course — 260
Accommodation (1 night, transit block) — 90
Administrative fee — 60
Balance owing: 670 credits
I read it twice. The numbers didn’t do anything the second time.
"Six hundred and seventy," I said. "What’s that in — what does that buy? What’s a credit?"
"Day labour rate for an unskilled newcomer is twenty-two." He said it kindly. He had clearly said it many times and had learned to say it kindly. "Skilled or hazard work’s better."
I did the arithmetic. It took no effort at all; the number was small and horrible.
"Thirty days."
"About that." He was already sliding a fabric band across the table toward me, 1447 stamped on the tab. "Except food and accommodation accrue daily while you’re clearing it. Six credits a day, if you eat both meals. So it’s more like—"
"It’s more like never," I said.
He didn’t argue. That was the thing that finally landed. He didn’t argue, and he wasn’t gloating, and he wasn’t ashamed either; he was a clerk explaining a schedule to somebody who had just understood the schedule.
"Residents with an outstanding balance can’t be cleared through the gate," he added, in the tone of a man reciting a fire regulation. "It’s not a punishment. It’s just that the settlement can’t function if people take the intake package and walk."
The intake package, I thought. The blanket. The soup. The bandages on my hands.
I sat in the warm hall with a full stomach and clean dressings and a number on my wrist, and I understood, with total clarity, that Eastbridge had not rescued me.
It had bought me. And then, afterwards, it had told me the price.