Marine Snow

The song seemed to be coming from the direction of the workshop, just beneath the short flight of stairs.

It was Marco's first time on duty outside the manufacturing room. Standing alone in the hallway, he looked more like a mannequin than a human being, his body as stiff as the collar of his freshly ironed shirt. And because his suit and shirt matched the walls' slate grey paint, at first glance, you would have mistaken him for a floating head. Chiyuki had given him a sedative to calm his nerves, but Marco had a creeping suspicion that it was just a glucose pill intended as a placebo. Filled with trepidation and supporting the weight of a jacket that was too large for him, Marco looked like a boy attempting to impersonate a security guard. But then again, he was only fifteen.

Marco had yet to hit puberty. His thin neck looked frail when compared to Tolga's and Yu-ho's, whose voices had already dropped. And because of Marco's thin bones and short stature, which made him the second smallest of his friend group, it seemed that, barring some miracle, he would remain a young boy forever. So, when he told his friends that he wanted to become a security guard, they all reacted with concern; he just wasn't physically cut out for such work, they warned him. But this was the precise reason he chose the profession. What Marco wanted was intense physical training. He'd heard that a year of hard work and training was enough to make even the meekest of boys into strong men. And the rumors weren't wrong. Although Marco didn't know it yet, within a year, he would be the largest of his friend group. But right now, only sixteen days after starting work, he was still undersized.

The cold air in the hallway and the ruckus from the large machine, which rumbled like the pulse of a wild beast, caused Marco to withdraw further into his clothes. Behind him were the inner doors to the manufacturing room, which were made of thick steel, unlike the glass doors in front of him. Marco didn't know why he felt like this, but he had a hunch that the inner doors to the manufacturing room might be the most fortified in the whole underground city.

Production occurred beyond those steel inner doors. The mystery surrounding what Marco had never directly witnessed was, to his imagination, like yeast was to bread. Marco knew very little about how they used the genes stripped from humans to make clones. Did the clones start from eggs and grow inside a surrogate mother's womb, or were farm-grown hearts and brains inserted into ready-made vessels? Or perhaps the bodies were assembled piece by piece on a manufacturing belt. And what happened during quality control, he wondered? Were those with flaws sent to the grinder to be disposed of? And yet, no matter what Marco imagined, one thing never changed: behind those doors, human bodies were being produced, unnaturally. It was for this fact that the steel doors to the manufacturing room felt like the gates of hell. Standing with his back to such a horrifying reality, Marco had to constantly wipe his nervous, sweaty palms on his pants.

Then it came again, the rumbling of the machine. It made the ground and the ceiling shake. The vent on the wall even let out a metallic rattle. Marco had never felt such a disturbance. He peeled his eyelids back into his skull as he stared at the ceiling and studied its cracks, which until now he had never paid much attention to. They looked too thin for anyone to worry about water leaks, but for some reason, Marco could imagine more than just water pouring out of those crevices. Sand, and lots of it. Marco pictured all four hundred fifty million hectares of this underground city being buried in sand.

Until now, Marco had never taken seriously Yu-ho's claims that the city...