Yelena Barek. Never thought I’d work with a cooler, but life turned out very surprisingly in the time between then and now. Her idea was a good one, to host a party with several government spokespeople in the room talking about this and that and hopefully the Dome. The Council rarely would come to a party such as that; maybe they would, just as their social personas rather than as Council members.

As I stood up and reached for the door, Yelena stopped me.

“Milo…” She sighed. “This mission is going to need both of us to work together. So…for now at least, could we set aside our grievances?”

I wasn’t sure what to make of her words. I had nurtured my hatred for so long that it was more me being the anger’s body, not the anger being my emotion. Cassian nodded his head slightly, a small smile tugging at his lips. But my anger wasn’t done. I turned away and walked down the stairs, with no intention to resolve my anger. The cold air bit into my skin as I walked back to my tiny home.

That was selfish, very selfish. I think I did it because I was more angry than concerned, more…what’s the word? It’ll come to me. Yelena has forgiven me, thankfully, but I still carry that guilt. It’ll take a while.

Mack still wasn’t home by the time I got to our tiny apartment. My bag was tucked into the closet and the eggs from that morning were still available for eating, I just had to heat it. The stove quickly heated the coils after I put the pan on, and soon enough eggs for two were on the table. I ate without him, and watched his meal get cold. Maybe he was in the fighting rings again. He told me to never go, and I’ve kept to it. But when he comes home clutching his side, I want to go there and pull him away, ask, beg him to stop.

And so, I cleared the table, put the eggs in the oven, and went to sleep.

-

The door slammed in the early hours of morning. Rubbing my eyes groggily, I peaked over my blanket. Mack was rubbing his left side and wincing. There was a nasty, purple bruise forming on his cheek, and he still had bloodied bandages wrapped on his hands and knuckles. He dropped his bag by the door and turned to face me on my mattress. His eyes widened and he looked away.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Where are you hurt?” I stood up and padded to the table, pulling out a chair and cocking an eyebrow.

“Milo. I can patch myself up.”

“I know,” I moved to the cabinet under the sink and took out the first aid kit.

The chair creaked as he finally sat down and I began to tend to his injuries, starting with the bruise on his cheekbone.

“So, how were your fights?”

He groaned, then winced as the alcohol doused cloth brushed against the skin.

A tsk escaped my throat against my will (I lie, fully my will), “Serves you right. No one’s telling you to go there and get hurt.”

“Ah! But that’s the small sacrifice for a larger problem. I was able to make a few more credits and we can pay more of those debts mom left us,” His grin was so big, he was so proud of himself, I couldn’t bring myself to retort. I just smiled and continued to his ribs.

A small sacrifice for a bigger problem. If I really think about it, maybe my whole life was like that. My mother was a small sacrifice for the bigger problem of keeping people in the Dome. Me focusing on farming instead of art was a small sacrifice to focus on the looming bills that only grew as time went on. After several winces and “stop moving!” becoming a chant more than a command, Mack was finally patched up. He staggered to the couch and collapsed, his snoring following soon after.

I stared at his sleeping form. Was this what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life? I had a brief flash of Mack looking like a character from a movie I saw long ago, something about a philosophers’ stone, beat up and groaning every time an equally old me wiped his scars. My face flushed as I shook the image away. That would not be happening. I cleared the bloodied rags, stuffing them into a “bag” for laundry and the scrap pieces of medical tape were tossed into the garbage. My steps were light as I made my way around the apartment, hoping to not wake Mack, who was still louder than the Dome’s generators.

With the sun barely even beginning to rise over the horizon and me knowing without a doubt that I’m going to be sleeping anytime soon, I think of the documents I found in composting. And the cooler. Yelena. What do I make of her?

She’s…not what I thought. She’s kind, and seems genuinely interested in destroying the Domes. But I still can’t trust her. What if she betrays us in the end, taking all of our hard work and burning it as we’re hauled off as terrorists endangering the Dome. Then maybe Cass would finally learn that rich people were deceiving foxes, hoping to snack on us poor chickens.

Okay, bad analogy, but still. It was a point.

There was no reason to dwell on it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of wrongness from Yelena. There was something off, and I couldn’t place a finger on it.

I snapped back to reality as the smell of something burning reached no nose. Looking down at the vegetables I was tossing around in the pan, I groaned. A few pieces had begun to stick to the bottom, looking like blacked bits of dirt instead of grown things from the dirt. I quickly took the pan off the heat and salvaged what I could before it was too late. The burnt vegetables were thrown in the bin for composting, and I gazed at the measly vegetables that were left. Oh well. I went back to my mattress on the floor and fell back to sleep.

-

Cassian came by the accounting shed later that day after fertilizing and watering his section of crops. It was a realistic approach to life, accounting. Maybe I could be good enough to get the rich people of the Dome to let me do their taxes and eventually become rich myself. Wishful dreaming. Cass looked worried out of his mind. Understandable, if anyone caught wind of what Yelena was doing, she could get in serious trouble.

Or not. She was rich, after all. Maybe a light slap on the wrist, is what I thought.

He was wringing a flimsy hat in his hands, a wide-brimed one that protected him from the sun. I was pouring over charts and charts of imports and exports of produce and composting, using one of the Dome’s rare computers. I had on a pair of glasses that made my reading better for the small, cramped print on the sheets of paper. Looking up upon his entrance, I took a quick glance at the clock and set down my glasses.

“Glasses? Really, Mi? You’re such an old man,” Cass flashed one of his famous smirks, though his smile twitched and fell as soon as it came.

I scoffed and put up my feet on the desk, “Cass, I can’t read these annoying graphs without them.”

“You and your farsighted eyes,” Cassian paused, then leaned closer and lowered his voice to a whisper, even though no one else was around, “So, uhm, anyway. Yelena decided she was going to throw a ‘party’ at her place. Her mom approved, of course, because Yelena told her it was like a ‘post-ceremony banquet’ or something. We’re only inviting the highest of the rich and some of the nobles, and also you, because mainly we’re after information, and they’re going to have it, and you’re going to get it. So, you two will need to sneak over before and change…well…that,”

Cass gestured to all of me, which I took great offense to. Not to mention, a banquet? Me? Absolutely not. I knew next to nothing of what happened at a banquet and what rich people did there. Did they…eat…fish eggs? Do we even have fish eggs?!

I made this opinion of banquets very clear to Cass.

“And I know next to nothing about what you need from me.”

“Yelena’s mom will be out of the house by 5 to go run errands. That’s when you will sneak in. Yelena will be waiting for you at the main Upper Ring tram station. She’ll help you get ready and give you the rest of the details. She barely even told me her plan.”

“Why can’t you go?”

“I was assigned night duty. Can’t really get out of it. Besides, I need the money. That ring I got for Yelena really put me out,” Cassian’s cheeks flushed. “And…I should not have told you that. I mean—er—just nevermind.”

What.

“Ring?” I stood quickly, “Cass? What ring? There’s a ring?”

My voice embarrassingly cracked at the end of my confusion.

Cassian blinked, opening his mouth, and then quickly shutting it. There was a moment of silence before he eventually mumbled, “Yeah. I proposed to her last night.”

My mind blanked. Proposed? Like, a marriage proposal? I knew he and his lover were close but…what? Seriously? I stood, grabbed my bag, and left the shed. I probably made him feel bad, but I needed time to process this new information. I stopped a few steps from my apartment building’s door and realized I had most likely barged into his house during the proposal. Groaning, I walked into the building and unlocked my door. Mack was most likely out in the fields, doing farmer stuff. I resolved to simply going over the graphs at home, making the necessary notes on what costs needed to be cut and how to properly get enough income to cover them. But through it all, the thought of the banquet stayed in the back of my head.

I looked up at the clock during the middle of my work and realized I was late. I hastily wrote a note for Mack and grabbed my bag, stuffing the papers into it as well as a pencil and eraser. The accounts were behind because of me feeling lazy one week and deciding to draw instead of stay up to date. I was just able to catch a tram from the edge of the Middle Ring.

Yelena met me at the Upper Ring’s busiest tram station, as promised. Shocking. She was wearing the largest hat I had ever seen with the smallest glasses I had ever seen. She raised an eyebrow at my look, which I took to be her making fun of me in her head before she spoke.

“I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

Oh. I took them off and stuffed them in my bag, clearing my throat as I looked around, “So, what are we doing?”

She turned and began to walk, checking behind us every so often. Did she think she was a spy? “I put a suit for you behind some of my clothes in my closet. You’re going to need to put them on, fix whatever’s going on with your hair, then we’re going to the banquet.”

My hair? What was wrong with my hair? I self-consciously patted it with my hand before entering a tall, white building. There were a set of stairs to the right of a pair of steel doors with no handles. Yelena pushed a button next to the doors, and they slid open without her touching them. She got in, motioning for me to follow her, which I did. It was a box, with mirrors on all sides except the doors, which took up one wall, and the floor, which was a shimmering carpet. There was a grid of more buttons on the right of the door, all numbered from 2 to a number so unfathomable, I want to go back outside to see if the building is really that tall. Yelena presses the highest number, making the doors close and the box start moving. I grabbed one of the bars on the sides of the box as I felt my stomach plummet in my body. Is this what rich people did in their free time? Do magic? I thought magic wasn’t real.

“Have you never been on an elevator before?”

I shook my head, “No, never. Why is it a box? Is this even safe?”

“They’ve been around for hundreds of years. They should be safe.”

“Should?”

“Are.”

The doors opened to an expansive apartment. To the right was a lounge and beyond that a balcony that reached out above the roads below. The doors to the balcony were open, and a tram’s bell could be faintly heard. Directly in front were the stairs, built as planks supported by the wall and a series of vertical beams of wood. The left had a full wall made of glass, lightly stained pieces arranging to form a picture that could still be seen through. As I was trying to study the glass, Yelena led me up the stairs and to her room, which was as big as my apartment. Seriously. She grabbed the suit from the back of the closet and held it up. It was a typical suit that I knew, just a bit better in quality. But it also had a waistcoat. I had never worn a waistcoat before, and I was mildly uneasy as I took the hanger that everything lay on.

“Here. Put this on,” she handed me a white button up along with the suit, “and then I’ll do your hair.”

With a confident nod and a warm smile, she left the room to give me privacy. The suit was a rich burgundy colour. There was a black tie on her desk, and some socks and shoes underneath it. I wondered where she got all this stuff from as I put on the suit. As I fixed the waistcoat, Yelena entered with two mugs of tea. She placed the tray on her desk and cocked her head as she stared at me.

“That’s better. Nobody should recognize you now,” When I didn’t move towards the tea, she gestured towards it. “I didn’t poison it, you know.”

I hesitantly grabbed a mug and took a sip. It was unsweetened and bitter, but I still drank it as Yelena messed with my hair. There were little chocolates on a small plate next to the teas. I took one, and wow. That was hands down the best thing I have ever tasted. Chocolate was a rarity in the Fields. Yelena giggled as I not-so-subtly began to devour the chocolates. I glanced at her in the mirror she had set up and wondered what she was going to wear. Maybe something that’s also red? She had already done her makeup, which was simple but pretty nice. It highlighted all the good parts of her. In that moment, I understood why Cass loved this woman. Of course, I still didn’t trust her, but maybe I could…tolerate her, for Cass’s sake.

Makeup…I hadn’t worn it a lot, but I did like the effect. Large, bold makeup was my favourite, the kind that would turn heads.

“Hey, uhm, Yelena? Could I ask you something?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Rich people, specifically rich men. Do they wear makeup often?”

She thought about it for a moment, “Yes? Depends on the man. I’ve seen men that wear makeup to cover flaws or to add aesthetics or to highlight features. I’ve also seen men that like to wear it to banquets and balls for the fun of it. Why?”

“I…wanted to wear some. In public. Is that okay?”

She smiled and nodded, adding some last minute accessories to my hair, to presumably match my makeup. Little crystal butterflies were adorned on top of my head, and she swiveled the chair around to begin working on my face.

She was finished just as the sun began hiding behind the other apartment buildings. The clock said the banquet was starting in an hour. Yelena shooed me out of her room so she could change. I wandered the halls of her house, looking for a mirror to see what she had done. I found one in a bathroom, and I loved it. It looked like the butterflies in my hair, with thick eyeliner and a design that had a bold red that outshone my suit. Speaking of my hair, Yelena’s hands had shaped it into a fluffy mass that looked like a black cloud. The clips reflected the light to send the reflected beams onto the walls around me. I felt pretty.

Yelena came out. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder dress in a shade of purple, and long earrings swayed side to side every time she moved her head.

I looked at her in awe, “You look…great. Amazing. Wow.”

She smiled, chuckling softly, “Likewise. Of course, I was the genius of your look.”

“Ha! Yes, you were. Shall we go?”

I offered my arm to her, which she took. We walked out of the apartment, taking the elevator back down. That night would be the turning point of our plans.