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Then Ruby rides the elevator with Temple up to the sixteenth floor, where Temple’s room is, a little office with a mattress on the floor and a table with a lamp and an artificial plant

The bathrooetically We have to share

Thanks, Temple says For the soda and the nail polish and the food and everything

You’re very welcolad you’re here with us We’ll take care of you, Sarah Mary

Te here, in this place, with these people, and she is surprised to find the idea is not entirely objectionable to her She wonders if this , Ruby says You can go pretty hborhood four That’s where o out patrolling--the ones who brought you in today They’re very nice entleet a little rough I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about us, that’s all We’re a nice community

Then Ruby leaves, and Temple finds herself alone She locates the bathroole next to it, the one e of the sink and strips down to nothing and has a good ith the cloth and towel Ruby has given her Then she puts her head in the sink, letting her hair soak in the hot soapy water for a long tiood and hard in thetwo bright blue eyes She could be pretty She tries to look irls do, pouting out her lips and lowering her chin and raising her eyebrows Her little breasts aren’t laazines with bodies like hers, so she supposes it’s all right

She dresses again with the new underpants Ruby got for her They are cotton with roses all over theot her a brassiere, but she doesn’t put that on

Back in her rooers and toes cotton candy pink--but she is sloppy and doesn’t have ets all over her skin Then she stretches herself out to let her nails dry and looks through theat the darkening sky The lights of the city come on as she watches Some of them are on automatic timers, she supposes But a few are real people like her

She gets right up to theand sees her breath cloud the glass, and she says good night to the sunlit world and feels the intense gravity of sleep press down on her, so she lays down on the ether and whispers a prayer and listens to the low huoes wide and dreams take her into the vastpolitely at the greetings she receives from the residents They are happy to see a new face, they are happy to have their ranks swelled by one--another brick in the bulwark against the tide crashing against them from the outside Some of them tell her stories of where they ca yarns about the world before She has heard many versions of this story, butbicycles down tree-lined streets in the afternoon Picnics in parks Going to grocery stores andtrips without a care in the world except mosquito bites

These stories have always sounded suspect to Teia In her own experience she’s learned that happiness and sadness find their own level noyou, mosquitoes or meatskins

She offers to help in the kitchen, where a bunch of wo what seems to her an elaborate s--they have chicken coops and gardens on the roofs--but when they see how long it takes for her to pick out all the shells froet acquainted She can help in the kitchen another tioes to the conference room that they’ve set up as a theater, and she sits in the dark with everyone else and watches an oldscreen It’s a movie about spaceships and planets that look like deserts, and she watches, and a girl next to her hands her a bowl of popcorn and she takes soets bored and antsy She looks out theon the third floor and watches the patrol leave the building and wind their way down the street like a tactical serpent She likes the way they move, those ht and strolls the silent corridors of the buildings feeling her insomnia like a disease

When the silence beco four, where she finds the athered in a large space that takes up two floors and aravel voices The lobby of some company headquarters, she supposes, some monolithic co

At first the ur of their own ehter dies down quickly as they, one by one, notice her Then she says:

Go on I can’t sleep is all I ain’t here to guoes on, tentatively at first, then building in voluet her presence altogether She likes the sarettes and the clink of their liquor bottles and the crude language that tumbles like quarry stones froht patrols, and she watches the pistols and AR-15 rifles and 20 gauges and coo to a table set up like a bar where a man with an apron pours them drinks

Louis, the patrol leader, finds her

How do you like the game? he asks