I, Cassandra

13 | CASSANDRA VALLIS

With all my soul I hate The Jackpot. The whole club is fake, run by the UFF for the sole purpose of getting intel from Global Command's horny soldiers. Though I hate to admit it, Zee's strategy is effective. Between the soldiers' desperate need to sleep with a human, and R7, the UFF gets far more intel through the girls than they ever got through the long, slow process of torture. Before The Jackpot was a thing, Zee used R7 in the interrogation rooms. The soldiers fought it, giving up almost nothing, one even managed to give completely false intel that wasted the UFF's time and made Zee look bad. It turns out being naked and inside a woman makes the soldiers talk. A lot. R7 only works if there is trust.

Zee has 'sniffers' out in every bar, casino, and club across the city, looking for them; whorehouses are sanctioned by Zee and only men loyal to him work the doors. Those guys are his best sniffers. Illegal whorehouses he burns to the ground, with the girls and doormen locked inside. Zee's world is ugly and violent. People fear him. Even Carney, a total psychopath, makes sure not to get on his bad side.

Thanks to his network, Zee knows everything that happens in this vast, stinking cesspool of a city; more gangster than soldier, everyone fears Zee. He only fears the ones he calls the higher-ups—if he didn't there is no way he would have me in here opening my legs for other men. But orders are orders, and even he has to obey someone. So his sniffers work night and day to funnel GC soldiers to the club, pretending to be their friends, pretending not to know who they really are, offering them opiates and the best girls. They bring them all here—soldiers ready and willing to pay anything to sleep with a real woman—where we are ready and waiting with our fake Absinthe, R7, and meagre, empty bodies.

Everyone working in the club is either a soldier or vetted volunteer working for extra rations. The DJ is a sniper; the doormen, too. How many GC soldiers have I seduced since the higher-ups decided to repurpose me as a whore in between the times I had to go in and tell them about the next hurricane? Twenty-five? Thirty? Maddox was the last one. The best one. The one I loved. The one who loved me. My heart clenches, raw. The last time I walked in here, Maddox was still alive. Tears burn my eyes. I blink them back and nod at the other girls getting ready in the grimy changing room.

'Hey Vallis,' Sarz greets me with a faint smile. 'Been missing you. Heard about the DF Cap, shit luck, that.' She pulls off a ratty jumper and stands bare-breasted facing me. Ugly purple bruises pepper her torso. 'Damn, he was a good tipper. I ate good those months.' She bends over to peel off her thin, faded jeans. I look her over, surreptitious, she's much thinner than the last time I was here. Every vertebrae of her spine sticks out, sharp. Once, while I drowsed in Maddox's arms, he stroked my face and told me he heard a rumour that in the world before ours, being thin was fashionable because everyone was fat. Only rich people and fashion models were skinny. I knew he was trying to make me feel better saying that stuff since I was so frail against his well-fed, muscled body. He was so protective of me. I always felt so safe with him. Fuck, I miss him. More tears. More blinking.

Sarz reaches into her locker and necks a couple of pills. She rolls her head and closes her eyes in anticipation of the buzz to come. She catches me looking at her as she pulls on her gear, a hot pink latex bikini that looks shit on her scrawny, bruised body. She needs food, not painkillers, but food has become scarcer lately since one of the main production units for the chemical shit we get rationed out to us was bombed by GC. I know my ration packet keeps getting smaller, and I'm considered important. I wonder if Sarz gets any rations at all.

'Fuck these hit fast,' Sarz says with a languid sigh. 'I swear they just keep making 'em better and better.' She shakes herself out with a shiver of pleasure and sits down to strap on her see-through PVC platform stilettos. There's always plenty of opiates around, and a liquor everyone calls Absinthe because it's green, but it's not real Absinthe. It's just chemicals, made to assault the brain the same way booze used to do, except there isn't any grain or potatoes or whatever it was they used to ferment to make liquor anymore so this is what gets peddled out night and day by the UFF to keep the population sedated and quiet while they get on with the business of fighting their pointless, unwinnable war.

A UFF soldier comes in and stands guard just inside the door, wearing a flak jacket, his gloved hand resting on the grip of the black AK-47 slung over his chest. I catch him watching me undress. His gaze flicks to one of the other girls. He knows better than to look too long, knows who I belong to. No one messes with Zee unless they want to risk being cast out into the wastes, where a slow, painful death is certain. I catch a glimpse of my gaunt reflection in one of the cracked wall mirrors still left intact. Death is certain here, too. It just creeps up, quiet, and painless, numbed by opiates.

There's no mirrors where I bunk, even Zee doesn't have one, but my broken reflection tells me what I suspected. I'm thinner than I was the last time I worked here. I'm not surprised since I have been using my rations to keep Miro alive. I won't take the opiates, even though it would kill the hunger pangs. I keep thinking: what if I get a chance to get out and I miss it locked in a drug haze? No. Better to suffer, and wait, than give up like everyone else.