She greeted Isaiah with a suffocating embrace that made him lose whatever game he was playing on his old viewer and he grumbled an objection.

Claude, who had come over to keep an eye on Isaiah, politely passed on a dinner invitation. She couldn’t blame him. He was a station supervisor and didn’t have to eat from The Box like everyone else. The Box – a literal box of prepackaged food – was provided by Patriot to residents of the blood districts who maintained one-hundred percent participation in the Harvest. The idea had been sold as a way to streamline subsistence programs. Instead of going to the store and picking out groceries for yourself and your family, the government picked them for you. Processed mystery meats and condensed dairy, sickly sweet canned fruit cocktails, powdered grains. On lucky weeks, a handful of oat cubes or tea. Many lowblood families relied on The Box completely. With her job, Willa leaned on it as a supplement, but few were able to live entirely Box free. She’d pass on it too if she could.

She and Isaiah ate genmod pasta prepared with a splash of black-market vinegar, topped with the last of some dehydrated poultry cubes that she’d managed to stretch over a full week. She stirred her bowl until they puffed into something that resembled the meat they had once been, and took small bites, chewing deliberately to make it all last. Isaiah devoured without ceremony.

A thought occurred to her, curiosity in the wake of her encounter at SCS, that she might tune to The Patriot Report. The show, which aired in place of the local news, touted Patriot’s blood collection statistics and good deeds. Willa considered it a painfully tacky program, tortuously drawn out to thirty minutes in length, and cast in the mold of an old lotterydrawing segment complete with a shiny host yammering on through billboard teeth. The company served a vital role but bragging about it in such an ostentatious fashion left a bad taste. The fringes of the country were at war. People were suffering.

Swallowing her disgust, she turned it on, drawing Isaiah to the screen like a moth to a porchlight. Another reason she rarely watched anything.

“Isaiah, please,” she said, yanking him back a reasonable distance. “It’s nothing good.”

Tanned darker than a roast turkey, the host was flanked by two scantily-clad assistants who held up digital posters announcing the statistics for every precinct within each of the four city segments. Willa did a double take. Setting her dinner to the side, she paused the screen and quickly added the figures. Southern City Segment was reporting a full take, highest in the city.