Page 6 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

“Ye— Yes. Let me just check if I have everything.” She picked up the tablet device, the white plastic frame sparkling in the daylight, and tapped the screen with her pink-colored nails so forcefully the hits were audible.

I stopped breathing.

The screen faded into black, and she attempted to give me another wrong smile. “Everything is good. You can go.”

I hopped down and sprinted for the door, but Alora wasn’t in the hallway anymore. She’d probably returned to our dormitory. Traipsing down the shining hallway lined with equally flawless chairs along cold white walls, I promised myself: she would be okay.

She would be okay.

She wasn’t.The plan hadn’t worked out.

Saliva filled my mouth as bile began its journey out once again. I swallowed, willing my storming gut to settle.

This nightmare of a memory.

The last time I’d seen Alora was years ago. I’d been walking down the street, the autumn sun leaving kisses on maple leaves, scattering the colors in the wind. And there she’d been, a stark figure in front of the colorless concrete apartment building.

The day’s breeze had tickled my calves, seeking to recognize what it’d discovered. It’d ruffled the painted leaves around my feet and carried them back to her, whipping them around her in a whirl, like a protective cocoon of life. Not for her, but for her swollen belly—she’d been at least seven months along.

She herself had looked so…lifeless. Sunshine had danced on her, but a layer of hopelessness had coated her features, cleaving her from the world. The wall of black that used to flow down her shoulders had become dull, rough, each strand a spear, ready to lunge at anyone who dared to come close. She needed that shield. Even from afar, I could tell the iridescence of her eyes was gone. Shadows had settled in its place.

A glittering green band had hung on her skinny wrist, slinging up and down with each step she took—a symbol of her prison.

I’d clutched the restaurant’s wall beside me as the world had ceased its rotation and the chatter in the street died down.

Two hundred years of dividing the surviving population into two social classes based on your ability—or lack of it—to procreate, yet neither of the three still existing cities had put any effort into developing a tracking system that didn’t involve tagging people with tangible labels. Or, as the teachers had drilled into us at schools—tokens of honor.

As if the wristband permanently secured on your forearm since puberty could serve as such. Particularly when only the green ones were worth anything. If you wore the black one, it represented the shit job your birth parents had done in passing you the reproductive genes, and you were automatically expected to believe in submission and worship those who could breed.

Like Alora.

She had coasted past me and into another street full of lifeless concrete buildings, the look of them matching her life, not a single emotion displaying her recognition of me.

I hadn’t been able to move, to shout her name, to hug her. I knew what I’d done. And I’d paid the cost of it every day for the past thirteen years.

It was supposed to be me. I was supposed to be that lifeless figure wandering the streets, without a goal, without a purpose—just a possession, living in another’s domain, a living womb fit for the sole purpose of bearing children who would provide my assigned partner a life the city had brainwashed him into wishing.

Because the idea of designing a motivational system for green-banded folks had originated from Ilasall before spreading to the other two cities, Ardaton and Coriattus. While fertile women were supposed to count not the passing days, but their pregnancies, the cities catered to the ambitions of thosecapable of producing offspring men: the more times you knocked up your Match, your assigned female partner, the more opportunities you had to climb higher up in your chosen career field, one of the six identical governmental divisions each city had.

The half a dozen sectors were ruled by Heads of Labor, Health, Education, Nutriment, Military, and Welfare, and the seventh figure, the Head of the City, reigned over them all.

The small group of our masters, as I sometimes indulged myself in calling them, controlled everything, from what you were allowed to have for breakfast to the type of toilets you had to shit in. Not a single grocery store for green-banded or nutritional bar shops for black-banded were owned by an individual. The government had its filthy fingers in all aspects of your life.

Evidently, humankind’s population had dwindled because such things as elections or private organizations were given too much power, leaving our society to fester, disregard the dropping fertility rates and, in turn, collapse our civilization. The only solution to ensure our existence had been the government’s total, full, and without-any-limits-whatsoever involvement in our daily matters. Including how we used our genitals.

At least that was what they taught us in schools.

The books I’d discovered on the black market told a different story.

And realizing Alora had to walk the path of belonging to someone, completely alone…

I rushed for the toilet as my gut painfully contracted, but this time, I didn’t throw up my dinner. I puked out the cowardice, the evil, the vileness in me that had turned my blood to ice.

Closing the lid, I flushed the bits I’d choked out. As I curled up on the freezing ceramic tiles, I counted.

One. I got the job. Assistant to the Head of Welfare. How ironic that welfare meant population control. Or more like getting our numbers up by any means necessary.

Two. The job was in the Spire, the highest glass building in the entire city, a physical statement that loomed over everyone, a place where our government, the seven Heads, resided, their homes and offices located in the same dwelling.