They travel like gray marbles, rolling down through the white city, drawn to the large, bright Cube in its center. The city is perfectly symmetrical—all streets form either lines radiating from the Cube, or concentric squares around the Cube. All the streets and buildings are perfectly white, and built of a stone that does not crack or soil. One small light, cast upon the stone, can illuminate the entire face of a building, and even with minimal lighting the streets glow faintly beneath the feet of the children. The city is white and the Sky is black. Black, with distant, motionless shadows arching through it—if there can be shadows in such blackness.
Inside the Cube, under bright, white lights, the children stand as tall as they can while adults in white uniforms examine them silently from a few paces away. The children do not shrivel beneath the gazes of the adults. Blue eyes meet each other calmly, and pink lips do not utter a sound. Smooth, white skin does not flush. One by one, the children are sorted into groups of one hundred each. One such group is ushered into a train-car, with no windows. The white seats glisten.
The train runs so smoothly and quietly that the children can hardly tell when it has started moving. They remain silent as adults give them white protective suits. The limbs of the suits are too long for the children, and they have to put layers of cloth around their blond hair in order to keep the hoods from falling off. Clear eyes, rimmed with long, perfect lashes, stare placidly at each other through blue-tinted goggles. Whatever parts of their pale faces that are not obscured behind the goggles are sheathed inside a white mask.
When the train stops, the children are informed that there has been another cave-in, and that their job today is to sort the rubble. Most of the children have done this kind of work before, or have heard of it from their parents who used to do it, and do not need instructions. The doors open and the children, now bundled inside their protective suits, clamber out of the train-car. The white faces of the adults on the train are smooth and calm, and their perfect blue eyes do not flicker as they watch the children set to work.
The landscape outside the train is made of the same, luminescent white stone as the city, but here it is perfectly flat for as far as anyone can see—save, of course, the large pile of rubble scattered across it a short distance away from the train. It is all that is left of the cave-in, the hole in the distant Sky having been patched up before now so as not to expose the children to potentially harmful light or falling matter as they work. Large chunks of gray, black and brown stone and shards of metal lie on the ground, but there are also occasional pieces of plants or soil. Seeing these, the children unnecessarily adjust their gloves, making sure that no skin is exposed.
“All you have to do is sort it,” one of the girls says. She has done this kind work before, and now must provide well-practiced instructions for the children who haven't. “Reusable materials—rock and metal—go to Sanitation. Any life-form—even plants or dirt or anything like that—goes to Incineration to prevent contamination.”
The Sky is made mostly of stone and metal, so most of the rubble is dragged to the train-car marked 'Sanitation.' Some of the stones are so large that they require several children working together to move them. The shoes of their suits slip on the smooth ground, and their small hands cannot fully grip the rubble from inside their thick, baggy gloves.
One small boy climbs over the rubble, straying a bit from the other children. He's caught sight of something among the stones that intrigues him—a long, brown... what? A branch of a tree, perhaps? Or the root of some plant? He clasps a precautionary hand over his mask at the thought. It isn't until he is mere paces away from it that he sees what it is. His hand falls to his side.
It is an arm.
But the flesh is a dark, wooden color and slightly speckled, unlike the perfect, white arms of the people of the city. The color is so vulgar that he can't help but find it tantalizingly beautiful. He is mesmerized by the thin line of black under each of the short fingernails. The inside of his mask fogs over a little before his suit adjusts to his quickening breaths.
He kneels down and nudges a sheet of metal away to see who the arm belongs to.
His blue eyes blink. As the metal slides aside, the body of a woman appears, but she is like no woman he has ever seen. Her skin is all the same dark, slightly patterned color as her arm, and she is surprisingly short, compared to the tall, lean adults he is used to seeing. She wears a dull green dress, made of a strange, light fabric with noticeable imperfections in its color and texture. Her long, brown hair is smooth, but speckled with dust from the rubble. It has fallen over her face, and a string of wilted white daisies is tangled into the dark strands like a battered crown. Despite her roughness, she does not seem physically wounded—until he sees her wings. The elegant arches of rich brown feathers look so natural on her back that he almost didn't see them, but when he does, he also notices that her left wing is crumpled awkwardly under the weight of her body. He cannot tell if she is alive. He's reaching towards her to push the hair off of her face, when he hears a voice from behind him.
“What did you find?”
He turns around to see an older boy coming towards him over the rubble. When the new boy sees the dark woman, he wrinkles his nose.
“I've seen those before,” he says. “Nasty stuff. I'll be right back.” He clambers over the rubble towards the train and returns momentarily, carrying two long white poles. “This is the best way to carry it, I think.”
With the older boy directing the younger one, they wedge one pole under the woman's shoulders, right above her wings, and another beneath her knees, then hoist her up. Slowly, carefully, they carry their load across the pile of stone and metal.
“What are we going to do with her?” The younger boy asks quietly.
“You have to Incinerate it, of course,” replies the other boy, without hesitation. “These things are pure contamination.”
------------------------
Spoiler! :
Gender:
Points: 7241
Reviews: 721