Chapter Text
Moist.
Harrowhark had never become used to it, would never become used to it, would never accept it even passively: Everything down here is moist.
She looked around and revised her thought: Everything and everyone down here is moist.
It would have been tolerable if the heat wasn’t oppressive, hovering and clinging to the moisture to make even the air feel soggy. Her black hair stuck thickly against both sides of her face. She could feel her button down sticking to the tops of her thin arms under her green sweater. Her tights were itching under her skirt as they drank thirstily from the air.
She pulled out her tablet from her satchel, opening up yesterday’s readings. This proved to be a pointless endeavor. In less than a minute and after only a couple of pages of absentmindedly reading a translation of City of God, her tablet was no longer registering her fingerprints.
After several attempts to turn the page — which ended with her reader hopping three chapters ahead in the book — followed by another attempt to update the settings so that she could turn her tablet with eye movements — which ended in her reader highlighting several random passages, and suggesting that she share the book with Father Crux, she sighed, slammed the tablet back in her bag, and gave up.
The train was delayed again.
Water pooled into puddles across the platform. Water dripped through the seams of the hastily erected plastic barriers between the platform and the tracks. Water dripped off the sagging split-ends of the large man standing to her left, splashing onto his opaque goggles which buzzed muffled sounds from a basketball game.
The rest of the people around her on the platform – constructors in jumpsuits, likely off to continue the work of deacidifying Rapture, scientists in their white robes with black clerical collars, and a smattering of catechists, accountants, and people in minor roles in the clergy – were equally soggy.
Absent from the platform was almost anyone from the lower levels of the Cathedral, as well as anyone who lived in the Old City. They didn’t hand out a MetroCard to just anyone. If you left the island, it was for a reason.
Harrowhark understood unpleasant environments. She reveled in them, really. Her own bedroom was neatly utilitarian: Windowless, black, with one bed, one closet, one desk, and one cross.
But as unpleasant as her room could be, it was still air conditioned, dry, and most importantly, lacking other people.
Plus, at her house, she could suffer on her terms, and leave her room if she wanted a break from the life of a monk. Outside her room, her father decorated the place more lavishly, with paintings, couches, a well-stocked kitchen and organized kitchen island, the works.
As the only child of a bishop, Harrowhark’s duty was to display subservience, penitence, and devotion to God. But a bishop must be prepared to entertain, to flaunt status, and to show off his nicely acclimated and pious daughter.
It was a neat tightrope to walk.
“A train is approaching the station on the Rapture-bound track.”
With a sound like the flushing of the world’s biggest toilet. The seams of the plastic barriers shuddered and the leaking turned into spraying, peppering those who had stood ambitiously close to them. Behind the plastic, there was the whir of an airlock. Finally, segmented metal doors embedded into the plastic opened.
After around forty people got off but before all of them got off, Harrowhark rudely squeezed her way under the armpits of the remaining exiting riders, darting towards what she viewed as her seat, regardless of which line or which car she was entering: the corner seat of the corner-most L-shaped set of seats in the car.
It’s not that she needed to rush for this seat. In addition to the fact that most people disembarked at her station, so there were plenty of seats around, any normal human being would have found this seat to be the most uncomfortable one in the car.
Metal jutted out into the seat from odd angles: from the side of the seat in front of her, from the side of the window, from some covered electrical equipment under her seat. She encased herself in it, pulling her knees up and pressed them against the side of the seat in front of her, forming a slanted table with her legs on which she placed her tablet.
“This is Fifth Sphere: Mars. This is a Rapture-bound train making all local stops.”
It wasn’t what anyone else would call comfortable, but it was a position that she was just small enough for, and she fit into the seat like a glove. Gideon Nav, who she had the misfortune of commuting with most days, had commented multiple times that she liked that spot because it was the closest that Harrowhark ever was to being hugged.
Speaking of which, she made sure her headphones were visible, her rad-hood was up, her stylus was out, and that she looked, generally, like a person who was very much not interested in chatting, because —
“The next stop is Cathedral Parkway.”
For this stop, they had kept the name.