Page 15 of A Better World

“Trunk?” she asked, unwilling to waste all that food. “I’ll eat at least a few of ’em!”

The town was split into four quadrants. They lived just inside the border of the southeast end, with what she’d been told was a respectable address. The northern quadrants were for the top people. The southwest, the least desirable area, was for retired residents and the less skilled essential workers who kept the town and shelter running.

Three kilometers east and south, Linda cut the engine at the center of their circular driveway. Dirt-smeared Josie jumped out. “So long, suckas!” she called, having recovered her good spirits, or at least gaining enough composure to fake them. Glum Hip slid over, went out the same way.

Linda was about to get out, too, when she noticed Russell beside her, his top hand draped diagonally over the one beneath it, spindly fingers splayed. He looked tired. Exhausted, even.

“You okay?” she asked.

He squinted at the giant house. Except for the bird scat on thelawn and shelter, it was unnervingly pristine. Dayworkers constantly cleaned and repaired, but they were quiet about it. You had to look to notice them. “A little of column A, a little of column B.”

“The soccer game?”

“A lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“I’m glad we’re here, but it’s hard.”

“Yeah.”

On plenty of occasions over the years, they’d argued when they should have joined forces. Life is stressful. Eventually, you have to let the pressure out. Sometimes the safest target is the person sleeping in your bed. But maybe they’d matured, or maybe they both understood that the stakes were too high to fuck around, because since the Bussel Rowen incident, they’d been very much on the same team.

“Are you upset about the dirty birds?” she asked, hoping to cheer him by making light. “The meaningless politeness? The competitive soccer? The thing they callHollow, that they claim isn’t a religion, but kind of sounds like a religion?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

He was the kind of person with permanently wet eyes. Even she had a hard time discerning whether he was about to cry or just being thoughtful. “I keep missing everything. I keep getting everything wrong,” he said, a reluctant confession.

“How?” she asked.

“Everything I do, every interaction I have, feels like it’s a second too early or too late. It’s as if I’m just slightly off the same dimensional plane as everyone else.”

She nodded, because she understood the feeling, this unrealness, though she wouldn’t have described it in terms of dimensional planes.

“Everything here feelsoff, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she agreed. The cutesy pamphlets were off. The gratitude prayer hands were off. The pathologically polite people masking what was beginning to feel like real cruelty were off. Then again, the world was falling apart. Living inside high walls with abundant food andenergy and water and watching hypercompetitive teen soccer games felt a little like being a circus elephant balancing on a beach ball, trying to run in place while the entire big top burns to the ground.

The vibe, inherently, was wrong.

“I’m having trouble at work,” he said.

“How?”

He shook his head, the muscles of his face tugging in contradictory directions: a grin, a grimace, a scowl. He was unmoored, she could see. “At the office. It’s all smiles. You know those smiles.”

She nodded.

“I can’t break through.” He sounded frustrated with himself. Ashamed, even.

“You were at the office until almost two in the morning last night,” she said. “Are the rest of them clocking those hours?”

He stabbed the radio dial with his finger. Static played through the speakers, and he stabbed it again, quiet. “I don’t knowwhatthey do. They don’t tell me. Half of them are supposed to be subordinate, but they don’t act it. They’re nice about it—they pretend to agree with me. Then they do whatever they want. I told everybody we weren’t taking lunch; I wanted the data back on a clinical trial the London office is running on Omnium safety. Then I went to the john and when I got back, they were gone. The papers I’d left on my bench were gone. My computer was off, and my work hadn’t been saved. I lost hours. I had to do their workandmine. It’s still not all done.”

“You’re kidding me. That’s insane.”

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