Chapter 3: The Green Horizon

July 3, 2135
Departure Station—Geosynchronous Orbit above the Western Hemisphere of Earth

Nate leaned back against the wall in the spot he’d claimed sometime late on the first day, when the room had still felt too big for the number of bodies in it. The paint there was scuffed to a dull gray by years of forklift traffic, the carbon-composite surface cool even through the thin fabric of his shirt. He shifted his weight slightly, careful not to give up more space than necessary. Once you let a spot go, it was gone.

At his feet lay a blanket he had been issued two days before upon arrival. Cheap, thin, and the color of nothing in particular—some washed-out gray that might once have been black. It had clearly lived many lives before this one. The fabric was thick and soft in places, threadbare in others, with repairs that didn’t bother matching. It smelled faintly of disinfectant and older bodies. Nate had folded it twice into a narrow rectangle and kept it close, not because it offered much warmth, but because it marked territory.

He held his water bottle loosely in one hand. Clear plastic, scratched opaque from use, the lid replaced at least once. He’d just filled it again. One of three dispensers lined the far wall, identical stainless-steel units mounted at chest height, each with a short line in front of it at all times. The lines never disappeared—only shortened and lengthened as people drifted in and out, refilling, sipping, refilling again. Nobody wasted water, but nobody hoarded it either. There was always enough in this place. Granted, it used to be someone else’s urine, but wasn’t that the case in the pee-hue too?

The room itself had once been a storage bay. You could still see the outlines on the floor where shelving units had been bolted down, long rectangles of slightly darker flooring. The ceiling was high—too high—crisscrossed with exposed ductwork and lighting rails that threw a flat, even brightness across everything. No shadows. No corners. Nothing to hide behind.

Along one wall, near what had once been an enclosed office, a line had formed. That was the bathroom. One. A single door with a simple lock and a guard standing beside it, tablet in hand, calling people forward one at a time. No arguments. No shortcuts. When it was your turn, you went in, you did what you needed to do, and you came back out. Privacy existed there, briefly and officially, and nowhere else.

Nate had just returned from the roach pit.

That was what everyone called public cafeterias. It had been the colloquial term for at least two generations. Nobody remembered who’d said it first, but the name stuck because it just fit. Big rooms. Hard surfaces. Food extruded by machines and handed out under supervision. People scuttling in, eating quickly, scuttling back out. You didn’t linger. You weren’t supposed to.

The walk there was five hundred meters through the station’s interior corridors, past places the UE passengers waiting to board the interplanetary ship weren’t meant to stop. Past glass walls and wide waiting areas with real seating and soft lighting, where employed passengers sat in comfortable recliner chairs with their bags at their feet while waiters and waitresses brought them drinks and food. Calm and contained. They were under STD quarantine just like the vermin, but they were at least comfortable doing it. Nobody said anything as the UE group passed. Nobody had to. The separation did the talking.

Lunch had been exactly what lunch always was.

A sandwich. Some kind of meat processed down into a uniform salami-like substance, sliced thin and laid between two pieces of white bread that had gone stale long before. No cheese. No condiments. Nothing to soften it. Just bread and meat and take it or leave it. Somewhere, an AgriCorp accountant knew exactly how much each sandwich cost in materials and electricity and could calculate it out into a yearly projection. Alongside it, a small paper cup of fruit—diced, syrupy, indistinct—and a sealed bag of potato crisps. No drink. You brought your own water or you went without.

They’d eaten at long tables bolted to the floor, benches attached, bodies packed close but not touching more than necessary. Nobody talked much. You chewed, swallowed, finished. When the last person at a table stood, the table was cleared for the next group. Movement was managed in waves. You ate, then you walked back together, escorted and counted, while the next group was allowed in.

Four hours from now the dinner cycle would start and last three hours. The meal would contain slightly more calories. There would be some kind of mystery meat in gravy with some pasta noodles. A limp and disgusting salad with no dressing of any kind. A few tater tots or French fries. Pretty much the same thing they served in ghetto schools for lunch.

After that, nothing until breakfast.

Nate took a sip from his bottle and capped it again.

Around him, the room was fuller than it had been yesterday. People kept arriving—small clusters filtering in from other ships, other holding areas, funneled here because this was where the Unemployed on Earth class were held. There were slightly more men than women, but not by much. Everyone was young. Everyone looked tired in the same way. Every last one of them was vermin. At this point, there were maybe three hundred people. Maybe a few more?

They sat on the floor in loose groups, backs against walls or pillars, blankets spread out like claims staked on bad land. Some smoked, cigarettes appearing and disappearing between fingers, the smoke itself whisked away almost immediately by the ventilation system. The smell lingered anyway, clinging to clothes and hair and skin. Nate didn’t smoke. He never had. He was very much a minority among vermin, where cigarette rations were included with every public assistance delivery.

There were no beds. Just the blankets. No lockers. No doors. No privacy. The entire space was visible from anywhere else in the room, watched constantly by cameras and guards posted at the entrances. No dark corners. No closets. No places where anything could happen without being seen.

No fucking.

They didn’t even have to make it a rule. There was no way to do it even if someone wanted to. Which, as it turned out, almost no one did.

The powers-that-be had always assumed vermin were dangerous in groups. That given enough men in one place, there would be rape and violence and chaos. It was a popular belief among people who had never spent any real time around them. The truth was quieter and sadder. The lessons taught in school and on social media and by their peers—that sex was disgusting, that it was diseased, that it ruined lives—had done their job. Most young vermin were afraid of it. Afraid they wouldn’t know how. Afraid they’d get sick. Afraid they wouldn’t be able to make themselves do it when the time came, once married, once approved, once it mattered.

Nate pushed off the wall slightly and adjusted the blanket with his foot, keeping it close. Somewhere nearby, a guard’s voice called the next number for the bathroom. The line shifted forward by one.

Three days down. No one said how many more to go. No one had told them shit about anything.

He leaned back again and waited.

Raised voices cut through the room’s steady murmur, sharp enough to turn a few heads.

They were coming from the bathroom line.

Nate didn’t move at first. He didn’t even look right away. Arguments happened. Lines bred them. This place was nothing but lines—water, food, the bathroom—and where lines existed, friction followed. It was just noise until it wasn’t.

Someone swore loudly. A woman’s voice, hoarse and angry. Then another voice, male, cutting back just as hard.

“I’m tellin’ you, I gotta go now.”

“You always gotta go now, bitch.”

That got more attention.

Nate finally turned his head enough to see what was going on.

The woman stood a few places back from the door, one hand pressed flat against her stomach, the other gesturing sharply as she argued. She looked about twenty-five, maybe a little older—hard to tell with vermin. Her hair was pulled back tight, face shiny with sweat or stress or both. The guard by the bathroom hadn’t moved. He stood with his tablet held loosely against his chest, eyes tracking the exchange without expression.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t even be a question.

In the places Nate grew up, the cops didn’t show unless something profitable or embarrassing was happening. Pirated software. Under-the-table work. Anything that touched the tax stream. A murder in the slums got logged and forgotten unless it spilled into a better neighborhood. Because of that, vermin had learned early to manage themselves. Not out of virtue—out of necessity.

They had rules.

Unwritten, unposted, but understood.

One of them was simple: if someone genuinely needed the bathroom—genuinely—you let them go. No debate. No punishment. Shit happens. Bodies failed. Everyone knew how bad it could get if you didn’t.

But those rules only worked if people didn’t abuse them.

“She pulled this shit twice yesterday,” someone farther up the line said. “And once this morning.”

“That ain’t my fault,” the woman snapped. “I got a fuckin’ condition.”

“Yeah, a condition called speakin’ out your fuckin’ asshole.”

“Fuck your mama.”

“Fuck your mama.”

The profanity came easy. It always did. This was how vermin talked—not because they were crude, but because there was no point pretending otherwise. Polite words didn’t change outcomes. Direct ones sometimes did.

A man near the front of the line turned halfway around, arms folded. “You said emergency three motherfuckin’ times already. You don’t get four.”

“I’m about to shit myself here!”

“Then shit,” someone told her. “And then we’ll apologize and say we was wrong. Until then, fuckin’ hold it, bitch.”

That drew a ripple of short, humorless laughs. Not cruelty. Enforcement.

The woman looked around, eyes darting, searching for sympathy, for allies. She found a few uneasy looks, a couple of people shifting their weight—but no one stepped forward. Not yet.

Nate leaned his shoulder back against the wall and watched with mild curiosity.

They’d work it out. They always did.

Either she really needed to go and someone would decide the risk of being wrong wasn’t worth it—or the consensus would harden, and she’d wait like everyone else. That was how it functioned when there was no authority worth appealing to. Common sense rose to the surface. Slowly, sometimes clumsily, but it got there.

The woman hesitated, jaw working, then dropped her hand from her stomach. Just for a second. Long enough for several people to notice.

Someone snorted. Quiet, but pointed.

“Yeah,” the man at the front said. “That’s what I thought.”

The woman cursed again, louder this time, but she stepped back into place. The line compressed, bodies closing ranks around her without touching her. The argument burned itself out the way these things always did—fast, hot, and then gone.

The guard had ignored the whole thing. If the vermin would have agreed to let her skip the line, he would have allowed it. But they hadn’t. So he called the next number. The door opened. One person went in. The door closed.

Nate looked away. Order restored. No blood. No intervention. No paperwork. He stayed where he was, watching the room settle back into its familiar rhythm.

That was how it worked where he came from. Not because anyone had decided it should, and not because it was fair, but because there was no one else to do it. The law didn’t live in the slums. It didn’t patrol them, didn’t protect them, didn’t mediate their disputes.

Street gangs ruled what territory was worth ruling. Warlords, if you wanted to be honest about it. They enforced their own laws, took their own cut, and left the rest to rot. If you weren’t in a gang, if you weren’t useful muscle or inventory, you survived in the cracks between them.

The decent vermin outnumbered the gangs and the gang associates, but they were a silent and very meek majority. They did not confront. They survived. And they had learned how to live in those cracks.

They did it by sticking together when it mattered. By keeping their heads down. By making rules no one bothered writing because everyone already knew them. You didn’t steal from your neighbors unless you wanted consequences. You didn’t escalate unless you were ready to finish it. And you didn’t abuse the few bits of grace that kept things from sliding all the way into chaos.

The rules weren’t kind. They were practical.

Nate looked around the waiting area—at the bodies sprawled on blankets, at the quiet conversations, at the tired faces that still watched one another out of habit more than suspicion—and something clicked into place.

Everyone here had that same look.

Not the look of desperation alone. Not fear. It was the look of people who knew how bad things could get, and who had decided—consciously or not—that they weren’t going to be part of making it worse. These were people who lined up, who waited their turn, who enforced the rules because no one else would. People who had learned restraint not from authority, but from survival.

Respectable vermin.

And it made sense, suddenly, why they were the ones leaving.

The truly dangerous ones—the feral ones, the ones who lived for the chaos and fed off it—weren’t here. They stayed on Earth. They had no interest in lawful employment. They stayed where the rules were familiar, where power came from violence and reputation, where the wildness was home. Mars would never work for them. It would ask too much. Discipline. Patience. The ability to exist inside a system without trying to dominate it.

The people here wanted something else.

They were willing to leave their home planet—everything they’d ever known, good and bad—just for the chance to become employed. Not rich. Not important. Just legitimate. Counted. Useful in a way the system acknowledged.

Nate leaned back against the wall again and folded his arms, the recycled blanket still marking his space on the floor.

Respectable vermin used their common sense.

That was why they were here.

And why Earth, slowly and indifferently, was letting them go.

Darla came back from the roach pit a few minutes later, moving carefully through the bodies like she’d learned the lanes. She dropped down beside Nate with a soft grunt and leaned back against the wall, shoulder brushing his.