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“It will be fine,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll come around.”
“I don’t know, Miss Eden, but thank you. I hope you have a good night.”
“Good night, Manuel.”
Without waiting anymore, Eden walked toward the stairs. However, as soon as she found herself there, she hesitated. The stairs went two ways: up or down. She glanced at the stairs going down to the basement and hesitated. ...No, she shouldn’t. She ignored it and ran upstairs. Her apartment was on the fourth floor. As soon as she got home, Eden let out a long sigh of relief and dropped her bag on the floor. She didn’t have enough belongings for this place to be messy, but it certainly had a lot going on.
She had a table against the window, with dozens of little pots filled with dirt. There wasn’t anything sprouting, it looked like they had just been left there. Eden walked to that table first, checking if anything had happened. She was so used to deception, though, she only glanced once and didn’t look back again. She walked to the mattress on the ground and let herself fall on it. She wasn’t really tired, but she did feel a bit... out of it. She regretted not staying longer at the bar. Being here, between four walls, was a bit depressing. If it had been a better day, she would have gone up to the roof, but she couldn’t waste more oxygen today. She sighed and grabbed the little notepad that was left somewhere on her bed. She wrote down, again, all of the expenses for the week. She could skip dinner and save a bit of money there. Jack let her wash her clothes at the bar too, and she could go without water until her next workday. She scratched her neck, her SIN a bit itchy.
She wrote down what she had earned at the bar, and her work at the shop. The number she had in mind was still bigger, though. The usual costs for her mom’s care were just a little bit under both combined. If she added the special care, and her own expenses... Eden took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She couldn’t manage a third job. She had no time for it, and the first two she had already been lucky to find in her condition. She glared at that notepad, a bit annoyed. Why did things always end up like this?
She glanced at the window. Do those people have any idea of the struggles they faced on this side of the river?
After a while, she left the notepad on her bed, stood up, and walked back to the stairs. This time, she was resolutely going down to the basement. She hadn’t been there in... what, a week? She arrived in front of the locked door and pushed the number combination.
“Wrong code. Two attempts remaining.”
Eden rolled her eyes. He had changed the code again?
“SIN, call Loir.”
However, nothing happened. His SIN number too? Eden sighed and banged against the door, annoyed.
“Loir, open up, you paranoid idiot!”
The door opened right away and Eden almost fell forward, not prepared for it to open so quickly. She sighed and closed the door behind her.
The basement was completely dark. A bit cautious, Eden walked in silently, each of her steps echoing. It was like being in an underground parking lot, but a small one. After a while, a light bulb flickered in one corner. She heard a desk chair rolling toward her.
“Good morning, my little Eden.”
She turned around, a bit annoyed.
Loir was the most unique character she knew, and that was saying a lot. She didn’t know his real name. From what she had heard before, he had at least five or six aliases. She finally spotted him in the darkness, sitting on his desk chair, perched like an owl with his bare toes out, wearing shiny, blue nail polish. The rest of his clothes were all black, so dark it was hard to even know what he was actually wearing. He was bald, but he had so many tattoos on his face and head that it was hard to tell in one glance. Although he had dozens of tattoos, Eden could only read a handful of them. The most obvious one was the word “Anarkia” tattooed on the left side of his head, and she also knew the Chinese symbol on his neck meant pain. The rest of it was presently covered by his clothes. His skinny arms were wrapped around his knees as he was staring at her. It was a disturbing stare, mostly because she couldn’t figure out where his pupils were; his eyeballs were completely tattooed.
“It’s evening,” she retorted.
“Maybe here.”
She knew she shouldn’t get into his little mind games. Loir was crazy in his own way.
He tilted his head and smiled, revealing two missing teeth. Then, he rolled his chair to another side of the basement. The screens lit back up one by one, all fourteen of them. Loir was seated in front of a giant table, his keyboards scattered all over in random order. Despite the number of screens, she couldn’t tell how many computers there really were, as she’d see his mouse jump from one screen to another from time to time, with no logic either. It would disappear to the left side of a computer on the far right and reappear at the top of another one located at the other end. She couldn’t even figure out if he had messed it up to play, or perhaps to confuse people who could intrude and try to use his things.
“Eden is not sleepy tonight,” he whistled, his eyes back on the screens. “What is she up to?”
“It’s too early to sleep,” she said in a low voice, although it was half a lie.
“Mh... I can smell someone who needs money.”
She glared at his back, but Loir wasn’t looking at her. Eden crossed her arms and walked up to stand next to him, glancing at the screens. One was displaying a Russian news channel, two others the news of the various Cores throughout the world. Eden stared at the pictures and videos of places she had never been, curious. She wondered if all Cores were the same, living without a care about the rest of the world. Another channel was showing the Green Earth Party news, where images of the thriving forests were displayed. It changed into gorgeous, blue images of fish swimming in the aquamarine sea. She stared at that even longer.
“...It’s fake.”
“What?”
Loir pointed at the screen she was looking at without looking at it himself. His other fingers were activating like crazy spiders on one of the keyboards, sending coding information on a black screen.
“Those images. They took it from a documentary from the twenty-first century. This isn’t the real current state of the Western American sea. They are just clearing the place to build three other Cores. The water is still too polluted for fish like that to be there. But fear not, they will make more artificial beaches.”
