It was approaching noon when Sina and Josef were both in the shared living room of the apartment, which felt empty without their mother even though they never saw her mother there at noon, as she was usually at work by that time of the day. Sina had hid the money and the sheaf of papers until she had judged that both her and her brother were awake enough to deal with the discussion that she knew was imminent. When she explained the situation, Josef, sitting cross-legged on the old moldy couch in their living room, listened patiently through her muddled, nervous explanation of the order of events. When Sina took out the money that the man gave her, he didn’t emote, he just looked, acknowledged, and waited for Sina to explain.
“So that’s what happened last night.” Sina finished, with the papers and money on the table. She looked at Josef, who was now staring at the money and the documents, still calm and collected. Sina could see his eyes darting between the things on the table, and knew that he wasn’t only looking at and examining the things on the table, but that he was also thinking deeply, running the simulations in his mind, and coming up with all possible outcomes. When he really wanted to, he could be extremely calculating. Almost to an infuriating degree.
“So, do you want to take the job?” He asked simply.
“I don’t know, that’s why I asked you.”
“Well, if it’s my opinion you want,” he looked at her, and Sina nodded, indicating that it was exactly what she was looking for, “I don’t think we should do a single thing lined up for us in these documents.” Sina’s stomach dropped.
“But what about the money?” Sina asked.
“The ‘down payment’ or the paychecks for the jobs?”
“The future paychecks. If this is what the down payment was, imagine what they could offer us in the future!”
“Quite honestly, I think we could live off what he just dropped on our kitchen counter for damn-near the rest of our lives.”
“If we were particularly frugal, we could survive. Not live.”
“Same thing.”
“It’s not! Imagine if we got to move out of this shitty apartment that’s cramped even for one person, much less three, start actually paying for our food, being able to buy luxuries like books and broadcast screens and radios! If we have a sustainable cash flow like that, mom can retire, and she can live a long peaceful life from here on.”
“And what about mom? She’s still missing. Are we just going to forget about her? Just hope that the scent of money is going to lure her back like she’s a hungry dog?”
“You make it sound like she just abandoned us, and I’m not saying anything close to that. I don’t want to think for a second that Mom just left us. She loved us, she was just tired. I think she may have gotten hurt or had a fit of some sort or something while working the night that thing hit us, and I just want to make sure that she can have something like that happen to her that might have impacted her health permanently and-”
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“Sina, Sina,” Josef cut her off as she started to get more frantic. He was standing up from the old, dusty, moldy couch now. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything.” His voice no longer had the calm inquisitiveness that came with his interrogations, but now was soothing and apologetic. “I just want us to think of everything. Let’s take this one step at a time.”
Sina, looking up at Josef, started to take deep breaths as she forced herself to calm down. She was about to start crying, and she knew that Josef could tell, and cut her off just as she was about to. “Ok, sorry. Let’s–let’s…” She paused and took a look at the things that were on the table. “Let’s put the jobs aside for now. We can use the money to go look for Mom, and then we can discuss the jobs after that.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” Josef said.“Again I’m sorry for saying that,” he said, pulling Sina into a hug. Her head nestled right under his chin. “I’m just as stressed and scared as you are, okay?”
“You know, I wish that boys would wear their emotions on their sleeve more often,” Sina said.
“I do too. Only the Seven knows how much I wish we could.” He paused. “Lets go look for Mom, alright?
They released each other from a hug, and Sina put the things that the person, who she had started calling “the messenger” in her head, had given her away. Before she did, she gave the papers another quick look. Each time she picked up that thin stack of papers, she flipped to a random page and read an entry on it. Each time she did she found something new. Another person of relative political unimportance, all seemingly unrelated to each other, needing to have a major asset stolen or toppled, or an unsavory rumor about them planted, or, in some cases, just straight up killed. There weren’t very many of those, but they were there, and Sina was pretty sure she had found most of them. She put the papers in a random drawer, took a few bills out of the stacks that the messenger had given them, and put the rest in the family lock box that had most of the money they had on hand. It barely could close after Sina put the new money in there.
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Verdigris was quiet in a way that was unlike anything Sina and Josef had seen. It was about an hour or two past noon, and Sina and Josef saw barely anybody roaming the streets of the middle-city. Even in the most notoriously busy and crowded streets, barely anybody walked. As far as Sina and Josef knew, it had never been this quiet on these streets at this hour.
The sun beat down on them relentlessly. The weather had decided it was tired of gray clouds and rain, and instead decided that it wanted heat, and lots of it. The quiet streets and the heat of the sun echoing between the concrete walls and heating the asphalt streets below made Verdigris a miserable place to be. On a regular day, it would have been bearable, as the moving bodies on the street absorbed the heat, moved it elsewhere, and had things like water and umbrellas to help shade the ground from the sun, keeping it, and by extension the rest of them, cooler as a result. But there was none of that now. The street was sprawled out wide for the sun, and it was drinking the heat like a thirsty dog. Nobody had a storefront with a mister for Josef and Sina to relax under like they so often did.
Sina could only imagine that, if they were struggling as much as they were, going from job site to job site looking for their mother, how awful it would be to be a soldier out on the southern plains, clad in armor, carrying packs of ammo and artillery, or in the case of the most unlucky, hauled up in a large tank that moved like a spider, made entirely out of metal, windows of bullet and blast-proof glass that allowed the sun beat onto them, the metal heating to the sun as well, all without any sort of cooling system. She felt bad for all they had to do. For the fighting, the running, the stress, all under the sun that decided it wanted to be antagonistic to the people of Viridia today.
Sina took a swig of water. They just finished checking their third job site that their mom was known to work at. She had not been at any of them for a few days.