DETERRENT - Apply Fic

08

The passage of time is clearer here than in Neo Elysium. The sun rises and sets as the day progresses, bonded by the shifting of the earth rather than clocks that dictate when the dark grey sky is night and when it is day. Time feels woven into their skin with their new clothing. As exhausted as they were to rise so early in the morning, the hot sun prickling down on their exposed hands warms them to the day.

Harvey himself is bound too. The kitchen is where his roots lay. He is stuck in the heat as both he and a worker with droopy eyes and a silent mouth work together. The oven cooks them in the kitchen, and Harvey's shirt clings to his body wet with sweat by mid-afternoon.

He watches time progress in the kitchen. He reads a recipe book, flipping more and more pages as he goes. He doesn't know how to cook with raw ingredients like these. Most of everything he's eaten is pre-cooked or artificially grown. Meats from pea-try dishes and vegetables under heat lamps. The minutes tick by as he turns pages of the cook book.

He gets better at slicing different things. Onions make him cry. He helps to make more loaves of bread following a recipe. The worker will not let Harvey touch the meat. He realizes from the recipe book that meats need to be cooked to different temperatures, but he's not entirely sure what products are made from which meats. The children of Cocta can never afford to go to school, and they could never afford meat anyway. Living in The Sticks, no meat he ever purchased required an internal temperature reading.

The passage of time is most clear as the other convicts come in. Huffing, they ask for water, and Harvey obliges. He feeds them lunch, making sandwiches that each of the three groups scarfs down at different intervals. There are no protein bars or heat and ready meals or anything stocked. The convicts come in and eat and eat and eat, never full. Harvey cannot tell if it's the hard work that's causing their ravenous behaviours, the smoky new flavours of the cheese, or the fluffy texture of the bread. Maybe it's their bodies. Harvey too feels hungrier than usual. They choke down water between harsh bites, and he does too.

Mid-afternoon, he hears commotion outside.

For the most part, they were working. Kae and Gale didn't stop. Eurydice is not an actress but given her line of work, she's used to appearing inconspicuous. Benji gave her grief for it, but she only snarled at him. It's fine. All of it is acceptable.

It was not fine for Gale. He didn't know how to speak to anyone. If it were up to him, he'd have gone back to the cabin and punched a bunkbed until the wood splintered, but Harvey would be on his ass if he did, and Gale thought he might be even more scared of Harvey than Eurydice.

The little girl beside him must have been just as scared. She jumped at everything.

In the next group, stuck in the middle of the corn, Titus forced himself to work hard. He got screwed by his group assignment as was common in the school he attended in his youth. Cosmia asked questions, far too many of them, and the farmhand never answered. Norbu was a fast worker, easily distracted with conjuring answers for her. It was as if the week or whatever of silence he spent in the panopticon had caused a build of pressure.

Titus hadn't felt that need to speak. When he was told to shut up, he turned himself off quite easily.

"I bet Ace would know," Norbu answered when Cosmia asked about why the peas only grow on trellises "He's into plants. You should ask him."

"Ace is an idiot," Cosmia rolled her eyes.

Norbu gasped dramatically, "that can't be. He bets on me in fights."

"Everyone does," Cosmia smiled just a bit though. "Even idiots."

Together, they compiled a list of things to do. Both of them had more endurance than Titus naturally. He threw himself into work, shucking corn as fast as he could until his fingers started to bleed. Then, he bit at his thumb, tasting the coppery feeling of the blood. Then, he kept going.