Sorry I’m so late with posting this. It’s been a busy day! Almost… *removes glasses*… too busy.

Word Count: 15,042

And yet, those same people traveled with me during the relocation. After we had all gathered together in the living area, the trek began. Thousands of people moved along – without modern technology to speed up the process, it was a the slowest of affairs. There were no vehicles, no light trams, nothing to move us along quicker. We simply had to walk to our next destination. Pick up and move out.

With so many new faces, I wasn’t sure who was worth interacting with. Instead, I found Maiya sitting alone during one of our breaks, and went to sit down with her. She looked lonely; then again, she might not have cared. I like to think she valued my company.

“A lot of new faces around here, eh? I never thought I’d be seeing this down in the mines.” I dropped down to the ground and sat on a large boulder of slate across from Maiya, who was cross-legged on the sandy ground. A cool breeze blew by us, an unnaturally disturbing breeze that pushed Maiya’s shoulder-length brown hair into her face. She awkwardly removed it with one hand.

“I don’t notice anything,” she said, leaning her head back against some rock and closing her eyes to rest.

“So, why are you working for The Embassy?” I asked.

“Well, why are you?” she retorted. “We all work for Inland down here; we all have our own debts to pay and scores to settle. I’m simply settling my own score and paying my own bills. I like patrolling more than mining. I would really like to do research on the surface, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.”

“Yeah, nobody in or out,” I said, and chuckled. I wasn’t sure if I laughed because of how much a joke that statement was, given the new faces around the place, or if I was mocking Maiya’s inability to move between the surface and sub-terrain, which I had succeeded in doing with ease. She gave me an odd glare, and I stopped chucking. I made my gaze serious. “You could do it. If I can get in, you can get out. I’m sure of it.”

There, all better. Pat, pat.

It was time to pick up and move again; Maiya and I walked together for most of the trip, since neither of us seemed to know anybody but each other anymore. With Derek gone, with all these new people, Maiya was really the only person left that I knew. I couldn’t find a trace of my other friends and acquaintances. They may have been further ahead, or far behind. I trusted that they were somewhere, though my stomach sank at the thought that they had also been taken, as Derek had, and as the man in the plant had. The worst part of that was knowing the kidnapping could have actually taken place, having facilitated one myself.

Or worse, they could have been killed by someone as careless as Maiya.

Our course continued on to district 137 in that lonely fashion for hours at a time. We took more breaks, as a group, but eventually the group of thousands dissolved into groups of fifty, then groups of twenty, and all of a sudden it was just Maiya and I, napping under the fake stars. We decided when we would finish the move to district 137. We decided our own path. At times, we wondered if we even had to go there; but, under penalty of law, we did. Our new homes had already been erected, identical to the old ones.

When I awoke from my nap, Maiya was hovering over me, telling me to get up quickly. We were just a few kilometers outside of district 137, but there seemed to be quite a bit of commotion going on nearby. It looked like there was a fight going on amongst the members of another group, or perhaps between residents of district 137. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see rowdiness below of one the most hostile districts on Cydia.

The commotion was actually regarding an old man who had died during the trip. I wondered how many other people didn’t survive the hike to district 137, and how many more were severely injured. Maiya and I had taken it slow, relaxed, caught our breath throughout the mines. We were still in peak condition, but the same couldn’t have been said about others.

Scars, bruises, broken bones. Blood stained the Slate where someone tripped and fell. In some areas, multiple people were injured in the same location, making the Slate appear bloodier, darker. Fatigue was common; nobody wanted to sleep on the rocks for a night, so they darted towards the new district as fast as they could, hoping to reach their new homes hours before everyone else, but ending up passed out in the process.

It didn’t look like the old man had died by accident. He was covered in blood; someone either did it to him or provoked it. Either way, it was nothing that I wanted to get myself into, so Maiya and I squeezed by the commotion and made it safely to the new living area. I parted with her to settle down in my new enclave, which I found soon enough and adjusted to quickly enough. It was so similar to my old enclave, I felt as though I hadn’t gone anywhere; that my twenty-hour trek had never happened. But there was one consistent reminder that this place was fundamentally different from before: to my surprise and disappointment, Derek was no longer my roommate assignment. Someone had already left their baggage in the room. Within moments, they walked through the entrance and greeted me. When the greeting came, I could have sworn it was the voice of a woman.

It was Maiya. How was she assigned to my room?

“You’re not a miner,” I said. “There’s no way you’re assigned to this room.”

“I certainly am not, but there is. Here’s my slip.” She handed me a pink slip of paper indicating her room assignment; it was the same as mine. There was nothing I could do to get her out; although I’d enjoyed our time together during the relocation, I wasn’t comfortable spending each night with a murderer. She had the stink of The Embassy on her that, in large doses, was an overpowering, pungent odor.

Then it crossed my thoughts that I was supposed to see The Embassy now that I’d settled in. Perhaps that was the true benefit of having Maiya as a roommate, if anything – she would know where to find The Embassy.

“I don’t know where to find him,” she said when I asked. I sulked; it was my only chance to gather the information I needed to get Derek back. I asked Maiya again where he might be, if anywhere, but she had nothing to say to me. No information to give.
I stepped outside and looked around. So many new faces; more than previously. My entire community had vanished before my eyes in less than a day’s time; I felt frightened and alone. Why was I the only one left? What was so special about me? I told Maiya that I was going out for a while. I saw her set the holographic sky to nighttime, and I told her I’d be back soon to sleep as well.

Outside, the Slate had been ground into sand, like elsewhere. It felt soft beneath my boots, but I knew that it was toxic to exposed skin in high levels. The fine powder had only begun to form recently, and came in concert with the strange cracks in the Slate I’d noticed before Derek went missing. Nobody dared to kick around the Slate sand. I was waiting for somebody to vacuum it up; I could sense that others were as well.

I felt the breeze again, cooling the side of my face. The calm moment was ended abruptly by a falling piece of Slate, which hit my head with an unpleasant thud. Rubbing my head to alleviate the pain, I picked up the chunk of Slate. It felt like it had come from the ceiling; it had.

On the ceiling were a large number of cracks and crevices. Out of one of those cracked had broken off a chunk of Slate, which fell on my head.

I rubbed the bruise. I didn’t feel like wandering around district 137.

When I returned to my enclave, I expected to see Maiya asleep. I had entered quietly so as not to wake her up, but instead I saw her, wide awake, dressed for sleep but doing nothing of the sort. I watched as she took out a large container from one of her bags and began unraveling wire from inside the container. She connected these wires to an outlet in the wall, then concealed the wires with the powdered Slate, touching it with her bare hands.

She snaked the wire up to her bed, and then to her pillow. With nothing but her fist, she broke a hole through the pillow and maneuvered the wires through the hole.

Although I didn’t know what she was doing, I wouldn’t have minded it until she began clawing at the back of her head, just above her neck. As she did so, I watched her skin tear away, revealing a number of ports, each one corresponding to a different wire in the bundle she’d strung through her pillow. Before she went to sleep, she connected each wire to the back of her head. Only when every wire was perfectly in place did she finally go to sleep, never aware that I had been watching the entire time.