Deprived

Chapter 14

After work, Maize left the Finders department and walked across the ProLab Lobby towards the exit.

She glanced up at the glass wall where she first saw President Aberdeen standing in an office. To her relief, he wasn't there. Yet, she still felt like she was being watched.

In three hours, she'd meet the person who left the note to meet at Celeste Community Orchard. After looking at the pamphlet, she saw that the orchard was a few miles from her apartment, and she'd have to take the express to get there.

Maize hated that she had to keep her meeting from William. She didn't know much about relationships between a man and a woman, but she knew trust was a major foundation to a strong union. She remembered how her mother and father shared everything with each other. In fact, it was one of her father's qualities that made her mother fall in love with him. But she had to keep this meeting a secret. She couldn't risk Willian wanting to follow her. The note said she had to come alone. Who knew what they would do to Liam if she didn't follow their request?

In her peripheral vision, she saw someone behind the glass wall, looking down into the lobby. She looked up and shuddered when she saw President Aberdeen looking in her direction. He was at the same spot yesterday, and now there he was again. Was she paranoid, or was he intentionally waiting on her?

But why her? She was nobody special. Her final score at Finishing School was high but wasn't the highest total score that year.

From that height, the concaves of his face sat like dollops of darkness, but his entire person beamed handsomeness and power. Maize quickly looked away. Her heart beating out her chest, her footsteps quickening. The towering double glass doors slid open, and she crossed the threshold.

Outside she left the pavement and hurried across the street to the other side.

She saw a man sweeping the pavement, which was unusual because the street robot did the cleaning. She stared into the man's face and recognized him to be the man on the jumbo screen outside her apartment window. On his red overalls were white patches bearing the word "shunning" He had obviously broken a rule and was being punished with manual labor.

To confirm, Maize looked up at the jumbo screen on the sky building up ahead, and just as she thought the sweeper's image was plastered there, it was the same guy. She wondered what he had done, but had no time to find out.

Main Street flourished under the full sunlight. Behind the sky buildings, the white food train whooshed by, metal on metal perfectly oiled.

Maize strolled by a square of green lawn nestled between two sky buildings. A group of ten people stood on the lawn, stretching their bodies this way and that way, their fitness instructor, a petite blond lady, led them into the stretches. The instructor jumped and turned to face the road to demonstrate a stretching technique, and the rest followed. Maize looked over her person, trying to decipher her age. As a finder, she had files of many women who looked as young as the fitness instructor, who could pass as a woman in her mid-thirties, but in reality, they were in their late sixties to early seventies. In the capital, no one got sick or old.

On the corner of Clark and Main Street, a crew cleaned the windows by remote control. Maize watched as three machines about two feet wide and two feet high rubbed against the windows and doors all the way up the glass walls. Maize watched until the robot was so high it looked like a speck of sand from the ground.

She glanced back at the crew. One of the guys reminded her of William. He was tall with sandy brown hair.

She sighed thinking of William. When he'd left the night before and got to his apartment, five buildings down, he'd called her on the comm device. They talked until one minute before the 9:00 pm curfew. And she'd been thinking of him all day.