In view of the racket and the lumpy mattress they have trouble getting to sleep, so Stan hears the tapping at the window immediately. “Yo! Stan!”
Fuck, now what? He draws back the ragged curtain, peers cautiously out. It’s Conor, with his two looming sidekicks watching his back.
“Conor!” he says. “What the fuck?” At least it’s Con and not some lunatic with a crowbar.
“Hi, bro,” says Con. “Come out. I need to talk to you.”
“Fuck, now?” Stan says.
“Would I say
The woman in the suit glances up. What’s she looking at? Her gaze sweeps over them, calm, cool. Then she turns back to her cellphone. Without a phone himself, Stan feels naked: they’d had to turn in their cells at the beginning of the workshop. They’ve been promised new ones, but those will work only inside the wall. Stan wonders when the new ones will be issued.
Ed lowers his voice: serious stuff coming up. Sure enough, on comes a PowerPoint with a slew of graphs. The financial big guns have concealed the true statistics to avoid panic, he says, but a shocking 40 percent of the population in this region is jobless, with 50 percent of those being under twenty-five. That’s a recipe for systems breakdown, right there: for anarchy, for chaos, for the senseless destruction of property, for so-called revolution, which meant looting and gang rule and warlords and mass rape, and the terrorization of the weak and helpless. That is the grim prospect staring everyone in this area right between the eyes. They’ve already noticed the symptoms for themselves, which is – he is sure – why they saw the desirability of signing in.