Chapter 3: Soren Ashby's Sponsored Arrival

The intake facility smells like money.

Not real money—Zone 12 money, which smells like nothing, which smells like absence. This is the other kind, the kind that gets a scent added to it, ambient and precise: something between cedar and ozone and the specific chemical signature of surfaces that have never been touched by anyone who couldn't afford not to touch them. I notice it the second the door opens and the broadcast-optimized light finds my face, and my first thought—embarrassingly, in a way I will spend the next several hours trying to forget—is that Mira would love it here. She would spend twelve minutes cataloging everything she recognized from the Meridian's pre-season coverage and then write a meticulous commentary about the gap between the set dressing and the structural load-bearing reality, and she would do it in the kind of detail that makes you realize she has been paying attention to things you didn't know were worth paying attention to.

I don't love it here. I note it with the flat, cataloging part of my brain that I use for scavenging: exits, surfaces, sources of light, things that could be useful and things that could be dangerous, the distinction between which is narrower than people with clean air seem to understand.