Elohat groaned, throwing back the ragged blanket. His wife turned over, snoring gently.
“Fuck it!” Elohat said, swinging his legs over, letting the momentum help him stand up.
His back was hurting again, that last fall had done something nasty to his spine. Leaning both hands against the wall he stretched, trying to unkink his muscles.
The alarms screeched through his room again and he screwed up his eyes in annoyance. Did they have to be that loud?
But then everything in Roller Alley was loud, from the roaring engines driving the wide roadways above, to the gears, cogs and sprockets he had to keep greased every day.
Even here, in the hot concrete box that served as his home, the machinery shook everything, the dull throb a part of his consciousness.
Walking to the thick metal door, Elohat wondered what it might be like to spend your life up in the open, where the sky was blue and you could hear yourself think. He’d seen it on the vidscreen, so it must be true. They said that the Blue had wide open spaces.
Elohat wondered what wide open spaces might look like.
There was little chance that he would ever find out though. He’d been born in Roller Alley and would die in Roller Alley, as thousands of his peers had done for the past two hundred years.
The only way out was to save enough credits to bribe an official, but a Roller would never be able to earn enough to do that. The little he did earn was only just enough to keep himself and his family fed and clothed.
No, the Blue was a dream, something to keep Rollers hopeful and in line.
Palming the door-pad, Elohat braced himself for the noise that would blast his ears when it opened.
The unending noise in Roller Alley was so bad that some Rollers deliberately deafened themselves, but he’d never had the courage to do that, preferring to stuff cotton wads in his ears instead.
Exiting his room, Elohat saw Dymos sitting astride a metal vent pipe, struggling to undo the retaining nuts on an inspection cover.
Walking over, he raised his eyebrows, fingers flicking over one another in the universal Roller-Talk that had developed over the years, because speaking in such an environment was an impossibility.
“Another blockage?” Elohat asked.
Dymos nodded, freeing the last of the nuts and dropping his large spanner onto the floor.
The alarm siren suddenly cut-out and Elohat breathed a sigh of relief. It sounded almost quiet now.
The ventilation system twisted and turned its way through the machinery, coming out beside the rolling roads above at regular intervals. They were covered in grills but sometimes one of the children living in the Blue would wrest one off and drop rubbish down it, running away when the alarms sounded.
Elohat could have cheerfully killed the one that had disturbed his sleep tonight.
Dymos raised the cover and looked at Elohat expectantly.
Elohat shrugged and wriggled his way head-first into the vent, turning on his skull-light. It was a tight fit.
All the vents were fitted with small tracks so that a Roller could scoot himself along on a trolley. Vertical off-shoots had to be climbed, and it was falling from one of these ladders that had damaged Elohat’s back.
Elohat was thirty-three, old for a Roller. He wouldn’t be able to work for much longer. Pushing the thought away, he cursed having a daughter and not a son to take over looking after the family when he was no longer able to. It didn’t bare thinking about.
* * *
An hour later Elohat was deep in the complexities of the ventilation system, climbing a ladder to the Second Level, when something dripped onto his head.
Rubbing his fingers over the spot they came away wet. In the dim light Elohat couldn’t make out what the wetness was, so touched the tip of a finger to his tongue .
Blood!
Elohat’s heart quickened, his mind conjuring up all kinds of scenarios - none of them good.
Finally, he took a deep breath and began climbing again, an occasional drip hitting him as he ascended.
If he didn’t get the vent unblocked, his family wouldn’t be eating tonight. Their meagre credits depended on him getting this job done.
Climbing into the next level, Elohat was met with a thin trickle of redness running down the centre of the vent. He followed it, turning a corner to be met by a body.
The body was wedged half-out of an overhead duct, hanging upside-down, head smashed open on the steel metalwork. He’d obviously fallen, or had been pushed, down the vent.
Elohat wriggled closer, eyes widening as he took in the expensive clothes and credcom strapped to the man’s wrist. He’d never used a credcom before, but soon worked out how to turn it on, his dirty fingers pecking at the screen.
As he studied the credcom, Elohat’s face broke into a huge smile - his first smile in years. The credits in this man’s account would keep him in comfort for the rest of his life.
Pulling the body into the vent, Elohat stripped it, struggling into the soft material. He needed to get a move on. It was night in the Blue, which would hide his grime covered face from view and give him a chance to get cleaned up.
He had to get to a credmach as soon as possible and empty the account. Then he could decide what to do.
With this amount of credits anything was possible.
Elohat began climbing again, pushing away the thought that his wife and daughter were destined to die now that he’d decided to leave them.
* * *
They found Elohat two days later, curled in a ball behind an airvan, fingers stuck in bloody ears, screaming for someone to take the silence away.