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“Twelve creds, that.”
Jamie smeared her thumb over the dust coating the glass. It was about three inches square.
“Ay.”
The white bloom was long dead, even more delicate than when it was alive, pressed safely between two panes of glass in a crude wooden frame.
Crumpled, fragile, beautiful.
“Ay!” the man barked, irritated.
Jamie didn’t look up, just fished out the credits.
“See you next month, comrade,” the man said, beaming over the credits in his hand.
“This’s the last time. Big Sister’s watching,” Jamie grumbled. The man grunted knowingly.
Jamie ducked out of the tiny shop, eyes on the object in her hand. She’d never seen anything like it. It looked delicate but it had survived years. Maybe it was stronger than it seemed.
Her eyes floated over it one last time before hiding it down the front of her coveralls, zipping them up and straightening the fabric.
To her right, a boot scraped the cobblestones and Jamie’s eyes snapped up.
The alley was empty. Except for the girl.
Jamie didn’t know her name, just that she worked in the Infraction Logging Department, indicated by the red armband. Her long blonde hair was always braided, broad mouth pulled into a flat, unapproving grimace. Sometimes Jamie had felt those blue eyes scraping the surroundings, looking for misconduct to scratch into her red book of infractions.
Once it was logged and reported, there was no escaping punishment.
Jamie had disliked her from the first moment of seeing her. Maybe she had known that one day the girl would catch her.
And there she was, thirty feet away, watching Jamie leaving a black market shop holding contraband.
The girl clenched her jaw in determination and pulled a red notebook from her pocket. Fear flooded Jamie’s guts and she strode towards her. “What are you writing?”
The girl didn’t look up, just wrote in the notebook.
Jamie sped up, reaching into her coveralls and feeling the thick frame. Enough to smash the girl’s head in?
“You loggin’ it?,” Jamie spat, three steps away, shaking with adrenaline.
The girl ripped a page out of the book, crumpled it, and dropped the paper on the ground before meeting Jamie’s gaze.
Jamie froze, thunderstruck to see tears welling up in the girl’s eyes.
The girl bit her lip and practically stomped away. Shock kept Jamie from doing anything but watch her go up the alley and around the corner, never looking back.
A stale breeze picked up, breaking Jamie out of her confused stupor. She scrambled for the wadded-up paper. Hands trembling, she pulled it open.
It was like Jamie forgot how to read.
It was only three words but they didn’t make sense.
She wanted to look up, to see if the girl had come back, to run after her, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away.
I LOVE YOU
Jamie carefully folded the paper into a square and tucked it into the chest pocket of her coveralls.
Crumpled, fragile, beautiful.