showing her his intentions. "There are quite a few limitations to our thin-film crystalline silicon design… but see here, and here, this new substructure. I'm experimenting with inner couplings that might trap the weakly absorbed long wavelengths so that they traverse -"
"- the film multiple times, increasing their absorption…" she finished his sentence, thinking out loud. "That's a great idea."
He tilted his head. "Thanks. It's right outside of our fabrication capability, though, so I'm not sure how to achieve it."
She saw the access to her log before the man behind her spoke.
"This Subian bothering you, Elizabeth?"
She turned around, facing an Anglan man a few years older than her. His chiseled jaw and slick-backed hair might have garnered attraction from anyone else. His dark brown eyes seemed to scan her hungrily. She sighed. "No, he's fine."
"I'm Jason," he said with a slight nod. "You should join our group. The twelve of us are working with a complete redesign based on a new material. We could use you." He made no attempt to hide his scrutiny of her hair.
Not wanting to make enemies, she repressed her usual reaction and gave a neutral response. "Sounds interesting. Thanks for the invitation."
Jason's features curled up in a wide grin. "Great. Say, are you doing anything this Eve shift?"
She turned away. "I'm going to have to read up on all the project files. Dierk, it was nice to meet you."
"You too." He moved his virtual design back onto his physical prototype and went back to work.
Moving across the floor, she found an unused chair next to a very dark Orani woman that was busy reading project files of her own. As she sat down, the woman noticed her, stared for a moment, and then stood and left abruptly.
Ignoring her, Elizabeth leaned her head back against the wall and began reading.
She took a moment to recall recorded moments from that morning, watching the dark southern sky, drawing calm from the distant and peaceful shimmering rains. All things considered, she thought her first day was going rather well.
As Morning shift ended, she stood and stretched, her body aching, her mind unfocused and exhausted from eight hours of complex study. She'd hoped to study for all of Eve shift, too, but she could feel hunger undermining her concentration.
Flitting through her visual map, she plotted a path to the Railstop two buildings over.
The crowd already ran oriented in that direction, and she flowed with it, leaving the tremendous red-bricked factory behind. Outside, the Sun burned the same as ever, and she briefly envied those who lived under the Rain Belt's darkness.
She searched for Og's location, finding him heading over from the biology labs. She waited near a gapsquare, leaning on the waist-high stone and watching the flat, glimmering seawater. Cool breezes circled up from below, offering a brief respite from the heat of the Sun.
"Hey you," Og greeted her, smiling and waving as he emerged from the crowd. "How was your first day?"
"Not too bad, all things considered. How were the labs?"
"Fantastic. The clean rooms are amazing. Way better than the student labs at the Atoll."
She took a moment to run through his recorded visuals, skipping to random moments in the claustrophobic white-walled rooms in which he'd spent the last eight hours. Each moment found him in the same place, bent over a microscope. "If you say so."
"Hey!" he shouted, waving over the crowd.
She watched Rolf approach, her eyes narrowed.
"What's goin' on?" Og asked, clapping his friend on the shoulder and leading the way towards the Railstop. "How's your uh, programming project going?"
He made a face in response. "Horribly boring."
"Really, why?"
Rolf made as if to reply, but a warning message suddenly cut him off. The sea of people around them reacted, turning as one to face the sudden focus of all attention.
A small figure darted through the crowd, stumbling and rasping weakly with the effort, a brightly highlighted chunk of cricket bread clutched in his hand.
He fell roughly across stone.
She stared down at the boney form sprawled near her feet. Clad only in tattered pants set to zombie brown, his emaciated form made clear his desperation. His recent actions and movements highlighted by the theft-warning, she could see his slow descent toward starvation, lying motionless in an alley…
Onlookers began to recover from their surprise, looking amongst one another with rising energy. An older Anglan woman and a grey-haired Scientist stepped forward unhappily. The two grim volunteers approached the prone child as he scrambled away from them, whimpering.
Heart pounding, she thought of all the times she'd witnessed this, and how it only grew harder each time. Memories of inevitability and powerlessness flitted through her awareness - but this time, there was something she could do. She grabbed Og's wrist.
He looked down at her hand, taken aback, more surprised by her touch than by the thief scrambling past their feet.
"This is it," she said forcefully. "This has to be it."
"Be what?" he asked, caught off guard.
"We want to change things, right?"
She watched his face go slack as a million thoughts raced through his head. Worried that he wouldn't agree, she bit her lip and turned to Rolf.
He watched her with alarm, eyes narrowed, fists clenched tightly. He shook his head in warning, never dropping her gaze.
She pushed him angrily once, shoving him in the chest, but he still said nothing.
The two grey-haired volunteers moved to either side of the thief, hesitantly sizing up their options for killing him. The male Scientist lifted his foot, nearing the child's neck - but he paused, visibly disturbed.
"Come on!" she said to Og, the rising murmurs all around indicating the crowd was growing restless. If the two older people didn't do it, someone else would have to. "Og! Come on! They don't even want to do this - nobody wants to do this!"
Rolf stepped back. "Some do."
"How can we stop it?" the tall Nord asked, dismayed. "This is the only way we have to deal with thieves. It's just -"
"The way things are?" she asked pointedly.
He raised his eyebrows. "Well, shit." His heart rate rose even further as he sized up the situation. "I guess we're doing this…"
He moved to stand over the cowering child. The two who had volunteered stepped back, relieved. She moved forward and stood next to him.
A hundred encircled faces watched them. Light-skinned and dark-skinned, bearded and clean-shaven, young and old - a thick circle of men and women waited, expressions filling out the full range from dark to curious. They'd all seen thieves killed before, but the Nord and the blonde standing before them seemed to have something else in mind.
"Um…" Og yelled loudly, and the crowd quieted. "What if we didn't kill him?"
A wall of sound physically battered them as a hundred shouts and conversations broke out all at once.
Standing close to Og, she scanned each of the faces around her as best she could, struggling to come up with some further plan. Among the watchers, she spotted Rolf, who had already merged with the crowd. She glared daggers at him, but he just shook his head again, his alarmed expression again conveying his belief that this was a very bad idea.
Leaning down to lift the child to his feet, she and Og backed up slightly, finding themselves at the edge of the gapsquare. The crowd's confused roar seemed to be tilting toward blood rather than compassion.
She stared in horror at the shouting, dark faces and lifted fists. They were all so angry - so brutally, irrepressibly angry - where was it all coming from?
"There's got to be some other way," Og radius-texted, opting to abandon the vocal route altogether.
The grey-haired Scientist that had previously volunteered now raised his hands and stepped forward, attempting to calm the crowd. "What would you have us do?" he wrote back, starting a discussion thread.
Desperately guessing at solutions, he glance
d down. "The food!" he wrote. "He hasn't eaten it. What if he just gives it back?"
The kid looked up at him with horrified eyes.
"Then he'll still die," the older woman volunteer wrote, holding her hands up in apology. "He stole because he's starving."
"Then we'll give him charity!" Elizabeth posted, struggling against an incredible sense of claustrophobia and impending violence as the energetic crowd surged close.
Everyone wanted to see, or to add to the discussion. Their conversation thread began filling up with replies as fast as they could be read.
"That'll just encourage thievery," the older Scientist managed to get a new thread in edge-wise. "Steal, and get free donations? No, we can't do that."
"It's my food!" a slick-haired Anglan man wrote, pushing out of the crowd. "I just bought the property rights from the girl he stole it from! It's mine now - look, it's registered to me!"
Elizabeth sighed in frustration as Jason moved to stand next to her and Og.
"I'll take it back, and we can let him live," Jason wrote to everyone around, his arms high in the air to grab attention. "Problem solved."
She glared at him - but any support was welcome, no matter how misguided.
"Can I have that back?" he asked, looking down.
The emaciated boy just stared at him, his clutched fingers twitching.
"He's still going to die," the Anglan woman wrote again. "Why upset the way things are done if he's just going to die anyway?"
"I'll give him some food," Og countered, standing taller against the crowd's roar. "And I don't care if it encourages other thieves, they'll make their own choices. This boy is alive right now,