Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Authors: Michelle Min Sterling
- Language: English
- Genre: Dystopian Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 12 MB
- Price: Free
ROSE
The Blooms receive their new names on the shortest day of the year. Six women
in total. All strangers. They stand in an empty parking lot and wait to be
checked in. Snow has scrubbed the landscape clean, capped the roof of the rundown mall that is one of the few buildings still standing on this frozen stretch of
highway.
The Bloom last in line pauses to appreciate the freeze. It’s colder in the North
than she expected, and the snow is more delicate. She takes o a glove and
watches a ake vanish in the palm of her hand. She’s never seen snow before, and
the snowake feels refreshing on her skin, like a cool cloth pressed to a feverish
forehead.
When she reaches the entrance to the mall, her new Madam introduces
herself as Judith. She is nothing like the Bloom’s previous Madam, who drifted
around in a linen caftan and calfskin sandals. Judith wears a fur-lined parka,
black snow pants, and a pair of steel-toe boots, as if she was hired to demolish the
dilapidated mall they’re standing in front of.
Judith reads o a clipboard. “Your name will be Rose.”
“Rose,” she repeats. A cloying, sentimental name. Like a grandmother who
keeps apple pies in the deep-freeze. She had expected one of the pseudonyms
shared among the “Asian Girls” in the Loop where she used to work: Jade, Mei,
Lotus. It never mattered that the names were cliché, or that she is as white as she
is Korean. Back in the Floating City, ethnicity was a ready-made brand.
Judith lowers her voice. “I wanted to let you girls choose your names for
yourself. But Meyer likes things his way.”
“Is Meyer my client?” Rose asks, careful to sound casual.
“He doesn’t want us to use that word here, Rose. Think of him as your
collaborator.” Judith opens the front door of the mall and Rose follows inside.
“Welcome to the Millennium Mall.”
The Blooms’ quarters are at the back of the mall in a department store that
has long since been pillaged. Metal clothing racks are scattered in jumbled piles,
and the beauty counters’ mirrors are mottled. Rose can smell the faintest trace of
articial gardenia as she rolls her suitcase past a perfume display, where an ad of a
woman’s glowing face pressed against the bristly cheek of a male model still
remains. Her mother never wore perfume and hadn’t allowed Rose to either.
She wanted them to smell as they actually did, like the saltwater breeze of the
peninsula.
“When did the mall close?” Rose asks.
“Fifteen years ago,” Judith says. “It was the rst place to shutter when the rigs
stopped drilling.”
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