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to my terminal and vice versa. I think back to the group of Rads the Maintenance workers doused with acid. They were protesting the situation with the Asylum patients, as they always do. But Shale had made a good point: why were they protesting it so violently, so stolidly, and so suddenly? Why would they not heed the warnings of the workers? I have seen many riots, but none of them in recent memory has ended with dousing the Rads in acid. It is always threatened, of course, to keep them in line. To remind them they are only alive because the government cannot be bothered with them. They are insignificant, hardly a threat.
    So why now? Why were they dealt with so swiftly and unequivocally?
    I cannot voice these questions out loud. To do so would be to invite suspicions and imprisonment. Maybe even death.
    I enter the alphanumeric codes in the correct database. The form looks like an electronic graveyard.
    Is one of these Ceres?

CHAPTER NINE
    I walk up the concrete stairs to my apartment, my feet aching with every step. I wish it was empty. I wish I didn’t have to play a part, put on my mask. I wear so many masks—one for the streets in case a Spark is watching, one for Moon, one for my coworkers, one for my mother, and one for Shale—that I am beginning to wonder if I even exist under them. If no one sees the true kernel of my self, does it exist?
    Le marché noir does brisk business with alcohol and pills, especially in times of distress. The last time there was a riot, the NNB reported that eighteen in every hundred homeless persons overdosed fatally in a three-month span. I’m sure there were good citizens in that number they didn’t disclose. That wouldn’t be good for morale.
    But I don’t waste my money. I’ve found that sleep is the perfect drug. I’m draped with fatigue every minute of every day anyway. I simply utilize the resource I have. We’ve all gotten adept at making the most out of available resources. People do that in scarce times. We’re adaptable.
    I’ve adapted so I can sleep whenever I want. I simply close my eyes, and the next thing I know, I wake up and it’s hours—sometimes days—later. Once I missed work because I slept twenty-four hours. I had to tell my boss, Miss Adams, that I was sick.
    I round the fourth flight of stairs, turning my face up to the crude windows punched into the walls to let in some light. If you want to go out at night, you risk falling down the steep stairs and plunging to your death. One of my neighbors fell, broke her leg, and lay at the bottom of the stairs in the frigid cold of winter until someone found her. She lost three toes.
    Haumea Kay, another one of my neighbors, hurries down the hallway clutching a putrid, stinking rug to her chest. I plan to give her a wide berth, but she stops when she sees me at the top of the stairs. She seems discombobulated, as if someone has woken her from a nightmare. She looks at me, then down at the stained rug in her hands.
    “Just off to the trash chute,” she says, her eyes wild. “Onyx is sick, but I should think it’s only a stomach virus. He’s always been a hearty boy, that one. Should make a fine Husband one day!” She laughs, and the sound is too high, much too unsteady.
    I smile, trying not to be unkind.
    Her son, Onyx, is only five years old, and about the sickliest child I’ve seen. He came home from the hospital puny, but since he was over the weight limit, they didn’t send him to the Asylums. Ever since then, it’s been a litany of diseases. I know because Haumea has borrowed medicine from me in the middle of the night before.
    I edge past her and go to my apartment. I’m undoing the laces on my boots, and Shale is asking me what I would like for dinner, when I hear the sirens.
    Shale and I hurry to the windows, even though it is clear that the siren is the Escort van, parked in front of our building. As we peer down, we hear the heavy clomp-clomp-clomp of the Escorts’ boots coming toward our