Word count : 4800
Meteor City
March 3rd, 1951 — March 3rd, 1955
The sack came down with the morning's third load.
It was jute, the kind used for grain or salvage bulk. It landed badly — caught on a slab of compressed metal on the way down and hit the deposit margin at an angle, rolling twice before it stopped. The man who dropped it was already walking back to the vehicle. Suit, dark. He had not come alone. The other man was already in the car. The suited man paused at the door and looked back at the sack. "Should have charged extra for the disposal," he said. The other man laughed. He got in. The car moved.
Twenty minutes later the deposit crew came through on their morning sweep.
The first worker saw the sack from four meters away and thought nothing of it. Jute came down regularly—rotting food, shredded clothing, compacted paper, the occasional body part when someone up top got creative. He would have walked past it except that when he was two meters away, he heard something. Thin. Barely there. He stopped.
He stood still for a moment. Then he crouched and pulled the sack open.
He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, "Damn."
His two colleagues came over. They looked.
The older one straightened up first. He had been working the deposit margin for eleven years. He had seen what the city's upper districts sent down when they were done with something. He had never seen this.
"Leave it," he said.
"She's breathing," the younger one said. He was maybe sixteen. His eyes moved over her slowly, lingering on the distended belly, the crusted thighs, the stumps. Not with concern but hunger. "Been a while since I got laid. She's still warm. I could—"
The older man didn't even turn fully. Just reached out and slapped the back of the kid's head—not hard, just sharp enough to sting, to reprimand.
The boy stumbled half a step, face flushing red.
"What the—"
"Don't put your dick in trash kid," the older one said, voice low and even. "You'll catch something that rots you from the inside before the week's out. Seen it happen. You want your prick to fall off in your hand? Or worse?" He jerked his chin toward the woman. "She's trash of some rich asshole. Diseases follow money like flies. You want to live long enough to regret it, listen. I'll introduce you to someone tonight. Clean. Willing. Gets paid in food instead of screams. Now walk."
The boy's face went red. He looked at the ground.
The older worker was already moving. The third man followed without speaking.
The teenager walked. At the passage mouth he stopped and looked back once with a twisted lust. Then he turned and caught up with the others.
She was naked. Her arms ended at the elbow, her legs at the knee. The cuts were not clean — the bone had been worked through with something with teeth likely a saw, and whoever had done it had cauterized the wounds after. The scarring was old enough to have set. Her eyes were gone. The sockets were dried and dark, the blood around them days old at minimum. Her face had been beaten so many times and so thoroughly that nothing remained of its original shape — no visible cheekbone, no distinguishable line of jaw, just swollen ruined tissue that had partially set in the days since. Welts covered her torso and what remained of her limbs had turned from red to blue to yellow at the edges. Her belly was distended, round and hard against the collapse of the rest of her.
She was still breathing. Thin and rattling, spending itself against the cold air.
The deposit crew did not come back.
The Cannibals found her an hour later.
-x-
It was a family of cannibals — two adults and two children — who worked the northern deposit margin of Bloc Nine and often visited the edges of Bloc 12 to find discarded bodies from outside as well as from the Bloc itself. They were naked, all four of them, their bodies stripped down to something past lean — not starved, just reduced, as if generations of their particular diet had decided that fat and excess were unnecessary and removed them.
They were looking for what the morning's load had produced and they found her.
The father, a man of approximately forty approached from the east, analyzing the content of the morning load with ease of doing it his whole life. He nearly passed her. Coated in dust and settled into the contours of the rubble, she looked like debris. Then he heard the same thin, insistent sound the deposit crew had ignored. It was still there, spending itself against the cold air.
He crouched, watching her without touching. His wife joined him, then their twelve-year-old son. The boy had worked the margin for six years; he'd seen everything the Pile produced, but he went still at the state of the body. He looked away first.
The woman was a ruin—compressed, depleted, and reduced to the biological minimum—except for her abdomen. Her stomach held a shape the rest of her had long since surrendered.
The father cannibal lifted her against his bare chest. She was unnaturally light, as if her entire mass had been sacrificed to keep one single function running. He carried her to their dwelling, a warm, oil-lit burrow three meters beneath the surface in Bloc 9, and set her on the floor with the care he usually doesn't show towards food.
Her breath was failing. He could hear how fast. It didn't change what had to happenThe wife knelt. Her hands moved across the woman's stomach. She looked at her husband. He handed her the knife.
The wife made the first cut low and deliberate. The woman's breathing didn't change. No surge, no flinch, no tightening of what remained of her body. The wife cut deeper. The bleeding was wrong — not the absent bleeding of a dead body, but something close to it. What came was dark and slow, as if whatever had kept her alive had spent everything on the one task remaining and had nothing left for anything else. The wife worked around it. The boy stood at the far end of the room with his back turned, listening to a scene he refused to watch. The woman's chest kept moving. Thin and steady. Whatever was keeping her alive was not done yet.
The baby emerged into the lamplight — small, dark-haired, and silent. It was a girl. She didn't cry. She simply opened her eyes and looked. The wife felt the child's weight; She was healthy which was unnatural in itself if you had witnessed the mother's condition, the mother had held on just long enough to reach this moment.
As the wife cleaned the infant, the mother's breathing simply stopped. Something moved in the lamplight — faint, upward, there and then not there. The baby's grip tightened. Her colour deepened. The mother was still. The baby seemed to become healthier as the mother died.
The father had spent his lifetime reading human bodies. He observed the baby. She wasn't just alive; she had thrived. She carried an inherited momentum from the body that had died to produce her.
The baby wasn't food. In the Cannibals' world, that line was fixed. The living were never taken. The dead were. A group that crossed that line would face a response the city could sustain for a long time. The family had never crossed and didn't intend to start now.
Before dawn he carried her to the surface. He moved through the quiet streets with the invisibility of a career scavenger, stopping at the northern wall of the intake crib — the structure Bloc Nine used as a repository for children it didn't know what else to do with, He placed her in the crate by the entrance and stood for a moment in the cold looking at the quiet child. She hadn't made a peep or cried as infants tend to.
She looked back at him, her eyes wide and dark. He turned and walked back to his dwelling. The girl lay in the crate quietly.
Marre the caretaker found her forty minutes later on her morning perimeter check—a daily routine of Security check drilled into her as all habits tend to. She looked into the crate and saw the infant.
She scooped the girl up with one arm without any pity, just with an apathetic look. After marking the date of intake in her pocket ledger—March third—she carried the child inside.
-x-
The naming happened four days later in the small partitioned space at the crib's east end that Marre used as an office. It was not a ceremony but an administrative task. Dov the only security personnel of the Crib was present because the ledger required a witness. The previous Caretaker had established the rule and Marre kept it in place. The rule had little function as neither Dov nor Marre gave shit about the baby, but the crib had few structures left. The rules remained just for the sake of it.
There were three children to name that week.
The first was a boy, about six months old, found in the outer deposit zone by a salvage worker. The worker brought him in because he found a rare trace of sympathy. He said he had a sister who had been abandoned once. The boy had a mark on his left cheek, a port-wine stain spreading from his jaw toward his eye. Marre looked at it briefly and wrote: Stain.
The second was also a boy, about three months old, delivered by a woman who did not speak and left no name for herself or the child. He had been wrapped in burlap with a military stencil printed across it. The script on the burlap was foreign and unreadable, but the stencil pattern was clear. Marre looked at it and wrote: Mark.
The third was the girl from the crate. Marre studied her longer than the others. She examined her by turning her to find any identifying mark. The naming system required a visible trait or associated material. She had no birthmark, no unusual coloring, and no object brought with her. She had arrived wrapped in nothing. Dov leaned over the crate and said she had very dark hair and eyes.
Marre examined the child again.
She wrote: Sable.
It was the name for a dense black fur and the heraldic term for black. It also matched the scrap of black wool on the edge of Marre's desk that she had been using to wipe the pen. Marre recorded the entry and moved to the next line.
The child who would be called Sable lay in the crate and watched the ceiling in her now characteristic silence.
-x-
Twelve infants lived in the crib during the first year Sable was among them. five did not reach their first birthday.
The deaths were not evenly distributed across the year. Most occurred during the winter months, when the temperature inside the building dropped low enough that infants with weak constitution could not maintain body heat. Some died quickly. Others over several days. Marre checked each infant every morning as part of her routine. When she found one dead she recorded it in the ledger. The entry was brief, just a line crossing out their name.
Then she opened the small window at the crib's north end and passed the body through it. The window was narrow and placed high on the wall. Nothing larger than an infant could pass through it, and no child could reach it from the floor.
The Cannibal collection point was directly below. They had made the arrangement with Marre three years before Sable arrived. The agreement was simple. Marre disposed of the body immediately. The body did not remain inside the building. No one needed to carry anything through the street in daylight. The cannibals collected the bodies before dawn. They had never missed a collection.
-x-
The first four years.
Sable observed others, mingled with children her age and learned to act like them. From the time she could retain what she saw she had been building a model of everyone and everything around her before she had words for any of it.
She knew Dov's resting state versus his pre-violence state and she knew it early enough to move out of his way when he was bound to be violent. She knew which spots on the floor were cold and thus uncomfortable, which were contested and which were safe, and she knew which children were light sleepers so that she avoided waking them up, because violence had started over less.
-x-
Sable learned early that Kids without any peers and backing become targets.
There was a boy called Petch. He kept to himself. He did not eat with the others. He did not sleep near them. Within a week three older children had taken his spot. Then his food share. He did not fight back. He had no one to fight alongside him and everyone knew it. By the second week he was sleeping near the window. He died in winter.
She did not want to end up like Petch. She searched for a shield.
Tin was a girl, two years older. She felt Sable's higher than normal body temperature and saw her as useful. The next day she slept close to Sable. Sable let her. Tin died of a chest infection the third winter. Sable slept alone for two days with an unknown pain in her chest. By the third day it was already duller. By the fifth it was gone entirely. She had never felt anything like it before and would not feel it at that intensity again. She started to find another companion the next day.
Ash was a boy, three years older, built large enough that smaller children didn't look at him wrong. He wasn't observant. Sable was. She fed him early warnings about Dov and he provided cover, and it worked for eight months until he aged out and walked out the door without a backwards look. Sable was already finding the next before he hit the street.
Grit was a boy, one year older, they had similar arrangement: He acted as her shield she his eyes and ears. The arrangement lasted four months, then a man Sable didn't recognize came for him one afternoon — a man whose pupils were wide in a way that had nothing to do with the light, who smiled at Grit with his mouth while everything else in his face stayed still — something about him gave her heebie-jeebies in a way she had no words for.
Grit disappeared that day no one really remembered him, but she did.
She didn't make another arrangement for two months.
Then Renn pushed his sleeping space next to hers and handed over two days of grain rations unprompted. Generous, maybe. More likely an opening offer. Sable read it for what it was and decided that it seemed worth it, and that was that.
-x-
Children died of disease mostly. That's what Marre's ledger showed if you read across years instead of individual entries. Respiratory infection in winter. Waterborne illness in warm months. And malnutrition — the slow kind, where a child became smaller with time and then just die one day.
Sable had watched seven children die in four years of illness. She was never in the room at the moment — partly chance, partly the fact that something told her to move away from deteriorating situations well before the end, and she moved. But she had tracked the progression each time.
This had produced a problem in her second year.
She didn't get sick. Not the way the others did. Minor illness moved through her differently — two days of reduced energy, a cough that lasted a morning, and she was back to normal while the children around her were still getting worse. The respiratory infection that killed Tin had run through the crib for three weeks. Most children were down for five to twelve days. Sable had been for two.
Marre noticed. She didn't say anything. But her attention on Sable increased. Sable felt this attention was not good for her — that feeling she always got. She began pretending to be sick.
She was three. The performance wasn't sophisticated. During waves of illness she reduced her visible energy, positioned herself further from the distribution point to avoid being spotted, copied the sounds the sick children made and kept it up for two or three days after each wave passed. She ate the same amount as the others. Her body processed it the same way.
It had taken her several weeks to articulate the observation that made her start copying others behaviour during the illness, even in the wordless internal language she used for thinking. The articulation, when it came, was simple: when I am like them, she stops looking at me like that.
Over fourteen months Marre's attention on her dropped. Then it dropped further. Then it disappeared completely one day.
She took it in and moved on
She didn't ask or wonder what Marre would have done with it. She was three and then four. She didn't have the words for that question yet.
What she had was the practical result. Less attention was safer.
-x-
The Crib - Bloc 9
March 3rd, 1955.
Sable is four years old today.
She doesn't know it's her birthday. She doesn't know what a birthday even is.
She woke before the building did, same as always.
Her body pulled out of sleep at the first change in sound around her.
She performed her morning observations Dov was two rooms over in his quarter, His breathing which was much louder than kids could be heard, from its quality Sable could deduce that he would wake up soon. She had been reading him for two years. She opened her eyes as Dov woke up and started his morning routine.
She lay still and continued her observation. Dov was moving east, unhurried, tired and neutral — he wouldn't be angry today. Marre was still in the back room, awake but still on her bed. She could tell from the breathing, or the lack of it — Marre's breathing was always louder when she slept. No other child was awake. The closest — a boy called Dust, two years old, new — was making the small mouth sounds he made every morning before he woke.
She was up before Dust would wake up. She moved between gaps of the sleeping children without making any noise. Her feet had learned how to walk so as to not make the noise others make.
The distribution point was at the far end of the building. The building was one large room with a smaller back room where Marre slept. It was cold in the mornings because the walls were thin and the desert dropped temperature fast at night. That was the main reason that children slept close together, for the warmth.
Outside the gaps in the walls the street was already alive. Bloc Nine woke early. She could hear the first salvage teams moving, the sound of the carts being dragged along the ground was unique, voices kept low the way people kept them low before the sun was fully up. The building sat on a side street off the main salvage route. Noise in the morning meant the day was starting normally. She moved to get her daily ration.
The distribution man was already at the pot. Sable had never heard his name. He was the distribution man; He was around fifty. Big. The kind of build that comes from decades of heavy work. He had a daughter somewhere in the city. He'd mentioned it once to Marre in a conversation Sable had been three meters from then and had heard it.
Sable didn't like the man, He always gave her and the girls less rations compared to the boys not by a lot, but Sable didn't like it.
Sable had noticed this on her third visit here; she was three then before three Marre used to collect their rations.
He saw her approach. His hand moved to the pot.
Every child was given a bowl they must keep safe if lost they will have to use their hands to collect the hot ration. A boy had lost his bowl the previous month. He held his hands out. The distribution man poured anyway. The boy made no sound. He ate quickly before it cooled enough to stop burning him.
She held out her bowl and watched him. She had watched him every morning for fourteen months.
He always took a portion from the pot, assessed it, and put a small amount back before passing the bowl to her.
She took it. Didn't say anything.
She moved to her spot near the wall — the one next to the exit, three steps from the door — and ate.
She had tested different ways while in the line. Different ways of holding the bowl. Different positions in the queue. She had tried arriving right after a boy so her portion came from the same part of the pot. The man always without fail gave her less.
She ate the entire bowl in under a minute. Her body processed food fast. The full feeling arrived a few minutes after the last mouthful, it arrives at the same time irrespective of speed of her eating. She had noticed this after she did some experiment.
She had found this interesting.
She was about to rinse the bowl with the small cup of water allocated for rinsing when Renn appeared beside her.
He was six. Taller than Sable by a significant margin. He had a piece of salvaged metal he used as a scraper while eating, which he carried in the waist of his trousers and which was the most significant possession in the crib by reasonable assessment. He had obtained it eight months ago and had maintained possession of it through his physical capability. No one took things from Renn. Sable had noticed this when she was evaluating whether the arrangement was viable.
He held out a small amount of grain. (A/N : grains and ration are different)
She took it.
" Dof?" he asks about Dov's mood today.
"Looks.. Tired but not angry," she said.
Renn exhales in relief.
"And Marre?" he said.
"Still asleep."
She paused. That morning, she had noticed Marre's breathing. It was quiet. Marre was waiting for something. Sable did not know what yet.
She decided not to mention it. She did not report things she had not finished observing completely. Renn would act on whatever she told him, He trusted her by now. She was not ready to tell him this. Incomplete information was worse than none.
Renn nodded. He ate his portion standing beside her. They did not look at each other while they ate. This is how they normally interact exchange information for some grain, maintain proximity to avoid being lone target, this was especially significant for Sable.
"The new one cried last night," he said. He meant Dust. "Three timeth."
"Four," Sable said. "You slept through the second one."
He nodded believing her without any doubt.
"Dof'll be moody," he said. "From the crying."
"Tired moody," Sable said. "Not the hitting kind." She considered.
Renn finished the grain. He wiped the vessel on his trousers. "You thure?"
She thought about the signals Dov's body produced in the morning. The way his body held itself when he was tired and irritable versus when he was tired and escalating. The difference was small. She had been reading it for two years. She was confident in the distinction.
"Tired is tired," she said. "Hitting is different. I'll tell you if it changes."
Renn accepted it with a nod and moved back toward the sleeping area to collect his sleeping cloth before the others woke and the cloth became contested, as well as his bowl.
She had one more thing she was going to do this morning that she had not told Renn about. She had been planning it for three days. She was going to go outside today.
This won't be the first time. She had been outside before — twice, both times briefly, both times in the period just before dawn when the street was at its lowest activity level and the walking outside carried low risk. Both times she had gone and come back before Marre's routine, and neither time had produced anything notable enough.
She was mostly going because of Marre. Marre was waiting for something, maybe she would find out if she followed her. She wanted to know. Because information about the people who controlled the crib's function was never wasted, and because that something that guided her had flagged the reading as significant, which was the most reliable indicator she had, and she had learned to always listen to the signals of her body.
For as long as Sable could remember She could read people through their bodies. Not their words or expressions. She registers the biological signals a body produces and cannot suppress — pupil response, muscle tension, shifts in skin temperature, changes in how someone holds their weight. The reading arrives before conscious thought. She does not analyze what she receives. She simply knows. This is the something that guides her.
The door was not locked. It was never locked from the inside. Marre's assumption was that the street was worse than the crib. For most children, that was deterrent enough.
She eased through the gap — the door's salvaged hinges were stiff and she had learned the exact angle at which they moved without sound — and she was outside.
She stood in the shadow of the crib's outer wall and observed the street.
Three adults were visible. A salvage worker moving east with an empty cart, a woman sitting in a doorway across the passage and a man at the far end of the lane with his back to the crib. None of them were looking at her.
She settled into the wall and waited.
Marre's door opened four minutes later.
She came out carrying a sack. It moved when Marre walked. Something inside was moving.
Marre looked left. She looked right. She looked fidgety. Sable deduced that this fidgety behaviour was not just due to anxiety — it had another element she hadn't seen before. Sable did not move. She stayed in the shadow while Marre turned and walked north, straight up the side street toward the passage behind the crib's northern wall. Sable followed.
She kept her distance, her body making minute adjustments to itself, minimizing and almost eliminating the sound she produced. Marre stopped where the passage opened onto the waste ground. Sable stopped at the passage's bend and watched.
Dark working clothes, worn but clean. A coat that had seen use. Nothing that marked her as anything in particular. Not young. Not anyone Sable had seen before. She observed her body language, The woman looked composed. This wasn't her first rodeo.
Marre set the sack down. The sack moved.
The woman produced a small packet from inside her clothing. A plastic bag with white powder in it. Marre took it, turned it once, and tucked it inside her coat without opening it.
The woman picked up the sack. As she did, the fabric pulled taut for a moment. A small hand. A wrist. Gone again as the woman adjusted her grip and turned toward the waste ground's far exit.
Sable knew the wrist. Its Wren. Two years old, was absent from the sleeping area this morning..
The woman walked away without looking back. Marre stood alone in the grey morning with her hand against the packet inside her coat.
She remembered now the signals the woman's body produced were similar to the man who took Grit. This is what happened to Grit.
Sable stayed in the shadow.
Marre turned and walked back toward the crib. Sable stayed at the bend until the door closed. Then she stayed three minutes more, reading the waste ground. Empty. The woman was gone. Wren was gone with her.
She did not follow further. She was four years old and alone in a back passage before dawn. Following further was not wise.
At least not yet.
She went back to the crib. Dust had woken. The queue was forming at the distribution point. Renn was at the back of it. His eyes moved to her when she appeared. They moved away when she gave him nothing.
She leaned against the wall.
The packet. Grit. Wren. She didn't have answers. She had questions. She would need to know more.