Chapter 2 Shiloh
SHILOH
Ihad just closed my locker door in the women’s changeroom of the shuttle engine factory when someone tapped my shoulder. I turned with my whole body to see who was behind me. It still hurt to move my head and neck too much.
“Hey, Shiloh,” Stasia said.
Like me, she was wearing her factory uniform.
The fabric was stiff and stained, the shade of it somewhere between a murky blue and dusty grey.
I still remembered my first shift here, when I’d been handed my uniform.
It was the first time in my life I’d found a colour so depressingly ugly that I hadn’t bothered trying to figure out how to recreate it with paints inside my head.
“Rod’s looking for you.”
Uh oh.
Rodney was our zone’s foreman. I couldn’t imagine he wanted to see me for anything good. I often found him staring at me during shifts, as if waiting for me to slip up somehow. But he’d never called me in for a special meeting before.
“You alright?” Stasia’s eyes were a clear, kind hazel. Burnt umber at the edges of the iris, melting into something warmer at the centre – raw sienna – layered with flecks of cadmium green around the pupils, as distinct and bright as shards of metal. “You were away for three days.”
“I was unwell.”
Unwell. That was one way of describing the hellish migraine that had put me through the ringer for the past 72 hours.
But I didn’t have the energy to go into detail about it.
I was exhausted. My nerves felt like they’d been dragged across a cheese grater for three days straight, and as a result my entire body was tender and raw.
Not a good sign considering my twelve-hour shift hadn’t even started yet. Technically thirteen hours, today. Both Stasia and I had shown up early for some parts maintenance overtime. The changeroom was mostly empty at this hour, the regular line-start folks not having arrived yet.
“Want me to walk with you?”
“No, no. You go clock in and get started. Get those hours, girl,” I told her with a weak smile. I didn’t want her to waste any of her precious paid overtime on me. “I’ll see you on the floor.”
She hesitated for a few seconds, pursing her lips, but then she turned and left when the need for every minute of paid overtime won out.
And so it should have. Nobody showing up before regular line-start did it out of the goodness of their heart.
We were all trying to eke out an existence on dreary Terratribe I, humanity’s oldest industrial colony planet. We all needed the credits.
I definitely needed the credits. It had been nearly five years since Daddy had died; four years since I’d finally been forced to take this job or risk losing the lease on our apartment.
By the time I’d started at the shuttle engine factory, I’d burned through all the savings Daddy had scraped together and put aside for my art training on Elora Station.
I never made it to the glittering commerce station. Obviously.
He died two weeks before I was due to leave.
And after that, everything had just sort of begun to unravel all around me.
It happened slowly at first – with rent payments and bills piling up like falling snow – and then more quickly, until I was selling my precious, unopened sets of paint just to eat.
The paints Daddy had worked so hard to buy for me.
This is my Shiloh, he would say to anyone who would listen. She’s going to be a famous artist.
It seemed unfairly cruel, the way that time had snatched the warm quality of his voice from me. But my visual memory had always been strong, and I could still see the pride that shaped his smile as easily as if he were standing right in front of me and beaming.
If he could only see me now.
He’d always believed that my painting would get me out of New Toronto. Off of Terratribe I entirely. That if he fostered my talents and supported me, I’d be granted a different sort of life than the one he’d led.
For a time, I had believed that, too.
But then he had died. And ever since then, my life had devolved into what felt like a series of slaps to the face, each one more stinging than the last.
And now Rod wanted to talk to me. After I’d missed three days of work in a row.
Better get this over with quickly.
The faster I finished talking to Rod, the faster I could clock in and start getting paid.
I considered clocking in before going to see Rod, but decided not to push it.
I doubted he’d approve that. He likely wouldn’t be feeling generous after I’d missed more than half this week already.
Sighing and making sure my curly hair was still safely secured in its tight bun (essential for safety around the machinery, but already hurting my scalp and threatening a migraine aftershock) I left the changeroom, slipping on my clear safety glasses. Then, I headed down the metal stairs.
Wincing, I pulled ear plugs from my pocket as the sounds of the floor battered me.
Even before official line-start, the air was loud with the bang of metal on metal and the scream of saws and engines.
My hands trembled slightly as I handled the ear plugs.
I got the right one secured, but dropped the other.
The squishy bit of bright pink foam went skittering between my boots like an insect with a mind of its own, promptly disappearing through a gap in the steps, settling somewhere on the filthy floor below.
“Shit!” I slapped my left hand over my ear and gritted my teeth.
I’d have to wait to get another pair from Rod.
There was no point trying to find that little thing below the stairs.
Even if I did find it, it would be so foul from the floor it would likely be too much of a biohazard to touch my bare skin, let alone put in my ear, right next to my freaking brain.
“Shit,” I said again, more softly, hustling down the stairs. That was another “if Daddy could only see me now” moment. I’d never really used swear words when he was alive. I’d only sworn in front of him once, when I was sixteen years old.
“I never wanna hear language like that coming out of your mouth,” he’d said. “You’re mad? You’re angry? You wanna swear about something? You put it in your paint.”
I’d done that ever since.
Until now. It was as if the further and further I got from the time my father was alive, the more the little threads that made me me kept snapping.
I wondered how many were even left.
With my head down and my elbow up to position my hand over my ear, I actually didn’t notice Rod approaching the stairs. When I reached the bottom, I nearly crashed right into him.
“Sorry!” I gasped, reeling backwards, one of my feet going back up to the last stair I’d just stepped down off of.
Instead of replying, he held up a tiny plastic package.
New earplugs.
Absurdly, I swallowed back what felt like oncoming tears.
For the first time in too long, I felt something close to optimism.
Maybe I’d been too harsh earlier, when I’d imagined what he’d want to talk to me about.
Maybe he was more thoughtful than I’d given him credit for.
I’d never actually had much of a conversation with him before now.
Maybe I was wrong.
“Thank you!” I shouted over the sound of the floor’s banging and grinding.
I opened the package – very carefully – and put the left earplug in.
It wasn’t perfect, but it reduced the background noise to a manageable hum.
And you still needed to be able to hear people’s voices.
Missing somebody’s shout of “Duck!” or “Fire!” could have lethal consequences.
“Come on,” Rod said, turning and leading me to our zone.
He had a small office there, a tiny room with glass windows that could look out onto our part of the line.
But it was blissfully quiet in there once he shut the door behind us.
I took out my earplugs, taking care that I didn’t stow them in the pocket that had a hole in it.
I’d forgotten to fix that after my last shift on Monday.
I’d felt the migraine coming on and had been desperate to get home, hoping to stave it off so I’d be able to make it back into work the next day.
That obviously hadn’t happened.
“So. Shiloh,” Rod said, leaning back against his rickety desk and crossing his arms over his chest. “Nice of you to join us this fine Friday.”
“Sorry,” I said with a grimace. “I had a migraine, and-”
“Another one, eh? You’ve had a few of those since you started in my zone,” he interrupted. He cocked his head and observed me.
I remained still and observed him right back.
Rod had a distinctly indistinct sort of look about him.
If I saw him in the grey streets of New Toronto, I doubted I’d look twice or even recognize him without his uniform and the context of the factory’s backdrop behind him.
He was a white guy with an average build, average height, and a doughy sort of face that had no real defining characteristics, much of his jaw hidden behind a beard.
“How long has it been since you got transferred to my zone?” he asked.
“Six months,” I said, feeling suddenly nervous.
The earplugs from earlier were feeling less and less like a sign this was going to go well.
His eyes had a narrowed, calculating look to them that made me wary.
Was he adding up how many days I’d missed?
“But I’ve worked here a lot longer than that,” I added hurriedly, hoping that might help my case. “About four years.”
“I hear that you’re an artist.”
“Uh…”
Where the heck had that come from? I cast about for something to say, totally thrown by the sudden shift in the conversation.
“I like to paint,” I said, feebly, after an awkward pause.
The last person who’d referred to me as an artist had been Daddy.
I’d never quite managed to use the same term for myself.
Somehow, I didn’t feel I was quite there yet, like I didn’t deserve the title.
I had no real training, no patron, no income from my work. No, not an artist yet.
Just a factory girl who liked to paint.
A silly factory girl.
“See, here’s the thing,” Rod said with a shake of his head. “How do I know you’re actually sick when you’re not here, and not painting? Or spending time with your patron?”
“My…What?!”
“You have one, don’t you? Or you’re looking for one?”
OK. There was no way he should have known that.
There were definitely a few people in our zone who knew about my painting, and he could have heard that from them.
But I hadn’t told anyone I’d been trying to secure a patron, something I’d been doing on and off since Daddy’s death.
It was too embarrassing. Because I hadn’t been successful yet, as evidenced by the fact that I was still working here.
The only way Rod could have known that would be if he were trying to find me online. My real name was attached to profiles on several different art forums and apps, places where people with credits to spare could connect with and support various creators.
“I…I don’t have a patron,” I admitted shakily.
“Hmm.” He rubbed his beard. The bristly sound against his fingers made my stomach turn. “Maybe you need one, then.”
“You mean…”
“Me.”
“You…” I was floundering. Maybe my brain still wasn’t completely online after the migraine. Or maybe this conversation had taken a completely bizarre turn I never could have prepared for. “You’re interested in the arts?”
His eyes moved in a slow line down my body, then back up.
“I’m certainly interested in the work of art right in front of me.”
“Pardon…me?”
“I’ll be your patron,” he said, his eyes once again doing that slow up-and-down motion.
“We can work out an arrangement. You make some art for me. And I’ll let slide all the days you’ve missed due to your migraines.
” He raised his hands, using his fingers to make quotation marks around the “migraines” part.
Oh.
Realization crystallized, cold and hard.
He wanted nudes. Or maybe even more.
Goosebumps exploded along my arms even while I began to sweat.
“Absolutely not,” I breathed, already backing towards the door. “This is…This is obscene. I’ll report you to staffing!”
My hand was on the doorknob at my back. I could run straight to the staffing office from here.
But he only laughed. “Report me to staffing? It’s your word against mine,” he said, giving a flippant shrug. “I’ve been here fifteen years to your four. And you’re the one who’s broken your contract.”
My heart dropped all the way down to my steel-toed boots.
“You’re past your maximum number of sick days.
That’s a fireable offence,” Rod went on blithely, as if none of this mattered at all, as if this weren’t my actual fucking life.
“Way I see it, staffing department’s going to know I had a chat with you about your attendance this morning.
They’ll think you panicked and made up some bullshit story about me to save your own ass. ”
Oh, God. He was right. Attendance was a big thing factory-wide.
I’d never seen Rod miss a day. On top of that, he was my superior as zone foreman, and he probably knew everybody in the staffing department.
Meanwhile, I didn’t know anyone in that office who could vouch for me, or who might be sympathetic to me.
The only kind face I remembered working in staffing was a pretty, curvy blonde woman named Tasha, and she’d left her post quite some time ago.
I was completely powerless.
“No,” I said. My voice sounded shaky and weak. So I said it again. Louder. “No.”
His eyes went flinty.
“Then don’t bother clocking in,” he said. He shoved off of his desk and came towards me. My pulse rammed, but all he did was push on the door behind me and hold it open. “Off you go.”
“Off I…”
“Go. You’re fired.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the staircase I’d taken down from the changeroom. “Get your shit and get out.”
“But-”
“If you want to stay,” he said, “then you know what I expect.”
As if through a fog, I left his office and stumbled back to the changeroom.