Page 51 of Heartless Heathens
Because when I looked into her eyes, it broke me, too.
“RememberwhatItoldyou?” I came out of my room to hear Felix asking her, her face held in his hands. “Just kick him between the legs if he does something you don’t like.” She nodded with a doe-eyed look to her that was so innocent it had to be fake.
I grumbled to myself and crossed my arms while I waited for the two girls I didn’t know at all, to dictate how my day was going to go. This kind of shit always happened when I blacked out. I missed so much information and it seemed like no one ever gave a fuck enough to explain to me what the hell was going on.
I would have preferred to walk towards campus parking in silence, and at least it seemed like Romina and I had that in common. Reesa was a chatty one, talking about anything and everything that would fire out of her mouth-hole at rapid speed before it had a chance to get filtered through her brain.
“Do you think you’ll be going to class with the rest of us now? Are you going to move into the dorms?” Reesa went off a million miles an hour, far too excited, and Romina looked to me for some sort of approval before she answered. I just shook my head and shrugged. She could answer for herself. Or had she never had the option before?
“I-I don’t know,” she responded when I didn’t bother to give her any information.
She didn’t need to know that I was more out of the loop than she was.
And now Sonny was meeting with Arlan without us, not that he needed to include us in these meetings. We all knew Sonny would lead the shrine without us. But things were shifting now, earlier than expected.
Everything was already changing and the only reason seemed to be Frollo’s little sheep standing right next to me. I whipped my head back at Reesa and peeled my upper lip up in a silent warning for her to stop her incessant babbling, but she was too dense for nonverbal cues. She rolled her eyes at me and continued on.
“Well, I bet if we contacted the CGS we could draw up paperwork,” she said, eyes blown wide as she marveled at her own idea.
“CGS?” Romina asked, unsure if she was repeating the right letters.
“Children of God Services. They deal with fosters, adopted kids, anyone misplaced and such. You’re an adult, but technically you have no paperwork so maybe they could help.” She shrugged and I tsked out loud at her stupidity. “What?” she asked me with a whine to her voice.
“You’re an idiot if you think that’s how it works. The minute they see her they’ll get dollar signs in their eyes and draw up a contract with the nearest Nile warehouse to get her ‘off the streets and into production’.” I used the air quotes exaggeratedly.
That was their motto for the homeless, indebted, or displaced and they advertised it proudly. To boot, they had claimed to have cleaned up the country’s ‘immigrant problem’ and turned them into hard working, productive civil servants. The real truth was that they were all shoved into poorhouses for the few hours a day they slept between shifts in the warehouses.
A cot and a hot, but worse than prison.
Those that were rounded up into the Nile’s homeless programs were forced to work thirteen to fifteen hour days in exchange for their living arrangements and they were paid a fraction of what those who arrived there by other means were given. If you’d signed up on your own, you got afewluxuries.
If that’s what you called getting paid enough to eat.
They exploited those with mental illnesses and addictions by selling their medications, drinks, and drugs at an unreasonable price that would leave them unable to purchase any other necessities for the month. Keeping them in that unending poverty cycle, constantly crushed by the wheel of demand as it spun on top of them. They called it inflation, but when did eating become a luxury?
Frollo’s God preferred profits over saving a sinner’s soul.
The church preyed on everyone. Holding their future hostage and limiting their options. Unless you’d spent four years in one of the dozens of parochial schools set up throughout the country, then you were shipped off to one of the Nile’s poorhouses for exploited labor.
The Nile became the ruling conglomerate soon after the virus hit. Buying out every major monopoly and delivering whatever was necessary to keep people in their homes, quarantined away from the infected for as long as possible. Now twenty years later, everything came from them.
The poorhouses were converted from old prisons and warehouses to become housing quarters and distribution centers for The Nile. Every person aged fourteen and up was given a bed in a shared space, three meals a day, and an electronic card with credits they could earn by working extra hours at the warehouses or distributions to purchase other living necessities.
If they were lucky enough to become breeders, The Nile granted them a 500 square foot dormitory to start their family. I would bet Reesa here probably grew up sharing a studio apartment with her parents. They were likely ecstatic to send her off to NotreDame and get some space back to themselves while they worked to death.
The system had long been rigged to keep the poor working for the wants of the rich, barely getting by with enough to cover their own needs.
If the people realized the power was all theirs, they would have rioted and gotten back everything that was owed to them. But here they were wasting seventy-hour weeks in warehouses just to cover the cost of a week's worth of insulin with a month’s pay. Some people were born in debt, and they didn’t even realize it.
They were so blind, too pushed against each other by the church to believe that those who had just a crumble more than them, would try to take what was theirs. Instead of rallying together the people fought to prevent equity, because the idea alone made them fear that they would lose everything. Charity didn’t even exist anymore. There was no one to give to. The church and the Nile worked hand in hand. Orphanages became their properties, raising the children until working age, and giving them the option to go to warehouses or join the clergy.
A trap.
Sonny wanted out of here, wanted us to go to college in Oxford and let the church ruin this ass stain of a country until it rotted away completely and there was nothing left to salvage. Arlan Black was too old to make plans, and his descendants were gone, leaving a hole in the future.
It almost felt like a test.
Sadistic old bastard.
