Sleepless: Chapter Seven

Nothing to Worry About [Except Everything]

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To say the next few days passed uneventfully would be untrue, but they did pass in their own due time.

Felix worked somewhere they called the Radio Room, where he sat at a desk and wore a “headset”, which was like earmuffs if earmuffs were like radios. He could talk to people around the city through it and coordinate things they couldn’t. She was very specifically prohibited from wearing the headset or talking to anyone in his stead (which was fine by her), so she mostly just sat under his desk and drew. A lot of his coworkers were nosy and wanted to meet her, but he had a door on his booth so he closed them out after he noticed Margo not handling the attention well.

Drawing had always been taboo in her house. ARNEN was quite keen to drill it into her that paper was for homework and occasionally intricate mazes, not doodling. She’d always wanted to doodle. She’d been allowed to when she was very, very small — she remembered her parents would hang up her drawings on the fridge.

She must have been very young then. It was before they ever lived at their most recent house, and before the hospital too. Or. Well. The most recent house on Earth, not here.

In any case, there was no one to tell her no anymore. When they’d gotten home from the hospital, Margo had raided the bag she’d taken hostage from Jaime, dumping all its contents out and sorting them. There were a few more items she hadn’t seen the first time around — including a stack of blank printer paper as thick as her arm, which she decided to claim as part of her hostile takeover of the things Jaime had left for her.