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lighter. My renewed faith in Felicity had unburdened me and I practically skipped through the lobby toward the silver elevators.
    “That’s a young one. Evaluation?” a thin man in a gray fedora who sat on a stool in the elevator lobby asked the angels on either side of me.
    The angel on my right replied. “Third kid this week.”
    The poster on the wall between the two elevators displayed a picture of an old man, maybe eighty or ninety years old, holding a blushing baby over his head while a glass of greenish-blue liquid sat on a picnic table in the background. The headline on the poster read: DRINK FOR LIFE. DRINK TO FELICITY.
    The silver doors slid open and a young man in gray coveralls with a blue star patched onto his breast pocket exited the compartment. His blue eyes took in the two angels on either side of me then locked on my face. He smiled, but not the usual plastic smile or the scary darkling smile. It was a smile that tugged at just one corner of his mouth, as if he knew exactly where I was being taken and he found it amusing.
    My gaze followed him over my shoulder as he made his way across the lobby, the shock of black hair on his head trembling in the breeze of the air-conditioning. There was definitely something strange about that smile. He was about to round the corner into the reception area when he glanced back and winked at me.
    The angel on my left wrapped his fingers around my arm and yanked me into the elevator compartment. His thumb pressed into my arm where the needle stabbed me earlier, but it didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt anymore.
    Except that amused half-smile. Did that guy think it was funny that I was potentially going to be sentenced to a leisure home? The anger subsided quickly under the haze of the rations. I couldn’t sustain my outrage in this state. But I wanted to. No, I didn’t. That would make me like them; the ones damned to the leisure homes for greater offenses than skipping rations.
    The elevator doors opened onto a carpeted hallway. The muffled thud of our footsteps beat in my ears like a drum solo marching me to my rapture.
    “Does it hurt?” I asked the angel who gripped my arm without regard to whether he was hurting me.
    He looked down at me and I realized he was quite handsome, or maybe it was just his uniform and the rations distorting my perception of him. His slightly sloped nose and full lips made his blue uniform appear even more crisp and authoritative.
    “I wouldn’t know,” he replied, and I could smell the rations on his breath, a faint metallic scent that washed away the handsome image like the dirty cloth my mother used to wipe the glass clean last night.
    Where was my mother? She had stayed behind to have a chat with Headmaster Tate and she still hadn’t caught up with us. Did she even care that this might be the last day she ever saw me?
    We finally arrived at a set of glass double doors at the end of the hallway. Etched across the surface of the glass were the words Suffering is optional . And I opted to suffer, so now I was going to suffer the consequences.
    The huskier angel on my right slipped his sec-band into the scanner. A flash of green then the locking mechanism clacked and the glass doors exhaled a great whoosh of air as they slid open.
    The blue carpet in here was thicker, rendering our footsteps completely silent as we approached a glass semicircular desk in the center of the lobby. The girl seated behind the desk wore a variation on the same gray tunic I wore to school. She even had her brown hair pulled back into a long braid that ran down her spine like mine. She could be me in ten years if the committee chose to take mercy on me.
    The air in the lobby was stagnant and warm as if no one had entered this room for weeks. I wondered how the girl at the desk got in without disturbing the stale plastic air. Maybe she never left. Maybe she lived here, she and the committee, shacked up in some back office or stockroom, grinning as they waited