Forgotten

Chapter 5

        ALL OF HAYLEY'S FEDERATION-issued clothes are nice school dresses, so Liana and I have agreed that I'll take Hayley down to the marketplace today and get her some work clothes. I rise early, change into old jeans and a plain gray T-shirt, and wake Hayley. I dress her in a pair of my old overalls, which are slightly too big for her, since I wore them when I was seven, and she's small for a four-year-old.

        Liana is staying home to do the farm work, but she gets up even earlier than me to milk the cow and collect the eggs. When Hayley and I come into the kitchen, she's ready with two covered baskets—one with five eggs and one with three glass bottles of milk.

            Soon, Hayley and I are walking south on the broken-up asphalt road, me balancing a basket on each arm, and Hayley hurrying along with a milk bottle looking uncomfortably large in her small hands. A freshly-risen sun spills warm light over the road to light our way, but unfortunately it's not enough to melt away the chilly wind that drives in our faces. I grimace, thankful that I thought to give Hayley a warm jacket to wear.

            "The milk and eggs would spoil overnight if we kept them at home," I explain to Hayley, "so we have to take them to the neighborhood storage house, which has electricity to keep them cold." I glance nervously at Hayley, who is staring determinedly ahead. "You sure you can carry that bottle?"

            "I'm okay," Hayley puffs, eyes still on the road.

            "Well, luckily the storage house isn't far." In fact, the huge gray building is already coming into view, just a couple of blocks away.

            As we approach the large, insulated set of double doors, a guard materializes out of the wall and comes up to us with a scanner. "ID, please," he says gruffly.

            I fish my small blue ID card out of my jeans pocket and hand it to him. The scanner beeps as it registers the bar code.

            The guard juts his head at Hayley. "Hers, too."

            "Hayley, did you bring your ID?" I ask her.

            Hayley nods, and I take the milk bottle from her hands so she can reach into her own pocket and pull out her ID. Hers is red because she's an Assignment child.

            "All right," the guard says when he finishes scanning hers. He takes a ring full of keys from his belt and searches through them, reading through each one's number until he finds a certain one. With a grunt, he detaches it from the ring and hands it to me.

            "Thank you," I say politely, and the guard heaves the door open for us. I hurry inside, Hayley just behind me, and hear her sharp intake of breath at the sudden drop in temperature.

            The refrigerated room is plain gray, like the exterior of the building, and has one aisle going directly down it. On each side of the aisle are tall storage units, each secured with a heavy circular lock and engraved with an identification number. Hayley and I have to walk almost halfway down the aisle before we find storage unit number 4928. I insert the key into the lock and turn it. The heavy bolt gives way, and I pull the door open and step into the room.

            Inside are almost all our stores, save what we needed to eat, from the past two weeks—three and a half cartons of eggs, and twenty bottles of milk. There's no way we'll be able to carry all that milk, so I reach for our rolling storage cart in the corner of the unit, unlock it with my ID, and load all the bottles in. I put today's eggs in the carton that's only half full, and place all the cartons in the egg basket. I give Hayley the empty basket that I used to carry the milk bottles here, lead her out of the storage unit, and close and lock the door.