Other hobos started stirring as the sunlight crept through the broken panels in the side of the barn. Marie raised her head just a bit to see her fellow hobos starting to wake up. Some of the latecomers from last night were sprawled out uncomfortably on the floor. Marie glanced at her watch. It was six fifty.

Again, her eyes scanned through the group, looking for a clean, blonde head of hair among the tangled greasy messes. Now that Marie knew what to look for, it wasn’t hard to find her. Sophie was in the corner, curled up on the floor, fast asleep. Marie decided to wait until Sophie got up. Then she could maneuver her way to ‘accidentally’ be with Sophie in line for breakfast. She couldn’t tell Sophie much of anything, because they still had their watches, but she could make the effort to befriend her again. She scanned the group one last time in a last attempt to find her dad, but he was nowhere to be seen. The finality of it made her curl up as her mind turned numb. He must still be in the basement. Dark thoughts of what they might have done to him entered her mind, but she tried to swat them away.

Marie pretended to be asleep, keeping one eye partially open to watch Sophie. She had a rough idea of what she would say to Sophie. Initially she would start with some sort of greeting, an attempt at an introduction, then hopefully they could click or connect somehow and they could be friends again. Marie tried to ignore the panic threatening to take over. She had to try.

“It’s 7:45, sleepy heads,” a hobo said, poking his head inside to the last of the hobos asleep. Marie watched Sophie stir and uncurl just a bit. “Breakfast is almost over.”

Marie got out of bed when Sophie sat up. Marie stalled long enough to make sure she was always a few paces behind Sophie. She dodged a few hobos as they entered the cafeteria building. Marie quietly cursed as two people slipped ahead of her. As she received her food, she kept Sophie always in her line of sight. She saw Audrey there again. Marie gave her a kind smile.

“Thanks, ma’am,” Marie said as Audrey handed her a half of a banana with her gloved hands. Audrey gave a laugh.

Marie turned and watched Sophie as she sat down at an empty table, and Marie smiled at her good fortune.

She approached Sophie, feeling her heartbeat in her toes. It felt strange to finally see her best friend after all these months and not be able to say anything to her.

“Hi.” It surprised Marie to hear her voice was an octave higher than usual. Was she really that nervous to see Sophie again? Sophie did nothing, keeping her head down as she spooned her porridge into her mouth. Marie cleared her throat and tried again. “Hello.”

The spoon Sophie was holding paused in the porridge, then she glanced up. Sophie studied Marie quickly, her eyes traveling up and down. Marie knew she looked like a new hobo. Her clothes, though old and crusty, didn’t look nearly as bad as others. And her hair wasn’t matted and greasy. “I don’t see a lot of kids our age around here, and thought we-”

“I’m not interested in making friends,” Sophie said, cutting Marie off and returning to her porridge.

“Uh.” Marie was so startled at this reaction she didn’t know what else to say.

“I know the welcome agent said to make friends, but I’m not going to be one of them.” Sophie tried to sweep Marie away with her hand. “Move along, hobo.”

Marie’s jaw dropped and her heart plummeted into her stomach. Her plans crumbled around her. She didn’t expect Sophie to react like this.

Sophie seemed to get angrier the longer Marie stayed. “Are you deaf? I said go away.”

Marie forced her feet to move. Sophie returned to her porridge and Marie forced herself to walk away. The sting of tears hit Marie’s eyes as she continued away from Sophie, gripping her tray like it was a lifeline.

She glanced around, knowing she’d have to sit somewhere. She saw an open seat by three other hobos who were talking over their breakfast.

“Hey, um, is anyone sitting here?” Marie asked, her voice far more timid than before.

“No, have a seat,” one of the hobos said.

Marie slid into the seat and tried to hide her tears by looking down at her porridge. Marie took a bite of the mediocre porridge. She was surprised it tasted mediocre. For some reason she imagined hobo’s getting the worst of the worst. The fact that it tasted mediocre was great.

“Don’t take it personally. Thief doesn’t like anyone,” one of the women said.

Marie glanced up to see the woman talking to her. The words settled into her mind.

“Wait… Thief?” Marie asked.

“You must be new,” another woman asked.

Marie glanced down and noticed her arm. The bruises were starting to heal, but they were still there. Her black eye probably looked like these bruises. “Yeah. I’m new. Got here yesterday.”

“Tough luck running into Thief, then. She is not someone anyone would want to run into in a dark ally,” the man said.

Marie fell silent and glanced over at Sophie. There was a part of her that wanted to stand up and defend her best friend. Something must have happened to Sophie to make her so bitter and angry. Granted, she had her memories wiped and forced to live the life of a homeless person, but would Sophie really react so vehemently toward people just because of that? She thought her best friend was different.

“Do all hobos have nicknames?” Marie asked.

“Yeah, it usually takes a week or two for them to stick. Mine, for example, is Numbers,” the man said. “Not sure why, but I seem really good with numbers and multiplication. Things like that.”

Marie nodded, biting back the desire to tell him why everyone here was probably more mathematically or scientifically minded. Numbers had dark brown hair and brown eyes. Marie could guess he was maybe in his late twenties, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Pusher here found a math textbook in the dumpster a few months ago. I read that thing until the cover fell off before agents found it and confiscated it from me,” Numbers said.

Marie glanced at the second woman who had talked to her, Pusher.

“Probably didn’t help that the cover was already in the process of falling off when I gave it to you,” Pusher said.

“Pusher?” Marie asked.

Pusher sensed her gaze and gave a lame smile. “Yeah. Pusher. I guess Button Pusher was too long of a name, so I got Pusher instead. People noticed I seem to push the buttons of some of the agents, but never enough to get me in trouble.”

“Hence the dumpster diving for math textbooks?” Marie asked, glancing from Numbers to Pusher.

“I’d like to think of them more as supply runs,” Pusher said.

Marie couldn’t help but laugh. Pusher played with her dark brown hair she had managed to get controlled from the grease and lack of care back into a braid. Her brown eyes were hidden behind thin framed glasses that looked bent out of shape a few times. Marie guessed she was barely in her twenties.

“And you?” Marie asked the last hobo.

“I’m Poet, because I guess they’ve already got a Writer here,” Poet said.

Marie tried not to look confused. If the hobos were made up of people who were all scientists or mathematicians, there shouldn’t be anyone with a writing background, should there? And yet Poet said there wasn’t just one, but two. Maybe more. Marie studied Poet a little more. She had brown eyes, brown hair, and seemed to be in her mid-twenties.

“You must love writing,” Marie said, still baffled at this.

Poet smiled. “I do! It must have been part of my past self. I look at situations and my mind thinks up ways to form them into a story somehow.”

“Oh, that’s cool.” Marie felt like her world view was turning upside down. She had a deep desire to figure out who this Poet was, and why she had her memory wiped. Her thoughts flashed to Siby in the clearing, how even though she was a scientist, she loved to draw. Marie winced. She hadn’t thought of Siby since she arrived. Marie tried to push it away, promising herself that when she found the underground again, she would let them know about Siby’s situation among other things.

“Pusher found a notebook for me in one of her ‘supply runs’, and I’ve almost filled it up,” Writer said.

Pusher shook her head just a bit. “I’m not in love with the nickname Pusher. People think I’m a good fighter because of it, but I’m not. If there’s some other quality you can think of...”

Numbers shook his head. “Too late. It suits you.”

“Has your notebook of writings been confiscated yet, Poet?” Marie asked.

Poet turned to Numbers and smirked. “I found a better hiding spot than Numbers.”

Numbers shot her a dirty look as Marie giggled. Marie kept eating her porridge.

“Do you guys know Wash?”

The three gave a nod. “You can’t really miss Wash. He’s been here almost five years now,” Numbers said.

“What’s his story? Why does he clean everything?” Marie asked.

Pusher gave a shrug. “From what I can tell, he wasn’t like that before. He’s had two or three incidents that has made him how he is.”

Marie frowned. “What do you mean ‘incidents’?”

“He’ll be going about his day, working on his assignments, when he’s struck with memories of what it was like in the woods,” Pusher said.

Marie’s eyes widened. This was new. Even when she lived as a citizen she hadn’t heard of these kind of things. Except that one time a hobo broke into her neighbor’s apartment, but the agent assured them the hobo remembered nothing.

Of course the agent would say that.

“Yeah, it’s a blessing we’ve forgotten what we did,” Numbers said. “Wash is one of those examples. The very last time this happened, two years ago now I believe, he was shouting and thrashing in the streets.”

“Did anyone hear what he was saying?” Marie asked, almost too nervous to ask.

“Rumor has it, it was pretty unintelligible. Anyway, the S.E.A. took him for a week to watch him, then something must have happened and he came back with us. He had forgotten everything, even his time as a hobo until that moment,” Poet said.

Marie stared at the three other hobos in shock, not daring to say anything.

“Once he didn’t need everything so clean. Granted, he still wanted things to be nice and tidy before, but now it’s an obsession. Something in him is slowly breaking down.”

Marie broke her glance from the hobos and turned until she saw Wash scrubbing down a wall. In the lab they had never tried multiple doses of the formula. Something must be happening to Wash with the extra formula he was given. Some sort of side effect. Her heart went out to the poor guy.

“He stays here, everyday, cleaning.” Poet said. “Whether the cafeteria or the bathrooms or the sleeping quarters. He cleans it all. And we track in enough dirt that he stays busy all day. I kind of feel bad for him, but he seems happy to do it. He hasn’t had another episode since.”

Marie swallowed, feeling sick. Would Wash’s side effects continue after he was given the cure? Sophie finished up her porridge and stood up, which caught Marie’s attention. Marie watched her drop her dishes off to the dishwasher. She kicked a bit of crumpled napkin toward the trash before walking out of the cafeteria.

“Why is Thief called Thief?” Marie asked.

Marie thought she imagined it, but she could have sworn the three of them seemed more uncomfortable.

“She’s newer. Came some time before this last winter,” Pusher started.

“She made a few friends when she first got here. But things got fishy,” Numbers said. “Winters can sometimes be tough. You should be happy you missed this last one, especially. Sickness, diseases, they spread fast among us hobos. There’s no heater in the sleeping quarters, and it gets so very frigid in there. The S.E.A. tries to help us out, except for the heater thing. Had a riot that almost burnt down the sleeping quarters, so they don’t have heaters in there anymore.”

“I'm sure they could install a good one that wouldn’t burn, but they’re not going to,” Pusher said.

Poet waved her hand in front of her. “Anyway, Thief got sick. Her friends tried to help her so she wouldn’t end up in the hospital, but whenever her friends went without blankets for the night, Thief would wake up magically better. She was accused of faking sick to get sympathy, since she’d wake up ‘cured’ from whatever illness she had.”

“It just got worse as the months went on. Fights would break out early in the morning because Thief would be found with other hobo’s blankets who didn’t willingly give them to her,” Numbers said.

Marie blinked, unsure how to take this information. “So, she stole them?”

“Of course she did!” Numbers said. “Obviously she denied it, but she lost all her friends that morning.”

Marie didn’t want to believe it. Was Sophie reacting so badly with the hobo lifestyle that she was actually stealing from other people? Did part of her remember her lavish, upper class lifestyle?

“We’ve upset you,” Pusher said, sounding sad. “We don’t mean to. You don’t understand what rough winters are like. They can make the kindest person go insane. Getting sick is terrifying, because you don’t know if it’s going to work itself out of your system, or if you have to go to the hospital.”

“Oh. That’s nice they’d take us to the hospital if we got sick enough,” Marie said.

The three shook their heads. “The hospital is the last place you want to end up. Us hobos aren’t like the rest of the population,” Pusher said. “Something happened to us over the wall, and now the medicine they try to give us just triggers the traumatic memories of what happened over the wall and hobos forget themselves all over again. It’s not good to go to the hospital.”

Marie felt some of the color drain from her face. She realized how little information she had with just the lab mice. After hearing Wash’s story, she was scared for anyone to get injected multiple times with the formula. “Oh,” was all she managed to squeak out.

Marie found herself once again drawn toward Wash. He had finished cleaning. He sat down, eating quietly, staring off into the distance. His hands were red and raw, and Marie felt an ache for the poor man. Marie turned back to the three. “I guess Wash doesn’t seem nearly as bad a nickname as Thief.”

Numbers shrugged. “Sometimes we hobos have to know who to avoid. Thief is one of those people. She’s a suspicious one, all right. She still won’t explain how she manages to wash her hair. Claims she doesn’t know.”

There was a deep sadness in the core of Marie’s heart. These three people were highly suspicious of Sophie, her best friend in the entire city. Marie wanted to defend Sophie and her character. Sophie wasn’t like that. She’d never do anything like that. But in truth, Sophie had her memories wiped and had gone through a tough winter. Maybe, just maybe, Sophie had changed. Sophie was used to a very rich upbringing that she had subsequently forgot about, but maybe some of it lingered. She didn’t think Sophie would resort to stealing other people’s blankets, but what if she had? How bad was the hobo’s situation if it drove someone like Sophie to steal? What had happened to her friend?