the speed at which vacuum collapses
After lunch, Pound goes through her daily ritual of shedding her dust-caked blue-collar shell. There's no time for a shower, but she makes do with the water she's allotted and a few scraps of cloth she keeps hidden in the bathroom supply cupboard. She replaces her wool work trousers and baby blue tee with a pair of tailored black bombachas that belonged to her father, and one of her favourite pieces, a delicate off-white short-sleeved crepe shirt, repurposed from a chemise she found by the clothes recycling unit.
She'd always made a point of walking past the unit before it starts running, early Tuesday mornings. There's a strange abundance there if you know when to look. Fabric, half-worn garments, sometimes something perfectly wearable, discarded by someone who couldn't be bothered to push it fully through the hatch. This is how she sources most of her finer materials, the ones that would otherwise be shredded down into something plainer. UnaOne, especially, sends clothes to recycling long before they've earned it. Lower blocks wear a garment until it stops being a garment at all. One block's trash is Pound's couture.
She checks her pocket watch - fifteen minutes before her shift. Enough time for hair and makeup, if she runs. The Barber Shop is one level up from the bathrooms, and empty at this hour. She sits, pulls out her toiletry bag, and starts the slow work of unpinning her hair, curl by curl. Rouge on her cheeks and lips. Eyeliner, mascara, a pass of soap, on her eyebrows. For eyeshadow, she runs a lighter along the underside of her mirror until it blackens, then presses a finger to the soot. Her final touch is a spritz of TerraThree perfume on her scarred neckerchief, tied neatly with a square knot around her neck.
Her shift is the same as it's been for days now: mechanical, silent, Unamuno angling her whole body away from Pound's every time they're behind the bar. Pound's stopped expecting anything else, even more so after yesterday's mess in the diner.
Near the end of the rush, an EsaSix and CuadroFour couple sitting at one of the farthest tables leans in close over their drinks. Covertly, they allow their hands to touch. They can't be a couple, not legally. These stolen moments in the darkest corners of the Speakeasy are probably the only ones where they can express what they feel to each other. Pound watches them while she wipes down the counter.
"Heartbreaking, isn't it?" she says, mostly to fill the silence, not really expecting an answer.
Unamuno follows her gaze. For a second, she softens her face. "Yeah..." She doesn't look at Pound. "At least it's real."
Pound is not cut by any edge in her words. They drip with sorrow. It sounds like something Unamuno wishes she didn't care enough to say out loud. Pound stands there for a moment, the cloth still in her hand, echoing the sentence in her head like it might mean something different if she thinks about it enough. But it means exactly what it sounded like: Unamuno, despite everything, still cared about her.
By the time the shift ends, Pound's already decided she isn't waiting to get another dose of Harmonix before reaching out to Unamuno.
"Hey, can I speak to you?"
"I don't know what else you have to say to me." Unamuno hurries to exit the Speakeasy.
Pound catches Unamuno just outside the Synergy. "Uni, please, can you listen to me? So much has happened since yesterday. I need to talk to you."
"Fine. What do you want?" Unamuno refuses to look Pound in her eye, shrinking into her own crossed arms, white beret shimmering under the single buzzing lamp. Pound takes a deep breath.
"Listen, I stand by what I said-"
Rolling her eyes, Unamuno starts walking. "Ha! I should have known!" Her dry laughter catches the attention of people walking past. Hurrying after her, Pound whispers to avoid the curious looks of Barber Shop patrons.
"I stand by what I said but not how I said it. I used something you said in confidence as a weapon aimed at other people. But I can see it only ended up hurting you. And I'm so, so sorry."
At this, Unamuno finally halts. They move to a corner where the echo of the hallways is less intrusive.
"It's not that you shared something I told you in confidence, Pound. I didn't care about that. I just thought we had something different. I thought I had finally found someone who understood, who saw me beyond my block, my colour, my family. I thought you saw me."
Her stoic expression, the same one she held that night at the talk show, can't hide the tears invading her eyes. But she doesn't look away. She hardly blinks. She stares at Pound in silence. Pound breaks through it.
"I don't know if we can ever truly understand each other. We come from diametrically opposed blocks. But I see you. I fear you may have seen me too. And I never should've hurt you, I'd do anything to take it back."
They stay like that a moment, both still catching up to what's just been said. The vacuum created by the talk show finally collapses, sucking everything into the silence between them until that silence is full again. The shock wave brings both of them closer and soon they are hugging, make up running on each other's shoulders.
"I felt I had finally found a best friend, and that night you made me think you hated me."
"I never hated you, Uni. You are my best friend. That's the thing you never let me say properly." She hesitates, then decides she's already said the hard part, so she may as well say the rest. Releasing herself from the hug, she continues. "I actually admire you, envy you even. The way you all carry yourselves. You walk these tunnels like you belong here, not like you're tenants who have to earn the right to stay. Like... you own the world. It gives you a confidence, a grace, that I or anyone from the lower blocks can never have."
"That's why it hurt so much, what you said. Not because it was cruel. Because it was true." Unamuno wraps her arms around herself, the same way she did earlier. "I've spent years trying to be useful to causes that were never mine to fix. And some nights I lie there wondering if any of it means anything, or if I'm just another UnaOne doing charity to feel less guilty about the tunnels I get to walk through like they're mine." She looks up, finally. "I don't know how to actually help you. I only know how to feel bad about not knowing."
"You've done far more for the cause than I have, Uni. Trust me. I sit here looking at this inequality as if I can do anything about it. If I dress right, speak right, look right maybe I can make a difference, but I never actually do anything. At least your people act, whether right or wrong. Ughi, for one, the way he walks into a room like the room already agreed with him before he said a word. He's using his good looks, his charm and his eloquence in the Synergy, to do something he believes in."
"Ughi?" Pound sees a teasing sparkle return to Uni's eyes, a genuine smirk across her face, and her heart feels right for the first time since the talk show. "You have a crush on Ughi!"
"What? I didn't say that."
"You sly minx!" Unamuno tickles Pound where she knows Pound will feel.
Pound doesn't dignify it with an answer, awkwardly laughing instead, which is its own kind of answer. Unamuno's smile fades into something more careful.
"Speaking of things we're not saying." She picks at the beading on her scarf. "Penhaligon told me about Pontecorvo. All of it. The neckerchief, the way he's always been on you. He made it sound..." She stops, chooses the word carefully. "Bad. Very. Like something you shouldn't agree to."
"I can see why Penny would think that. It's not the case. Promise."
"I think by now I can say that I know you?" Unamuno holds her gaze, and there's no cruelty in it, only worry. "You're not doing this for him, or for the family. You're doing it to prove something to yourself. That you're still PentaFive enough to matter to them, that you actually care about the cause. That you can make a difference, even dressed like this." She gestures, not unkindly, at all of it: the crepe shirt, the red lipstick, the curled hair. "Am I wrong?"
Pound doesn't answer right away. It doesn't surprise her that Unamuno can pierce through her shell and see what's inside. They both perform, in their own way.
"You're not. But I don't even know if I'll do it," Pound admits, finally. "Right now it's not costing me anything, really. If Poliakoff and Poincaré's license goes through, now with Planck and Pasternak as a backup, then the family's safe either way. I walk away and this never has to mean anything. I'm plan C. That's all it is. And I get Pontecorvo off my back as a bonus, whether we do it or not." She isn't sure, saying it out loud, whether she believes it more or less than she did five minutes ago.
"Well." Unamuno's cheeky grin returns to her face. "If you really want a backup plan, you could just date Ughi instead."
"Unamuno."
"I'm serious! There's a Synergy vote today, my friends in the Chamber say it might actually pass, something about union eligibility across parties. You could beat Pontecorvo to the punch." She's fully grinning now, delighted with herself.
"That's absurd."
"No it isn't, and it wouldn't be the first time you sip from a different cup, anyway! Remember that libertine CuadroFour lover of yours, the one that had a thing for doing it in the dark? Maybe Ughi has an even weirder thing!"
"Uni!" Pound exaggerates her annoyance, remembering how good it felt to have a friend to confide in. "I don't want to date Ughi or do any weird things with him!"
"You didn't say that fast enough."
"I said it exactly fast enough." But Pound is smiling too, despite herself.