A sea of trash surrounded me, the pound of the engines beat out an unending rhythm, but I ignored it all, focusing instead on the boy covered in food scraps. No pulse beat beneath his skin. Professional analysis: vitamin deficient, malnourished, and unfortunately, dead. Most of my patients were. I was a doctor of the dead.

The Chute stretched out around the boy and I, a river of filth on a slow moving conveyor belt that emptied into the mawing flames of the Incinerator, like some glorious hell waiting to consume us all. Below us, the machines of the Belly thrummed and roared and raged— beautiful and unending.

"But a beautiful cage is still a cage," I whispered to the boy. He didn't answer.

Further down the Chute, Xyla picked her way through the garbage towards me, her face wrinkled in disgust. But at least she came with me; Yaneli refused altogether. She was the one who'd found me as a baby, abandoned in the trash. It made sense she didn't want to risk coming—imagine finding something worse than me.

"We should finish checking the new bodies, Z." Xyla's handkerchief hid half her face, though the few white strands poking free from her cap, paired with her height, made her unmistakable. In contrast, I was often mistaken for Yaneli. She might have been twice my age, but we shared a similar olive skin tone, dark hair, and small, lithe build.

"I'm trying to decide what killed him." I turned back to the boy's body. "There's some sort of sweetness on his breath." I paused. "Maybe he was diabetic. I'd have to taste his pee to be sure..." Xyla shuddered, but the truth was, had she not been here, and had the dead boy been a girl, I would have cut open his arm and taken out the chip embedded there— sometimes I even practiced sewing the broken flesh back together. As someone unlettered, my greatest risk was a K-guard scanning my arm and finding no chip present. Thus, whenever I encountered a young female in the Chute, I took their chip and stored it in a secret compartment in my metal arm. It took the chips a few months to stop working, so when a guard scanned me, one of my chips caught in their scanner, and the dead person's information came up.

It was a dangerous game—I didn't know what info they saw, or when the chips would stop working. Still, it was better than being caught without one.

"Z, catch."

I turned just in time to catch a thin, glowing object— and when I did all thoughts of doctoring and chips disappeared. Flesh and metal fingers alike clutched a broken information monitor filled with static. And on top of that static was a message someone had physically carved into the screen

The Beast has swallowed me whole, but I won't eat your lies.

Even with the distant heat of the Incinerator, a cold thrill ran through me. So it was true: people were vandalizing the information monitors. Which meant someone had risked their life to leave this message. I turned to Xyla, voice full of awe. "What lies?"

Xyla shrugged. "Does it matter? Whoever did it, deserves to be thrown in the Letter Trials for getting our food rations docked." She moved on to another body, and I regretfully left the monitor and did the same. The newly reduced food rations were hitting everyone hard, but especially Xyla and Yaneli, who already split their rations with me.

At the next body, a middle-aged woman, I slid the robotic knife extension that made up my middle finger down the edge of her pants. A single coin fell free. Sometimes families filled the pockets of loved ones with trinkets or coins for good luck; we just relieved them of it before the flames of the Incinerator did. A single coin was a meager offering, but with the new food restrictions, there would likely be more bodies down here soon. The thought didn't cheer me.

Xyla moved in silence beside me, the two of us a machine as efficient as the ones surrounding us. We passed through a gulf between the trash mounds, where several bodies with deep wounds and missing body parts mixed in with the others— the Tuv Letter Trial fighters. My fingers itched to examine them, to see the exposed bones or gaping entrails and match them up to the pictures in my medical books, but I resisted. Once someone entered a Letter Trial, they had nothing worth stealing.

Farther across the mounds of trash, beyond where the bodies were dumped, something black and shiny gleamed. I paused, staring at the black object, oddly transfixed. Sometimes Xyla compared me to the magpies on Old Earth, who I read had a knack for collecting shiny things.

Shoes, I realized when I drew closer. Matching ones too... and still attached to a body. Odd on two counts, because they usually dumped the bodies in groups. And because they always removed shoes.

I didn't have to look to know Xyla followed through the trash. She knelt beside me as I took one foot and she the other. Even after all these years, my flesh hand always flinched when first touching a corpse. It didn't this time.

We both pulled hard, and the body slid free. I stared down at it, surprised. It was wrapped in a sheet of surprising quality, maybe even worth the soap and water it would take to wash it. Only the shoes showed, slick black with a slight heel.

Xyla hesitated, but I leaned forward, and ripped open the sheet. For the first time in my thousands of searches of the Chute, disbelief bloomed in my throat. Xyla recoiled. The Beast continued on around us, engines pounding, smoke billowing.