Road to Arcadia: the Path East

Chapter Twenty-three: Misnomers

Once the wave of questions had receded and the first round of pick-ups had left, Baz dismissed the other members of the squad. She gave them enough time to take an extended dinner break, citing that because they weren't on the road, they would be first shift to do round-the-clocks--spending hours of nightlight keeping an eye out over the sleeping rescuees.

Kai, Yulia, Irene, and Carsten gathered in the hallway outside the cafegymatorium. The ugly patterned, laminate floor had a thin layer of dust, but the group was too tired to care. They sat cross-legged atop it with their prepackaged food and bottled water. Only the emergency lights lit the hallway, a solo fluorescent light fifteen feet away, barely reaching the place where they sat. Not that any of them minded. They could see their food and they all were well familiar with how each other looked.

Conversation was casual, lighthearted chattiness cutting through the weight of the hours preceding them.

"Hey, new guy's first natural disaster." Yulia raised her bottle of water like a glass of champagne. "And on the first trip, too. How're you holding up, Kai?"

Kai was caught off guard by the sudden attention. "I'm fine," he said, maybe a little too quickly. "Largo did all the hard work today. I was just an extra set of hands." He shifted his gaze to address Carsten. "Thanks, by the way."

Carsten nodded once. "Consider it a pass. Next time we might not get time to parse out the hard stuff."

Kai responded by taking in a big gulp of water. Any normal person would have responded by saying the more the merrier or don't sell yourself short, kid! Carsten Largo was honest and pragmatic in the way that also made him an asshole--unintentionally or otherwise.

"Regardless," Yulia stepped in. "We had some wins today. We've got a lot of people coming back with us. That's a good thing."

"Almost a good thing we didn't pick up those people in Purkans," Carsten commented.

"We still would have had room for a few of them," Irene retorted. "But Baz was right, people are a lot easier to convince after the disaster has already happened."

"Everyone seemed really eager to learn about Arcadia," Kai offered.

"Pre-departure question hour," Irene lamented like it was a universally understood term. "Where you toe the very delicate line between complete honesty while still trying to convince them it's a place worth uprooting your life for."

"You make it sound like a bad place," Yulia teased.

"It's not," she admitted with absolute candor. "But it's also not exactly the primo paradiso that it's hyped up to be on the road, either."

Kai was inclined to disagree. While he didn't always fit himself comfortably into the hanging flower pots of the floating city, he always assumed that was something deeply flawed about him and not Arcadia itself. "Like what?" he ventured to ask. "What's the biggest misnomer?"

Irene decided to humor him. She sat on the thought, eyes drifting up to the ceiling in careful deliberation. "I wouldn't call it a misnomer--or would you? It's--"

She hesitated, forming the last of her thoughts. "Arcadia is characterized as thriving. And it is. Have you seen the place? I hadn't seen so much green in my life until we got picked up, but at the same time it's not the place of limitless abundance. There are restrictions. There's only so much food you can have, you can't stock up on luxuries. You're not exactly living like a king."

"It's enough," Yulia clarified.

"Right," Irene nodded. "It's enough. You get everything you need but that doesn't mean it's everything you want. And that's not a bad thing. It's good, but it's a mindset you have to adjust to. People on the ground think that a utopia is a place where everything you want is available to you at your beck and call, but that's not how the Arc works.