made worse for you. For some reason, Butchers & Rog haven’t just taken everything, which is a small miracle.”
“Okay,” Saretha said. Her voice quavered a little.
“You could consider deconstructive surgery,” he suggested, circling his own face with a finger through the air. Saretha’s brow knit. She did not understand.
“They could reconfigure your face, like plastic surgery, but without the goal of improving your features. It is significantly cheaper, as they need not be so careful.”
“Why don’t we just do it ourselves?” Sam burst out.
“You could do that,” Holt plowed forward. “Though I am legally bound to inform you this would not be safe or sanitary.”
Another Ad popped up. Zockroft™: When things aren’t going your way, it read. A row of happy little pills appeared beneath it.
Holt put the Pad down. “Please understand that if you don’t make a choice, they will. They have the legal right to prevent your face from potentially entering the public sphere if you fail to desist.”
I felt a little sick. Was it their plan to disfigure her? Or take her away? Or worse?
“Let’s not let it come to that,” he said, picking up his Pad again.
“Couldn’t she wear a mask?” Sam asked. “Like a Product Placer or something?”
“No!” Holt said, scrolling through more legal documents. “Product Placers have a special exemption. Maybe. Who even knows what they wear?”
They wore masks. Everyone knew that. They weren’t supposed to be seen, but it did happen. Ninety-nine out of one hundred times, if a Placer was spotted, no one said a word. Why cause trouble? Why upset them? It was an unspoken rule that if you happened upon Placers, you watched quietly and did not follow or draw attention to them. Everyone liked a good Product Placement, and often people were rewarded for their silence with a surprise Placement. Norflo Juarze thought this was how our building got inks that one time.
For Saretha, though, wearing a mask would be a breach of the Patriots Act©. How would she be identified? How would advertisers know who to market to?
Our bill was blinking now—$7,328.55. We were approaching our debt ceiling for the month. Holt could see this, too. He sighed again, like it pained him to feel anything.
“Stay home,” he instructed briskly. “They can’t issue a complaint if you stay in your private residence.”
“My job?” Saretha groaned.
“Oh.” Holt laughed sadly. “You can’t work in public. They could accuse you of tacitly using Miss Harving’s likeness in the promotion of a product or business. Miss Harving would be entitled to those earnings and then whatever damages Butchers & Rog could dream up. It is utterly out of the question.”
The blinking grew faster. My heart rate went with it.
“Mrs. Nince,” Saretha muttered, imagining the wrath of her boss.
I hated Mrs. Nince, though I’d never met her. During Saretha’s first week of work, the woman had “accidentally” jabbed Saretha in the arm with a leather punch, leaving a small crescent-shaped scar in the flesh above Saretha’s right elbow. She’d sued Saretha $90 for causing a workplace accident.
“Speth can work. She’s past Last Day, and she doesn’t look like anyone,” Holt suggested.
I almost snorted. What kind of job did he think I could get?
Attorney Holt’s face contorted as he remembered one more thing. He looked conflicted, then tapped at his Cuff a few times and looked to the left and the right, as if he were afraid to be observed.
“You can’t get sick,” he said. His bill had stopped creeping up. He was paying for this bit of advice himself. I don’t know why he did it. Compassion is trained out of Lawyers, but Arkansas Holt wasn’t a very good Lawyer. Had some small bit of kindness survived? “You can’t go to a hospital, because that would put your face in public. You can’t get arrested or taken into Collection, either.”
Saretha’s eyes seemed to go blank. Sam’s lips formed a question, but he didn’t need to ask. We all realized the same thing.
While we’d never had any significant hope of paying off our debt in our lifetimes, we had to keep making progress. Our parents’ income and our income had to be at a high enough level to chip away at our debt. We lived in constant fear of losing ground, because if the algorithms foresaw us earning under our minimum payments, they would take Saretha into Collection. Until Holt’s visit, we were afraid of her being sent to Indenture like my parents, stuck working a farm or much, much worse. But now, if that happened, they would disfigure her first.
“Just stay safe and healthy and home,” Holt counseled.
The Zockroft™ Ad popped up again, this time with a name. Saretha Jime: Be Positive! it read. The pills danced.
“We can talk again at the start of your next billing cycle,” Arkansas said, his attention falling away. “Perhaps I’ll think of something,” he mumbled quickly. Before we could agree, the call winked out and an Ad screamed at us to buy new, fluffier toilet tissue. I sat numbly by Saretha, the screeching noise from the Ad blasting over us like an unforgiving wind. I stood and shut the whole wall panel off.
Saretha buried her head in her hands. What were we going to do?
Mrs. Nince was the kind of woman who wore a cinched half-corset and tight black jeans, even though she was sixty years old and weighed about eighty pounds. She had jet-black hair interwoven with delicate, sharp, printed shapes. Her face had been rebuilt at least a dozen times, and it looked like something from a creepy wax museum. She thought her look was stylish, though that wasn’t the word she used to describe it. She called it modish, because she owned that word. She bragged about how she’d watched auctions for years for a word this good to be sold. I think she just took what she could find. Modish wasn’t exactly a common word.
Mrs. Nince wanted people to say it so she could make money. Words, she knew, were good investments.
Saretha had worked under her for two years and never said a bad word about her. She never described Mrs. Nince’s face as pinched and cruel. She never mentioned how painful the clothes must have been to model. In fact, she never mentioned Mrs. Nince at all, if she could help it, because Saretha never liked to say anything bad.
Her boutique was north, part of the shops above Falxo Park, but far enough along the outer ring that it was in the next section, the Duodecimo. I’d never understood why that section had a Latin name. The buildings were still printed to look French. That was baffling, too. The obsession with French style supposedly came from the period when the French let all their Intellectual Property rights lapse, but I’d only heard that from kids passing it on. It didn’t seem like the full story. My history classes were weirdly devoid of information about the world outside our nation’s borders.
At the shop, Sam asked for Mrs. Nince, and a pretty girl in a painfully tight silver corset and tight white jeans scurried awkwardly
