Free Migration by Daniel David Page A

on something, but by the time she noticed she’d missed the time to cry out. She looked down her leg as it swung on to the trolley and tried to make out if there was blood there.
    The young man tightened a couple of straps across her chest and hips and spun the trolley sharply towards the other side of the room before heading out of a discreet door in the wall. Out in the corridor, Sarah watched as strip lights spun above her and the trolley moved quickly over the floor, with just the faintest rhythmic vibration as it crossed from tile to tile. She rolled her head left and right to get a sense of the space but the walls were endlessly white and featureless. She looked up at the young man and made a weak attempt to lift her head up, but his hand pressed on her shoulder and she sank back down.
    “Not long now,” the young man looked down at her and smiled.
    As her head lay back down on the un-cushioned trolley she felt a tenderness above her ear. She bent her arm awkwardly at the elbow and tilted her head down towards her fingers, which stretched long as their tips felt around the moist cavity where her implant had been.
    Eventually, they came to a stop and the trolley steered through another set of white featureless doors into a plain room with more strip lights. It was hot and the air was dry with a sweet smell of occupancy and sweat.
    “This one’s cute,” called out the young man.
    “Nice,” came a voice that Sarah couldn’t locate.
    “Why don’t you take a break?” the young man said, “I can handle this.”
    “Jesus Mo, you’re fucking twisted, you know that?” said the lost voice.
    “Whatever. Go vape or something.”
    Sarah heard a door slam and felt someone pulling at her clothing. She tried desperately to look around, but her head was dizzier and dizzier and her muscles just wouldn’t respond to her desperate requests. She could see his face somewhere above her, a vague set of features that formed and disintegrated around her, but her eyes couldn’t focus for more than a fraction of a second and kept rolling and yawing beyond him, to the strip lights and white walls that spun sickeningly on the boundary of her view.
    She heard the sound of the tearing clothing and felt her useless body being pulled and pushed as her clothes came away. She couldn’t be sure now whether she was dressed or undressed, she couldn’t remember where she was, she tried to think who Benjamin was and the girl she kept wishing for, but then a sharp searing pain between her legs drowned out all her thoughts. Her jaw clenched together so hard she felt her gums flex and swell and the taste of blood ran through the channels around her teeth and down her throat. Her back arched, trying to recoil from the pain that spread from her groin to her fingertips and jammed itself in the synapses in her brain, but her body felt too heavy and clumsy, and nothing would respond to her demands anymore.
    When the pain stopped, silence took the room back for a moment, before the low and loud buzzing returned to her ears. The young man appeared above her again, silhouetted by the strip lights and anonymised by the syrup. Sarah couldn't remember now whether she was dreaming or awake, it was all so confusing. She remembered Zoe's breakfast and rocked her head from left to right looking for her, before the young man held her jaw and rubbed something cold onto the side of her head. In her dream, she thought she saw a cartoon gun with a red candy cord that he conjured from the ceiling. He pressed it softly to her head and when the bolt crashed from the barrel into her temple, Sarah’s dreaming stopped.
    11.46am

Outside
    On a Vactrain that shot effortlessly through the physical world, One sat in silence above a plain and pale bench and surveyed the bright light and matter, the metal, plastics and flesh that surrounded it. It watched for hours. The negative spaces that grew and shrank with the ebb and flow of passengers and their faces that twisted and