Watchers

Chapter 8: Everyone Loves a Good Origin Story

Sasha wakes up with her hand still entwined with Daniel's. Her arm aches from being draped over the aluminum edge of the cot all night, but she doesn't mind because in the moment when he reached for her, Daniel needed her.

It felt nice to be needed.

The morning light streams through the high, rectangular windows that circle the perimeter of the great room close to the ceiling, and a few people are beginning to stir. Sasha watches them put their cots away and quietly leave the room. Daniel lets out a small whimper in his sleep, and then he opens his eyes, looking at Sasha. She sees little flecks of gold in them that she didn't notice before.

Then Jane sits up behind her, throwing her arms over her head and letting out an exaggerated yawn as she stretches and wipes the sleep from her eyes. Sasha lets go of Daniel's hand and sits up, too.

"Morning," she says.

"Good morning," Jane answers, a big grin already spread across her face. "I bet that's the best sleep you've gotten in years, wasn't it?"

"It was pretty good," Sasha admits. She and Daniel get up and start folding their blankets like they see other people doing around them, and a nun who Sasha recognizes as Sister Mary approaches.

"Are you ready for your first day of work?" she asks Jane, who nods eagerly. She'll be in the kitchen, which means from now on she'll have to be one of the early risers.

Jane follows the nun out of the room, leaving Sasha and Daniel feeling aimless.

"What are we supposed to do today?" he asks.

Most of the other shelter residents have woken up by now and they're all stacking their cots and leaving their blankets in a pile by the storage room door, so Daniel and Sasha do the same.

"I don't know," she says as she folds up her blanket. Everyone else seems to have a purpose, and she's sure if she stays long enough they'll find one for her, too, but what about the meantime? Daniel carries her cot for her and when he returns, she says with a laugh, "This time most days, I'd be standing on a freeway exit with my toes slowly going numb."

"I'd probably be high already," Daniel says.

"You don't look like any of the addicts I've met," Sasha says. For one thing, there's the plumpness of his face - every heroin addict she's ever seen has been rail-thin.

"And you don't look like any panhandler I've ever seen," Daniel answers. "But isn't that the point of this place?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Sasha says. The great room is emptying out quickly, and they appear to be two of a very few number who don't have jobs within the shelter. She spies the rambling old man from dinner - this morning, she just barely catches his words echoing from the other side of the room, something about napalm in the morning.

"Come on, let's go get some fresh air," Daniel suggests, and Sasha is all too eager to leave this room.

Lately, staying anywhere too long tends to make her feel itchy to get moving. She got used to the tiny cargo area of the Kia Soul, mostly because it protected her from the bitter cold of winter, but most nights she sleeps under the open sky with nothing but a few scraps of cardboard to insulate her from the world. This cavernous but enclosed space becomes increasingly claustrophobic the more Sasha thinks about it.

She follows Daniel out of the room and they go out the first exterior door they come to, the one that leads out to the garden surrounded by barbed wire.

"I don't have my coat," Sasha objects. "The nun took it yesterday to be washed."

"There's an awning here," Daniel says, walking over to a covered area close to the building where the wind doesn't penetrate. "We'll be okay here for a few minutes. I just want to get some fresh air in my lungs."

"Yeah," Sasha agrees. That would be nice, although the stench of the neighborhood is even more apparent here. It's acrid and comes to her in wafts.

Sasha stands as close to him as she dares - she's not used to trusting anyone but Jane, and she keeps everyone at a distance, both literally and figuratively. But his body is giving off warmth which she craves and she allows her shoulder to butt up against his.

"Are you planning to leave soon?" he asks abruptly.

"Huh?"

"Is that why you're thinking about your coat?"

"I just don't like being separated from my things," she explains. "I don't have much."

She decides that will be her task for today - finding the laundry and figuring out where they've stored her coat.

"How long have you been on the streets?" This is an abrupt question, like something Sasha might blurt without thinking, but Daniel just looks curious - unapologetic.

"Three years," she says, and she can see that the answer scares him.

She gets that a lot, almost as often as the looks of disgust from the people on the freeway and in the fast food restaurants where she spends her hard-earned cash. It's impossible to live in this world without occasionally being reminded that you're closer to the abyss than you think. Sasha is a living monument to that fact, and people don't like being reminded.

She doesn't want to scare Daniel away, though. She can't bear the idea of spending the rest of the day completely alone in this crowded place, so she decides to give him a little context.

"My folks died when I was in my junior year of high school," she says. "Terrible car accident. I was a ward of the state for two years after that until I turned eighteen, and they helped me get a job in a warehouse, keeping inventory and fulfilling orders. I worked there for two years and got a tiny little apartment and a junker of a car, but it ran and it was mine. Then one day they called a meeting at the warehouse and said they were automating the vast majority of the jobs there. They told us a robot could do our jobs better, and you know what? They weren't wrong. After that it was a gradual decline followed by a sudden cliff - no one wanted to help me because I wasn't the state's problem anymore, and I realized rather suddenly that I didn't have anyone else in my life to rely on."

She leans against the building, trying to keep out of the wind's reach, and says with a grand gesture of her arms, "And here I am."

She stares out at the city beyond the chain-link fence, where smoke can be seen rising from the smokestacks of the few remaining factories. Everything else is quiet and dirty and worn down, and Sasha thinks there might not be much out there for her, after all. There isn't much to be said for independence when it means sleeping on cardboard and spending an entire day's earnings on the Dollar Menu at the only McDonald's in town that will still take her antiquated currency.

Maybe she will stay at the Haven of Salvation.

Daniel puts his arm around Sasha for comfort as much as for warmth, and for a moment she gets that itchy feeling again. She pushes the feeling away and asks, "What about you?"

He narrows his eyes at her and says, "You still don't know who I am, do you?"

Then, before she has a chance to answer, the door opens and one of the nuns comes outside to collect her.

"Sarah Jones?" the woman asks, and Daniel raises an eyebrow her alias but says nothing.

"Yes?"

"We've got a job assignment for you, dear," the nun says, smiling. "Are you ready to work?"

"Sure," Sasha says, looking at Daniel as she pushes off from the wall and he lets his arm drop back down to his side. She wonders what he'll do all day and considers asking if he can come with her, but the nun is taking her hand to lead her away.

"Come inside, dear," the nun instructs Daniel, "before you catch your death of cold."

Then she takes Sasha down the hall away from Daniel.