DUALITY /#Wattys 2021

Chapter 8

They dragged her into a transport, then into a holding area downtown where they shot her photo and scanned her fingertips with a laser fingerprinter. The strip search was the worst—rough hands pulling at her clothing, fumbling at her breasts. Her captors laughed at her when her milk ran onto their gloved hands.

The digital exam hurt. One man held her down while she struggled and screamed. Ridley bit him, and he slapped her so hard across the face she saw stars. They should have had a female in the exam room with her. They didn't.

At least they did only one digital exam, and not two. At least she wasn't raped.

Then they threw her in a filthy cubicle and shut the door in her face.

She was supposed to be allowed to call someone and let them know where she was. One thing none of the Neighbors knew was what to do if they got arrested and Detention wouldn't let them call anyone. She could die in here and no one would ever know, and what about her baby? What about Sannah?

Ridley beat on the door with her fists and screamed. "Let me out! Let me out! I'm supposed to be able to call someone! I demand a call! I demand a lawyer! I know my rights! You can't do this!"

Silence. She turned her back to the door and slid down it, her hands pushing her sweaty hair back. Her face stung where the guard hit her. She didn't want any part of her touching the dirt and excrement that smeared the floor, but she needed to sit down.

People just didn't "disappear" in detention elsewhere in the world ... that Ridley knew about. But this was a private police force and a privately-run jail, wasn't it? The Guild owned the railroad. And she had just robbed the corporation that controlled that railroad, that police force, and this jail of a very large amount of money. If they wouldn't let her call anyone, what were they going to do with her?

Hours went by. No one came. She sat on the filthy tile floor of a marred, yellow-stained cubicle whose walls had once been white, behind a door of solid six-inch-thick metal. It didn't even have a slot for food and water. She had just enough room to lie down, not that she ever would in this place. A foot-square grid in the floor occupied one corner, from which an abominable stench of feces and urine grew thicker as the hours went by. She put off using the grid for as long as she could, but, as a mother nursing a baby, eventually it wasn't only her bladder that ached.

Around her, screams, groans, and curses reverberated, ghostly and muffled. Even the dank and humid air felt slimy.

Ridley lost count of the hours she sat there, arms around her knees. At one point, she dropped off and slept for a few hours.

She dreamed she lay imprisoned in a different cell, the one the Elite Gymnastics School of the Confederation remanded her to after The Infamous Rotten Egg Incident of 2240. Only that cell had been clean and not filthy.

After she had begun winning juniors competitions, she would wake up every morning to the rancid stench of a rotten egg. Usually it lay broken under her pillow, but sometimes her pillow shifted in the night and she awoke to horrible, sulfurous rotten egg goo in her hair. She'd struggle out of bed and run for the shower to the titters of the other girls in her bunkroom as they all cut their eyes across at her with satisfied smirks.

She could understand that Guildsmen's daughters would do this; they all thought they were princesses and none of them ever talked to her anyway. Thank God she didn't have to go to school with them. Their parents paid for prep schools where they all took Latin and art history and learned French. Ridley and the two other girls who weren't children of Guildsmen went to the regular school run by the Confederate Olympians Association.

"Good thing she wins competitions, because she sure can't read!" the Guildmen's daughters would say, and Ridley wondered if it were true. She did have more trouble with longer words than they did. She had hoped the two girls whose parents were workingpeople would unmask the culprits when she showed the housemothers her stained and ruined sheets, but, no, they never saw anything. Suddenly Guild and non-Guild gymnasts were all the best of friends, leaving Ridley standing even more alone than she always had in that place. Every few days, she had a new mattress, because of the egg damage, but no gymnast in that bunkroom was ever disciplined. Ridley asked to move to another bunkroom, but the housemothers told her the girls' athletic bunkrooms were all full.