With them.A family with them, to clarify. Bobby turns paper-white.
“Um . . . yeah, I suppose you’re right. You’ve been assigned a unit with several others. Let me introduce you to them,” they mumble.
They knock on the trailer door. I count a minute before someone answers. Mafu’s lean, yet broad, frame, looms on the other side.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groan.
My anger at him rekindles. With how high his eyebrows rise, he doesn’t seem happy to see me, either.
“Hi, Atlas,” Mafu says, as if our conversation from the other day hadn’t played out at all.
“You have a family. Why are you here?”
Bobby’s head whips in my direction with an incredulous glare, their mouth agape in mortification. They’re probably trying to signal me to shut the hell up and right the fuck now.
“I had a . . . falling out,” he says.
Bobby looks as if they wish they were anywhere but here.
Me too, Bobby. Me too.
Chapter 51
Ezra
Proctus has some getting used to. It feels like the real world but better, and far more inclusive. Smiling faces herald us wherever we go, and I can’t help but sense a fakeness to them. Rich coming from me, the actual faux. The entirety of this place is a front. If I searched hard enough, I’d find weaknesses in the cracks, the crevices that threaten to expose them for what it truly is: a masquerade to distract these people from the outside world’s threats.
Maybe I’m just paranoid.
On the next day, we’re collected from our apartment and shown around what was once the town of Dunsmuir. Proctus is in northern California near Mount Shasta. Dunsmuir fell victim to one of California’s many wildfires years ago. The entire town was evacuated, the outskirts burnt to the ground, but what remains is purely thanks to the Angelics’ leader, Esther Brown.
She restored what could be salvaged, paying the local government millions of dollars in hush money, so no one wouldpry or give up their locale. Essentially, she bought the entire town. California is one of the more accepting states—Scarlet Letters aren’t mandatory, but that doesn’t completely abolish abuse or prejudice. Many have sought refuge in Proctus to get away from the constant vitriol, but there are just as many people from all over the country who have come to wipe away their past for clean slates.
Conin, Atlas, and I are amongst those people. And Conin, like others, is here because of family and loved ones they couldn’t part with.
A rotund woman with a bob of red hair arrives to retrieve us. She was so unbearably congenial, that ripping both ears off so I wouldn’t have to listen to her acute, upbeat falsetto any longer didn’t sound half bad. Put a wrench through both my eyes while you’re at it.
We follow the steps down to the street below our apartment building. Dunsmuir Avenue this early in the morning is devoid of human life, though I hear the echoes of voices from farther ahead and see the hint of canopies. The woman introduces herself as Sandra, then promptly leads us toward Town Hall, which happens to be on the same street as my and Conin’s new apartment. Sequestered between an old pizza shop and the town’s community center, the Town Hall is an unremarkable two-story brick and stucco building with a stone staircase leading to a set of glass doors. Sandra smiles at us, then gestures to follow her inside.
“Alright,” she says while we trail after her into a small meeting room, “first we’ll assign you occupations and then I’ll have Matt show you around Proctus. He says that he was one of the Angelics to extract you from Eureka. Terrible what happened there.”
Conin slaps me on the shoulder.
“You’re frowning. Stop it,” he whispers to me. Sandra doesn’t take notice. I arrange my face into something hopefully impassive.
My fingers grip an imaginary bottle, an amber glass of tequila, and its phantom memory. The numbness creeps forward—the want solidified. Conin nudges me again gently and I reel myself back to reality, focusing on Sandra and the file she’s just procured from somewhere. The hems of my long sleeve ride up, exposing scarred flesh, and I’m swift to lower them to the wrist.
Sandra opens the manila folder and leafs through its contents before settling on a select few pages.
“Ah, here it is.”
Sandra taps a page. She drives her finger down the column, murmuring to herself.
“Mr. Gray,” she says kindly, offering me a look. “How does horticulture sound?”
“Horticulture?” I question, vaguely familiar with the term, “What does that entail?”
“You would be cultivating our crops here at the fields. Tending to the fruits and vegetables, gathering them, proffering them to our sellers at the Shop. Would that be alright? We could use all the hands we can get.”
