When Claude arrived, Willa traded the woman’s blood bag for the gelpack, a small syrette filled with carbs and epinephrine used to jumpstart folks who sold more than their bodies could give. She broke its cap, pushed the two tiny needles into the skin on the inside of the woman’s arm, and squeezed the contents into her basilic vein.

Claude looked at the woman, shaking his head. “Crazy. An A-neg in here trading like a lowblood.”

Willa applied a small bandage over the wound and gave a touch of pressure. “How do you know she’s A-neg?”

“Just a hunch.” He leaned into the stall and scanned the bag on Willa’s console. “Mmhmm. A-neg.”

“The incentives are too high, Claude.”

“I hear you, Willa Mae, but...” he dropped the bag into her vault and took the chance to whisper “…what can you do? Rules are rules.” He gave a helpless shrug.

Willa helped the woman to a bench along the wall opposite a screen tuned to the Channel. She let her eyes blur over it while the stranger went in and out of consciousness on her shoulder. Back before the war, before Patriot, the medically recommended wait between donations was fifty-six days. This was to ensure that people fully recovered between donations. The absolute earliest that the human body could replenish a unit of blood was twenty-eight days, with many people taking up to three times that. The Harvest had lopped eleven days from the interval, mandating one donated pint every forty-five. If you wanted your government food rations, you showed up. If you didn’t, you starved.

The Harvest alone was enough of a strain. But Patriot had gone a step further, offering cash to people willing to sell even more than the Harvest minimum. Of course, people were drawn in. Robots had taken most of the jobs and the Trade was regarded as something like basic income. Except folks were paying for it with the fruit of their veins. It never ceased to amaze Willa how much people could adapt, walking around in a constant state of hypovolemia just to get a little more coin, wearing symptoms so long that they eventually became character traits. Weakness, fatigue, confusion, clammy skin. Eventually anemia or shock ended the cycle. To Willa it was like state sanctioned Russian roulette, and folks were just spinning the cylinder.

Claude looked at her sideways. She was violating company policy by vacating her stall, but Claude tended to give her wider berth than the others. She had quickly worked her way up to Stall A – the equivalent of first chair in an orchestra – and had never relinquished it. Her gaudy production numbers brought her a certain amount of leniency.

The woman’s hands lay folded against the bench like possum claws; skeletal and dirty, the dwindling meat beneath the skin a ticking clock. Willa had seen it all before, a cycle of destruction that churned through the districts to touch every family.