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“How much longer are you going to take?” Mulyk was sitting outside the clinic, wearing a sleepy face. She had woken up a few minutes ago, but Hundred was still cleaning inside. And the door had been shut all this time. “I’m almost done,” Hundred’s voice came from the inside. Only the four uppermost corners remained, but they were a bit too high for him to reach even after he stood atop a stool stationed on a chair. There were spiderwebs at the corner, so he had to clean those, but it was out of his reach. So he threw the broom like a spear repeatedly and took care of the webs little by little. And he caught the broom before it fell down. “Hehe,” he felt proud that his tactic was working. “I can’t catch bullets, but I can catch brooms. Wow, that sounded nice.” After the dry dirt and webs were taken care of, he switched to using a wet mop. He quickly took care of three corners and was working at the fourth corner, the one near the door.

A thick, five-feet-tall snake darker than coal, toiled on the floor, seemingly trying to find food. Its small yellowish eyes and tiny but sharp fangs didn’t stir up chills in the cross-eyed kid’s body as he approached it unescorted by chariness. The footsteps of the kid alerted the snake, and it immediately rolled over on its back, wide-opened its mouth, and stayed still.

At a child booth on the twentieth deck. A cross-eyed kid was inside the booth, seated near the inglenook, but he wasn’t eating anything like the rest of the children—all of whom were in germ-free clothes that not-so-nicely fit their lithe bodies. Today’s menu had his favorite food, the vale sausage, but he was yet to put one on his plate.

At the Drill Clinic on the twelfth deck. Though Hundred was standing still outside the door, Mulyk, however, leaned closer to the door and did her best to hear the inside conversation. “Oi, stop eavesdropping,” he urged her. “How can you stand calm like that when a man and a woman are alone in a room for this long?” Mulyk asked, peering at him with her huge eyes. “This long? It hasn’t even been five minutes.”

In Drill Clinic, Lirzod was lying unconscious on the bed in new clothes—the combination of an old sleeveless cream-colored shirt and a brown plus-fours. Having just struggled to dress him up, Hundred sat back in his seat with a look of discomfort. “Couldn’t you have done that?” he looked at Mulyk, a hint of indignation flowing through his speech. “I’m not married yet,” she was resting on the opposite bed, and she woke up from sleep only a couple of minutes ago, so her voice was dull but not vacuous. “What?” Hundred pried further. “What does that have to do with dressing him up?”