[Faye of the Doorstep] Chapter 6 - Sorting

Faye of the Doorstep, Chapter 6

Sorting

The door banged open, and two women were shoved inside hard enough to stumble.

“We need to stop this,” one of them said immediately. Her words tripped over each other, fueled by adrenaline that had not yet burned off. She had cropped hair and tattoos climbing her forearms, her whole body still vibrating with motion. “We can stop it. If people just stopped going to work. Stopped buying things.”

Heads turned. A few women straightened in their chairs.

“She’s right,” someone said. “If even ten percent of people did it, the country would beg us to stop.”

“We’d have the power then.”

“I couldn’t,” a woman said quietly. “My job is my insurance. My son has diabetes.”

“That’s real,” another woman said at once. “I’d lose my apartment. I’d be homeless.”

“Well, yeah,” the tattooed woman said, frustration breaking through the certainty. “Not everyone. But enough.”

“I read it only takes four percent,” a middle-aged woman said. “Four percent is doable.”

“Four percent of who?” someone snapped. “People with savings?”

The room went still.

“What if they arrest you for not showing up to work?”
“They can’t do that.”
“Girl, look where you are.”

A young woman near the wall began to cry. She looked barely out of high school. Another woman moved without asking and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, rocking her gently.

“Why are they doing this?” the girl asked. “Why do they hate us?”

No one answered right away.

Faye listened.

She could see the shape of it now. The idea was sound. The math almost convincing. But the cost landed unevenly. The people with the least room to fall were being asked to fall first.

The tattooed woman sagged a little, anger draining into something closer to helplessness. “So what,” she said. “We just take it?”

No one said yes.

No one said no.

The question sat there, unanswered, heavy as a held breath.

They were taken in waves.

Names were called from a clipboard. Sometimes two at a time. Sometimes five. Sometimes only one. A door opened. A woman stood. Another door closed.

Some of them came back.

Some did not.

At first, people whispered guesses. Released. Transferred. Deported.

After a while, no one guessed anymore.

The silence where those women had been grew heavy, like missing teeth. Faye noticed how people rearranged themselves without speaking, spreading out just enough to mark the absence.

Eventually, a guard pointed at Faye. “You. And you.”

He nodded toward the older woman from the wall, the one with the practical shoes, and another woman Faye had not spoken to yet. Dark-haired. Calm. Watchful. The kind of person who had learned to be quiet on purpose.

They were led down a short hallway into a smaller room.

No windows. A table bolted to the floor. Three chairs.

The door shut.

For a moment, none of them spoke.

The dark-haired woman exhaled slowly. “Well,” she said. “That’s new.”

“Better or worse?” the history teacher asked.

“Different,” the woman replied. “Different’s all I know so far.”

Faye sat carefully, mindful of her bruises. The room hummed faintly with fluorescent lights and air recycled too many times.

“They’re sorting us,” the other woman said after a moment. “They always do.”

“By what?” Faye asked.

The history teacher smiled without humor. “Risk,” she said. “Visibility. How inconvenient you might become.”

Faye thought of the women who had not come back. The young one who had been crying. The mother who needed insulin.

“Does it matter what we say?” she asked.

“It matters what they think you might say later,” the other woman replied. “That’s the part that scares them.”

They sat with that.

After a while, Faye spoke again, choosing her words with care.

“Back there,” she said. “When they were talking about stopping work. Stopping everything.”

The history teacher nodded. “A general strike,” she said. “It comes up every time things get bad enough.”

“It sounded possible,” Faye said. “And impossible. At the same time.”

“That’s because it is,” the other woman said. “It works best when the people who can afford to strike do it first.”

“And they almost never do,” the teacher added.

“Why?” Faye asked.

The teacher tilted her head, studying Faye more closely now. “That’s not the question people usually ask first.”

“What do they ask?”

“How to make others brave enough,” the other woman said.

Faye looked between them. “That’s not what I want to know.”

The silence that followed was different. Attentive.

Faye drew a breath.

“What I want to know,” she said slowly, “is what kind of power survives even when everyone knows it’s doing harm.”

The history teacher’s eyes flicked briefly to the door, then back to Faye. “That,” she said quietly, “is a better question.”

The other woman nodded once. “And you don’t ask it in a room full of people.”

Faye felt something settle. Not an answer yet, but the shape of one.

Outside the room, someone shouted. A door slammed. Footsteps passed, then faded.

Inside, the three of them sat, unhurried now.

They had time.

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Start my other novels: [Attuned] and the other novella in that universe [Rooturn]

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