She turned over her brother’s room.

  She fanned through each page of every book, tossed and shook loose every piece of clothing, opened and scoured through each container, not knowing exactly what it was she was looking for but expecting to come across some sort of anti-Rectification or state-disapproved contraband (praying to every deity she could name for ‘garden-variety’ verboten—but face it, Melody; why would anything ‘garden-variety’ warrant Societal Sanitation intervention?), and ended up with, for her day’s ransacking—setting aside the stirrings of incongruity that, in all fairness, even she herself wasn’t fully conscious of: like, sa-aay, didn’t your brother have a work laptop on his desk? a-and what happened to that headset he pointed out once?—nothing more societally illicit than a pack of stale cigarettes (which she kept for later) and (hidden within the deepest depths of his dresser, wire-snarled and dust-furred) a plastic, red-and-white oblong roughly the size of a shoebox, which she took out, blew clean, untangled, plugged in and turned on.

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