AURUM EXTRACTION LTD. - DAILY ACCOUNTABILITY REPORT Site: K-9 (“The Kennel”) Shift: Cinder (0400-1200) Personnel Verified: 847/849 Discrepancy: 2 (see mortality log, Form 9-ECHO) Productivity Index: 94.2% (within acceptable parameters) Note: Air filtration maintenance deferred (eighth consecutive quarter). Budget pending.
[The siren comes first. Then the counting.]
[Avyanna opens her eyes before the sound finishes. Her body knows the rhythm. Eight years of this rhythm. The siren is a knife through sleep, and her nerves flinch before it lands.]
[The bunk above her creaks. Someone coughs three tiers down. The coffin-pods are stacked four high, and the air between them tastes like the inside of a recycler-metal, wet, old breath.]
(Sixty for air. Thirty for water. Forty-five for food. One-twenty for the bunk.)
[She doesn’t sit up yet. The count hasn’t reached her section.]
[Supervisor Coil moves through the hab stack with a scanner. Her footsteps are heavy. Deliberate. She used to work Slurry 7, before the promotion. Everyone knows. No one mentions it.]
Coil: [calling numbers, not names] Four-seven-two. Four-seven-three. Four-seven-four.
[Each number gets a beep. Confirmation. The scanner checks vitals, location, debt balance. All at once.]
[Coil pauses at four-seven-three. The bunk is empty. The sheets are cold. Everyone pretends not to notice. Coil marks something on her pad, and her jaw tightens—just slightly, just for a moment-before she moves on.]
Coil: Four-seven-five. Four-seven-six.
[Avyanna is four-seven-seven.]
[She sits up. Swings her legs out. Her feet find the cold deck. The motion is automatic. Everything here is automatic.]
Coil: Four-seven-seven.
[The scanner beeps against Avyanna’s neck. The tag is embedded there—has been since she arrived. It’s warm against her skin. Always warm. Tracking, always.]
[Coil’s eyes pass over her. Through her. Avyanna is good at being passed over. On Coil’s wrist, her own debt ledger flickers-numbers Avyanna isn’t supposed to see. Red, like everyone’s. Even the supervisors are bleeding.]
Coil: [moving on] Four-seven-eight.
[The wash line is long. The water is lukewarm. The ration is thirty ticks for three minutes, and everyone moves fast.]
[Avyanna washes her face, her hands, the back of her neck where the tag itches. The water runs gray. It always runs gray. Aurum dust clings. Gets in the skin. Stays.]
[The woman next to her-older, maybe forty, looks sixty-scrubs methodically. Her hands shake. The fine tremor of someone whose body is running out.]
Older Woman: [not looking at Avyanna, just talking] Cold today.
Avyanna: [flat] Always cold.
Older Woman: Colder than yesterday. Vents again.
[There’s always something wrong with the vents. The filtration unit on the wall has a maintenance tag so old the plastic has worn smooth where fingers have touched it. DEFERRED, it says. The word is barely legible. Someone scratched “AGAIN” underneath, years ago.]
[Avyanna doesn’t say this. Saying things costs.]
[The water cuts off. Her three minutes are done. She steps back. The next person steps up.]
[The mess hall is loud and quiet at the same time. Loud with bodies—eight hundred workers cycling through in forty-minute windows. Quiet with voices. No one talks more than they have to.]
[Avyanna collects her ration from the dispenser. The pouch is small. The paste inside is the color of old bandages and tastes like apology.]
(Forty-five ticks. This is what my body costs. Forty-five ticks of work to keep working.)
[She finds a place against the wall. Not a table-tables mean eyes. The wall is better. The wall lets her watch.]
[And she watches.]
[The workers move in patterns. Shift groups cluster together. Foremen sit closer to the recycler—better air, everyone knows. The very sick sit alone. No one wants to catch something that costs ticks to treat.]
[A boy across the room is new. She can tell by how he holds his ration pouch—like it might be more than it is. He’ll learn. A week, maybe two. They all learn.]
[Near the exit, a woman named Sela—not that names matter, but Avyanna remembers anyway-moves like her joints hurt. She’s going thin. The dust is in her lungs. She’ll be dead before the quarter ends. Everyone pretends not to notice.]
[Two workers near the serving line are trading something. Filter patches, it looks like. Three patches for a painkiller tab. The math of survival, worked out in whispers.]
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[Avyanna notices everything. It’s the only thing she’s good at.]
[Work assignment comes through the tag. A vibration against her neck, then the data feeds directly into her visual cortex-cheap augment, standard issue, designed for inventory.]
WORKER 477 - SHIFT ASSIGNMENT Location: Processing Hall, Slurry Line 7 Duration: 8 hours (standard) Tool Rental: 90 ticks (deducted) Quota: 340 units Note: Productivity bonus available (+50 ticks) for 380+ units. Performance within acceptable parameters required for continued assignment.
[She walks to Processing. The corridors are narrow. Workers call them by names the company doesn’t use: the Throat is the main elevator spine. Spit Lane runs behind the commissary, where the condensation drips. The Warm Wall is a pipe junction where heat leaks-workers press their hands there between shifts, stealing warmth the company hasn’t priced yet.]
[The Throat is packed with Cinder shift workers descending. She takes the stairs instead. Cinder Steps, four levels down. Her knees ache by the third level. Her lungs feel heavy by the fourth. The dust is in her too. She doesn’t think about it.]
[The Processing Hall opens up around her. The sound hits first-constant, industrial, the grinding of ore into slurry, the whine of conveyor belts, the hum of machines that never stop. Then the heat. Then the smell: metal, chemical, sweat.]
[She finds her station. Slurry Line 7. Her job is simple: watch for blockages, clear them, report anomalies. Don’t get pulled into the machinery. Don’t breathe too deep. Don’t think about what the gold-colored dust is doing inside.]
[Above the line, a sign reads: SAFETY IS PRODUCTIVITY. DO NOT WHISTLE NEAR MACHINERY. The second line is hand-painted, older than the first. A superstition turned policy, or a policy turned superstition. No one remembers which.]
[Two hours in. The glitter is everywhere.]
[Aurum dust sticks to sweat. Seeps into creases. Avyanna’s hands are gold-flecked. Her arms. The workers around her shimmer like they’re decorated for a celebration no one invited them to.]
[The woman at the next station-Vera, or that’s what she was before-coughs into her sleeve. Wet. Heavy. The sound of lungs that are giving up.]
(Gold-lung. Everyone gets it. The filters don’t work. Haven’t worked in years.)
[Vera catches Avyanna looking. Holds her gaze for a moment. Then looks away. There’s nothing to say. They both know the numbers.]
[A man further down the line starts singing. An old song, something from before, when people had the energy for music. His voice is rough. The words are about a river that leads somewhere better.]
[No one tells him to stop. For a moment, the sound of the grinders fades. For a moment, there’s something that isn’t work.]
[Then the song ends. The grinders are still there. They’re always still there.]
[A commotion near Station 12. Avyanna looks up.]
[A worker has stopped. Just stopped-standing at his post, hands at his sides, staring at the slurry line like he’s seeing something that isn’t there. His lips are moving. No sound.]
[His partner is trying to move him. Gently at first. Then harder. The line doesn’t stop. The quota doesn’t stop. The machinery keeps grinding, and if he doesn’t move-]
Partner: [hissing] Kev. Kev. You have to move. The line-
[Kev doesn’t respond. His eyes are somewhere else.]
[Supervisor Coil appears. She doesn’t speak. She grabs Kev’s arm and drags him backward, away from the machinery, and his partner takes over his station without a word. The line doesn’t stop. The quota adjusts—two people doing the work of three, until someone from overflow can be reassigned.]
[Coil walks Kev toward the med bay corridor. His feet move, but the rest of him is gone. Avyanna watches them go. She’s seen this before. They call it “checking out.” When the numbers get too loud. When the body decides to leave before the debt does.]
[Kev won’t come back to the line. Med bay will give him a rest recommendation-unpaid, interest accruing—and he’ll be reassigned to something slower. Lower Works, maybe. Where the air is worse but the pace is gentler.]
[The Lower Works. She used to go there, before they banned her section from the deep shafts. Before-]
[She stops the thought. Thinking about before costs.]
[Lunch break. Fifteen minutes. The ration pouch is the same. The taste is the same. The wall is the same.]
[But something is different today.]
[Workers are gathered near the commissary. Voices louder than usual. Avyanna moves closer, staying at the edge, staying invisible.]
Worker 1: Fifty. Can you believe it?
Worker 2: Bram made fifty. The bastard actually made fifty.
[Avyanna knows Bram. Old—the oldest worker she’s seen here. He works the Lower Works, the deep shafts where the good ore is and the bad air is worse. He knows things. Stories about the mine before it was the Kennel. Superstitions that might be true. He’s the one who told her about the wall-tapping-two taps before you enter a new cut, asking the rock for permission.]
[The crowd parts slightly. Bram is in the center. His face is lined like cracked stone. His hands are gnarled. His eyes are still sharp.]
Worker 3: [slapping Bram’s shoulder] Fifty-run, old man. You cheated.
Bram: [voice like gravel shifting] Didn’t cheat. Just stubborn.
[There’s laughter. It sounds wrong here. Laughter sounds wrong in the Processing Hall, like flowers at a murder. But they laugh anyway.]
Worker 4: Speech! The old man has to give a speech.
Bram: [waving them off] No speeches. Just- [he pauses, looks at the crowd, at the young faces and the ones already going thin] -just don’t burn too bright. That’s all I got. Kennel takes enough light. Don’t give it more.
[The laughter fades. Everyone knows what “burning bright” means. Dying young. Working until the body gives out. Being efficient with your own destruction.]
Worker 2: [quieter now] Fifty’s a good run, Bram. Most of us don’t see forty-five.
Bram: [flat] I know.
[He looks at Avyanna then. Just a glance, brief and sharp. Like he’s seeing something. Like he knows something she doesn’t.]
Bram: [quieter, almost to himself] Kennel’s got a new itch. Feel it in the deep cuts. Something scratching.
[No one else seems to hear him. The moment breaks. Someone makes a joke, and the tension eases, and the workers drift back to their stations. Fifteen minutes is already over.]
[Avyanna stays against the wall. Watching. Counting.]
(Bram is fifty. The oldest person I’ve seen here.)
(What does that make me? I’m sixteen. Thirty four years to match him. If I live that long. If the gold-lung doesn’t take me. If the balance doesn’t compound.)
(If.)
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