The gentle purr of an engine outside. A rat which had been, very quietly, very surreptitiously, investigating a particular huddled bundle of rags on the grounds that it might just have stopped moving for good, now joined its fellows in streaking for a bolt-hole in the side of the shed-a trajectory so complicated, designed so that it escaped the slightest breath of detection, as to be barely physically possible.
The bundle that the rat had been perusing twitched, then stirred, then uncurled from the foetal form in which it had slept to show a pinched, pale face. A girl of maybe twelve years old, possibly slightly older, but her state of chronic malnutrition made it difficult to tell. Her matted, filth-encrusted hair could have been any colour. One eye was filmed by a cataract, which glistened silver-grey in the dim light. There was a large, open sore on the side of her neck.
Rubbing absently at the sore, the girl picked her way, silently and cautiously as any rat, through the other occupants of the shed. Heading for the door, even though it would of course still be barred from the outside. She intended to be amongst the first into the food-crush, this morning; she needed to conserve her strength. The last thing she needed at this point was a fight.
Dimly, she recalled a time when she’d had milk-teeth, friable as chalk due to lack of calcium in her diet, but they had at least served to give her some minute edge as a weapon. Her adult teeth, however, had simply never begun to grow. She didn’t even know that she was supposed to have them.
Outside, the sound of engines acquired extra harmonics as they were joined by the tones of another. The girl had never heard that particular sound before, and curiosity got the best of her. She stuck her good eye to a rust-hole eaten in the wall and looked out into the Camp.
Big yellow half-track carriers were parked in the compound. There were little blue bubbles on the top of their cabs, two to a cab, in which small, illuminated, reflective saucers revolved so that it looked as if the little blue bubbles were flashing with light. The girl didn’t know what the vehicles were, of course; her only experience with vehicles was the slop-truck that delivered what passed for food and removed waste. She wondered, vaguely, what the people of the Camp were going to be fed today. With trucks so big and splendid as that, it must be something very special indeed.
Off to one side, she caught a glimpse of men in coveralls busily setting up what looked like a monkey-puzzle of steel, fluorescent tubes and medical equipment. Other men, in bulky yellow corslets of polycarbon body-armour, looked on, hefting black objects that looked a little like the shock-sticks used by the Camp guards, but bigger. The girl wondered what those things were-just not so much that she wanted to be the one who found out.
Behind her, the other occupants of the shed were stirring awake. The girl found herself in something of a quandary. Something new was happening, and it could either be something good or bad. No way of telling which.
Deciding that it was probably better to be more circumspect, the girl backed off from the door and returned to the main crush of occupants, not so far that she would end up at the back. If something bad was going to happen then it could happen to somebody else first. If something good, then there was a chance there’d still be some left when it got to her.
Some half an hour later, the yellow-corsleted men unbarred the door of the shed and herded the occupants out, blinking in the sudden sunlight, into the compound.
Now the girl stood towards one side of a line of children, their ages ranging from those of toddler to adolescent. From this vantage point she could see what was happening to several of the sheds that made up the Camp.
Men in coveralls, with masks over their heads, had opened up the metal boxes sunk into the sides of these sheds-the boxes that the girl, and for that matter anyone else in the Camp, had attempted to get into at some time or another, and see what was inside, purely for the sake of something to do-and were loading them with pressurised canisters. One of them tested a canister as the girl watched, twisting a tap on its neck, then nodded.
Another pair of men were wandering between the rows of standing children. One held a portable data-terminal, the other a camera-though the girl of course did not know what either of those things was.
They stopped in front of the girl.
“You’re a little sweetheart, aren’t you?” he said. “Isn’t she a little sweetheart, Karl?”
“She’s a sweetheart, Lenny,” said Karl. “Yes indeedy.”
“Give us a smile, sweetheart,” said Lenny, sticking the camera in her face.
The girl smiled.
“Turn your head, sweetheart,” said Karl.
She turned her head.
“Visually, Karl, she could be good,” said Lenny, studying the display on his data terminal. “Don’t worry about the rickets or the incipient lupus, those are correctable. She’s got the general facial-structure, that’s what counts. Pity about that sore, though. Looks viral to me. She’s gonna need reconstruction, and that means, maybe, more bucks upfront than GenTech Entertainment needs.”
Karl shrugged. “So, we take a flier, Lenny, and if it doesn’t work out then GenTech Entertainment shoots her in profile. People won’t be looking at her neck, much, anyway. ’Cept the ones who are into it. There are those. Say something, sweetheart.”
This last to the girl, who dredged up as much basic English as she knew how to speak. It wasn’t so much that she was following orders as that it cost her nothing to do so, it was something to do, and she might as well do it as not.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked.
“I like the voice,” said Karl. “Personality.”
“Microtremors show an incredible potential range,” said Lenny, waggling his data unit meaningfully. “I think we might just have ourselves a screamer here.”
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” asked Karl.
“Trix,” the girl said. “My name’s Trix.”
“Nice name,” said Karl. “Very apt.” He pulled a paint-stick from his pocket and scrawled a small collection of symbols down her arm. “Now what I want you to do, sweetheart, is go over there. They’ll take care of you over there.”
He shoved her off in the direction of the biomedical monkey-puzzle, and big, old people in white who would babble about path-testing and debriding, and shove a needle in her, arm and that was the last thing she remembered for a while.
Her eyes and lips were crusted with dried mucus when she woke, at last, to find herself lying on something flat, and impossibly soft, and with an IV-drip in her arm.
Dark shapes hazed before her against a blazing white light. Something hard and shockingly cold was pressed against the sore in the side of her neck, and she tried to jerk her head away. She found that her cheeks, however, were pressed between two padded blocks, rendering her head immobile.
Something she simply did not recognise was water, for the simple reason that it was not sludgy and stinking, dropped onto her eyes and lips. She opened her eyes.
A man with a shaven head and a jet-black Suit loomed over her. Impossibly old, even older than the guards in the Camp. Possibly even thirty, if such a thing could be imagined.
Something cold and slim and tubular slid into her mouth. She tried to spit it out.
The man slapped her. Not particularly hard, just hard enough to hurt.
“Drink it,” he said.
Trix drank what she would later learn to be fruit juice warmed to body-heat so that the basic unfamiliarity of it would not be rejected by her body. All the same, her blood-sugar rocketed too fast for an atrophied liver to even begin to cope-and due to the clamped position of her head, she almost choked to death before hands, off to one side that she couldn’t see, found an aspirator.
After she was more or less settled, the man looked down at her and smiled. It was probably meant to be reassuring, but even Trix could see that it was just a movement of his mouth; he’d trained his mouth to move in a certain precise way and didn’t mean it at all. Even though she couldn’t see them for the obloids of black glass that covered them, Trix knew that the smile never had and never would touch his eyes.