Chapter Fourteen
Dinner had the appearance of meat and potatoes and the texture of porridge, made all the worse when there were no berries or nuts to make things interesting. Mal choked it down between gulps of the fizzy vitamin soda, finding herself on the edge of a conversation about imported produce that she was too tired to follow. When the crowd rose from their meals and filed out the door, she was relieved to go to bed and sleep, still holding onto the vain hope that things would seem less hopeless in the morning; instead of going to the bunks, the group led her into a lounge that pulsed with bass-heavy music and flowed with brightly-coloured alcohol. She turned on her heel and walked back into the hallway, pressing her back against the wall to recover from the deafening noise. She couldn’t remember the way back to the bunks.
Zig-zagging down a hallway chosen at random, almost every door she tried was locked. The few that opened only led to more hallways, which she dismissed out of hand for the moment — she didn't need to be more lost than she already was. She got lucky on her twentieth try, the door opening into a boxed threshold; after checking for onlookers and cameras, she stepped inside to explore.
With almost four hundred square-feet of floor space and a dark-room that was larger than the average outhouse, the photography studio was far more luxurious than what she had afforded for herself in Kawehno:ke. She ignored the single camera affixed to the ceiling, more interested in the sheer quantity of raw materials stored on the lower shelves: jugs of developing solution, crates of film, reams of photo paper, vast arrays of special equipment she had only ever thought about in the hypothetical. She scooped handfuls of film canisters into the pouch of her shirt, feeling a kind of mania that obliged her to gather materials and resources while they were plentiful.
The darkroom was equipped with a safe-light, yet another luxury she was unaccustomed to having: without a red bulb or the spare electricity to power one, she could handle the process of developing negatives by touch alone. The glaring red light hurt her eyes, and so she propped the door open as she investigated the cabinets, finding more chemicals, more photo paper, more rolls of film. She scooped up another handful of canisters, and her shirt groaned under the weight.
A little voice in the back of her mind whispered that there would be no cameras in the darkroom — even infrared light could spoil the sensitive film. She kicked the door shut, letting the darkness close around her, reaching slowly for the film stuffed down the ankle of her boot. She couldn’t just throw it away, not without ensuring there was nothing to find — and if a camera happened to catch her exposing a reel of film to light, there would be questions about what she was trying to hide. She had to develop the film now, while she had the privacy and the materials to do so, and once she knew what was on the film she could safely destroy it—
