SS Inglefield

He couldn’t remember the first time he’d ever seen his mother’s necklace. He couldn’t remember if it was in the before or the after, but why did that matter? It was his favourite thing about his mother, however unfair that was. Her necklace was simple, a heart-shaped locket, with intricate swirling patterns traced finely into the metal. He could stare at it for hours, holding it gently between grubby fingers, afraid of his own filth contaminating the jewellery. His mother would always come back to get it, running long fingers through his ebony hair, sighing at his fascination. She didn’t quite understand.

“Come, Jay,” she said quietly, coaxing her son from his empty-headed enchantment. “It’s time to go.”

He had dreaded those words for weeks. Time to go. Go where?

Jay handed the necklace back to his mother but she smiled almost sadly and pushed it back to him. The unspoken message was clear. You keep it.

Slipping the chain around his head, Jay felt the weight of the locket truly for the first time. It weighed almost nothing in his hands, but the feel of it on his neck and against his chest was different. It was almost too heavy for him, the chain nearly digging into his skin, the locket thumping uncomfortably against his breastbone. As he followed his mother to the ship, he swore that the heart-shaped locket was beating. He grasped it in his hand and felt the pulsing beneath his fingers, looking down at it to see the movement, but there was none. He could feel it but he could not see it. Looking back up to his mother, he saw she had the strangest expression on her face; half hope and half devastation.

The ship was small, only big enough for a handful of people. There was a crowd though, all of those people waiting for their turn to be selected for the trip. The trip to where? Some said it was a golden land, streets lined with poplar and apple trees, a blue sky full of puffy white clouds. Others said it was a factory filled with the brightest minds from across the generations. All of them trying to figure out what could be done to fix the world they had made. Jay hoped it was both. A place he and his mother could breathe proper air and live in a place where they could help, instead of the squalor and toxic wind of home. He hoped that he and his mother could go to this new place and live without fear. Without fear of the air around them and the ground beneath them. Without fear of the rain burning through and melting skin on the rare occasions it came. Without that ever-present fear of running out of drinkable water. A human being can only last three days without some kind of water. Even if the sugary, mass-produced, vile sludge they drank could be counted as water, Jay wished for real water. He was never parched, but he was always thirsty.

Few, but a loud few, said it was just death on the other side of the journey. They shipped out those who couldn’t be any help to society and killed them somewhere out at sea. Or fed them into a machine in another land and had them ground down into compost. While his mother told him to ignore those old men, Jay couldn’t help but fear they were right. He hoped they weren’t, but honestly, what does hope do in the face of death?

The locket beat against Jay’s chest as he joined the line of people entering the ship. He knew only one or two of them, recognizing what little he could see of their faces above their respirators. He might have been in school with one of the boys before the world collapsed, but he had been very young then. One of the last groups of children to even go to school, he took pride in the fact that he could read. Most of the adults in his life could, too, but many of the children couldn’t. The ability to read was becoming a rare commodity, or at least it would be when Jay was older. He didn’t think about the fact that he could write because in his mind they went hand in hand, reading and writing. Fewer people that he knew could read, and even fewer of them could write.

“Collin, Jay,” the bored man at the front of the line said, his voice only slightly muffled by his face mask. “Step up to the front of the line.”

Jay followed his instructions, feeling his mother’s hand slip out of his as he did. The man looked him up and down, looked at his screen, and back up to Jay.

“Remove your mask, please,” came to drawling voice.

Shoving down an involuntary shudder, Jay pulled the thick rubber mask from his face, the hot, stinging air tearing across his exposed cheeks. His lips began to feel dry almost instantly, and he could feel the moister being sucked from his nose and throat. With one more glance at his screen, the man nodded and gestured for Jay to replace his mask.

“Very good.” He pressed a thick finger into the screen and nodded once more. “Onto the ship.

“What about my mother?” Jay asked.

“Name?”

“Collins, Jemimah.”

“Not on the list. On the ship now.”

Jay turn around to find his mother in the crowd, but she had vanished. She must have known she wasn’t on the list.

“On the ship now, sir,” the man repeated, impatience growing in his voice.

With a numb nod, Jay made his way up the ramp and onto the ship. Once up there he was asked his name and directed to a cabin a short way down the ship. It only had a single bed and a small table but it was by far the cleanest room Jay had been in since the before times. There was a sign on the wall proclaiming the safety of the air in the ship, explaining that he could remove his mask and feel free to breathe the fresh air, courtesy of Nusk Air Company. The room certainly did feel fresher than the outside had, a cool tingle spreading up his arms and legs, even beneath the thick woolen clothes he wore despite the boiling heat. Shaking slightly, Jay raised a hand and removed his mask completely, letting the air wash over his sweaty face.

He could breathe. He could breathe better than he could at home. They were some of the lucky ones, him and his mother, because they had access to a Nusk Air Processor. It was a prototype so it wasn’t as good as the air processors the rich had, but it was better than nothing. Here, though, Jay could bring in whole lungfuls of air until the stretch of it hurt his chest without coughing. He laid down on the bed, looking up at the pale blue ceiling, and wondered if that was the colour the sky was supposed to be. Instead of the sickly grey orange that was always there, sometimes laced with the mottled greeny-yellow of an old bruise.

There was a crackling noise coming from a speaker in the corner of the ceiling. Looking at it, Jay found he was reminded of a faded memory. The announcer at school, the electric stuttering before the daily reminders. A voice came through the box, and a sense of dread washed over Jay instantly.

“Hello! Welcome to the SS Inglefield, your carrier to the next plane of existence. We hope your journey is pleasant and that you’ll recommend us to your superiors in your next life. For the duration of your journey, please stay securely in your pods as any deviance will end in immediate incineration. Your new life will begin as soon as we dock at Grenhil Island, so please place any and all identifying documentation on the table in your pods before leaving the ship. Congratulations on your selection!”

The heart-locket beat furiously against Jay’s chest and something inside him warned him not to remove it, or he may lose himself completely.