Mara kept her old badge in a kitchen drawer with dead batteries and spare keys. It had stopped opening the factory doors two years ago. The factory still stood at the edge of town, its windows bright through the night, turning raw material into furniture, medicine, and food packaging with almost no one inside.
Her housing credit arrived on the first of every month. The pantry downstairs never ran out. No child on her block went hungry. These facts were true, and so was the dull ache that came when she passed the 7:20 bus and saw nobody waiting for it.
Ivo asked her to look at a routing diagram. His group had found a way to move the carriers. Not steal them, he said. Just make the city notice that people were still here. Mara recognized the old maintenance port immediately. She also recognized the part he had missed: a second line, thinner than the first, leading to a set of contingency routes.
She could have told him. Instead she asked for one night to think. At home, her apartment suggested a walk. She took one without her wristband, carrying the old badge in her coat pocket as if it might still tell her where to go.