Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Gabrielle Korn
- Language: English
- Genre: Dystopian Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 3 MB
- Price: Free
PRONE TO ROOT ROT
2050–2055
A group of tired, rumpled young people spilled out of the lab’s double
doors and onto the glittering, gum-encrusted sidewalk. They rubbed their
eyes in the hazy afternoon light, which was thickly speckled with floating
white bits of who-knows-what, and though the city smelled of dirt and rot,
the light was aesthetically pleasing, like a photo filter that turns everything
grainy and sepia toned, like a memory. It was Friday, and the students
hummed with unforetold promises of the weekend ahead. Among them was
Ava, the teacher’s assistant for the plant biology class the kids had just fled.
Students clustered into small packs around her, talking loudly about their
evening plans. She wasn’t much older than most of them.
When Ava rounded the corner, breaking off from the group of students,
she reached into her nose and pulled out the gold, horseshoe-shaped septum
piercing that had been hiding upside-down in her nostrils since the morning.
Her long, curly brown hair was parted down the middle, which she always
felt made her look more approachable during the workday. She briefly
stopped walking to adjust her part to the side, revealing an undercut shaved
around her left ear. She took her glasses off and stashed them in her
backpack, blinking as her eyes adjusted. Her students didn’t need to know
that this was what she normally looked like when she wasn’t working. It
was easier if they read her as a bookish academic.
Her stuffed backpack was pulling her shoulders down. It was hot out;
well, it was always hot now in Manhattan, but it was an extra-oppressive
kind of heat that afternoon, and Ava felt like she was moving in slow
motion. Sirens wailed in the distance.
The lanyard with her employee ID was still around her neck, and the
plastic was sticking to her skin. Her hair was electrified by the humidity,
frizzing around her head in gravity-defying ways. She felt a pimple brewing
painfully on her cheek, trapped by the grease on her face. Her armpit sweat
was getting the best of her deodorant. There was nothing pleasant about
being in Manhattan. She couldn’t wait to get home to Orchid.
She’d have to rush to get to the station before the next aerial tramway
departed. Always creaking and moaning its way across the water, it was the
only good way to get back and forth from her home in what was once
Brooklyn (residents now called it Brook, an abbreviated name that suited
the newly tiny, crescent moon–shaped land) to Manhattan; there were no
bridges left, and the subways no longer functioned. There was a ferry, but
the water was so choppy it made Ava sick, a feeling that always reminded
her of being a kid trapped in endless silent car rides with her parents,
nauseous and alone.
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