For two months, I really felt like I was an adult, and for the first time, I really felt like I was being treated like one.

Maybe it was because I was to busy to get into fist fights anymore, or maybe it was just because I had a big official job, but it was a really good two months.

I’d get up just before dawn like usual to start my chores – I’d go out and take care of the outside dogs, pick up any messes they made during the night, give them a quick brushing and then go and give out little group of animals fresh water and food as well and usually a quick look over to make sure they had all their limbs.

We had a pair of cows, a dozen chickens, three horses, and a couple of goats. There was also a couple of barn cats, but I didn’t include those because I rarely saw the same one more than once, since my Mom had Brick, who weight twenty pounds of pure muscle and fluff and whenever he came out to saunter around for the day, he fucked up any cat that was on our property.

I’d take a shower in the outside unit we washed the animals in because I was usually covered in dog hair and gunk by the time I was done with my morning chores, drying off outside and going up to our room in my towel to open the curtains and give my sisters that I shared a room with their first warning.

I would get changed in our bathroom and then once I was dressed, I would more seriously make an effort to wake the girls up.

At the point, usually Mom would be up and cooking and if I couldn’t get them up easily, I’d go down and get her and she would go get them up herself. Now that Mom was really starting to show with her pregnancy and Mom was starting to get sick from it, Dad was usually cooking and I’d help, the two of us eating while we worked, and once Dad finished making breakfast, he’d go and get the carriage ready while I helped mom get the girls situated for breakfast.

Dad and I would go then, making the ride to Riverside.

Dad would drop me off at the two story building like one street down from where the patriarch of the Vermilion clan was basically living my dream life.

All clan leaders had big houses, but most had big houses on their own big ol’ plot of land. Meanwhile the head of the Vermilion clan had his big house right here in the heart of the city, where there was the theater was literally across the street on his east, and his huge ass church was across the street on his west.

It was really, really freaking amazing.

When I got to work I went to Marybeth’s office to check in with her, and then I’d go to my cubicle, start up my computer and the blood machine, and then get my first two boxes for the day.

I’d be at the desk for probably four or five hours before Marybeth and I usually had lunch in her office, since Marybeth got a call from Big Blue that he didn’t want me out of the building while I was at work (thanks, Big Blue) and then I’d get some bubbly from the machine in the break room, drink that while listening to the radio, and then return to work. There was another four to five hours of work and then once there were no more boxes in the loading room, I’d go to Marybeth and she’d call my Dad or Mom to come pick me up. I’d wait in her office looking out the window at the city until my ride came, and then I’d go home.

Usually, it was about six or seven when I came home, and then it’d be abut dinner time. I usually didn’t have to help, but sometimes I did. Mostly I’d have to help one of the littler girls with their writing homework, but it was pretty good.

I did writing throughout the day, usually when I was having lunch or waiting for my Dad to pick me up. Marybeth let me take a couple five minute breaks throughout the day to write down something I needed to write down, since my day at work didn’t end until I had all the boxes in the loading room processes, which could take an hour longer depending on how often I took a break to work on my story writing.

I had sent a short story into a radio producer and had gotten feed back on it, so I was trying to make the corrections he wanted to it so he could feature it on the weekly mystery show, something that was on after the weekly radio show my entire family – hell, my entire town – all tuned into every single week, Friday at Nine pm, the only night the girls were allowed to stay up past their otherwise strict nine o clock, lights out eyes closed, bed time.

If my short story got accepted, then my story would be read at ten pm.

And that would be really, really cool.

I mean, I’d get paid, which would be nice as well, but my non erotic mysteries were the only ones that had my actual name on them, so I wanted to be read under that name so my dad could finally have something to brag about.

I didn’t give him many things to brag about – working here gave him something, but usually when my Dad was talking about me, it was giving an update on the progress I was making for whatever shit I pulled I had to make amends for.

‘Oh yeah, Ren is almost done rebuilding the fence. He’s going to start painting it tomorrow.’

‘Ren’s actually done paying scrubbing the general store. Here’s to hoping the kids teeth he knocked in were put back in just in time!’

I didn’t care when I was younger, but I was really starting to notice now.

Hopefully though, I’d give him and my family more things to brag about.

I worked on my submission the entire ride to work this morning and read it out to Dad, who hated that I had to get rid of the subplot about the main character's cat, but I was told it would run over time if I kept it in so it had to go.

When I reached work, I thanked dad for the ride before I hurried into work, going up to Marybeth’s office to check in with her. She was reading the Riverside Daily when I poked in, getting caught up before I went to my cubicle.

There were three other cubicles other than mine, but there was never anyone there, oddly.

I worked here every weekday for two months, and I had never seen one other person. I knew they came into work because their cubicles would change slightly from day to day – like there would sometimes be a cup on one of their desks, or their computers would be positioned slightly different, but it was weird.

Any not really any of my business, but weird.

I took my backpack off and hung it on the hook in my cubicle, where there was a tall, narrow locker that I could have used, but like, who was there to steal my shit? Marybeth? The Mayor’s daughter? The goodie girl?

Please.

That was another thing that changed from time to time with the other cubicles – they’d have different locks on their lockers occasionally, so someone for sure would come and work overnight, but I never saw them.

I went and got my first two boxes, stacking them to carry them out of the cold loading room to set them on my desk between my computer and the machine.

I then went through the motions of the same thing I did everyday.

Testing the blood.

It was actually pretty nice how boring it was, gave me time to think on my stories.

There was a beep that was unfamiliar and I frowned, leaning forward to look at my computer and stare at the reports.

Normally the left side would be full of black letter and numbers of codes that came from the blood, explanations, notes, blah blah blah. The right side would be blank unless there was an error code.

I had only gotten two error codes in the time I was here.

My jaw went slack as several of the files flashes, signaling error codes. I opened them up and wrote them down, frowning.

That was a lot of error code – twelve out of the twenty.

I sighed hard, pushing my hand through my hair as I scanned down all the error codes. Shit. They were all the same code, which made it easy, but still. Very, very unusual, and I was told to bring anything unusual to the boss lady so that was exactly what I was going to do.

I stood, rubbing my palms together before I pushed away from my desk and went toward her office down the hall. I gave a short knock before I poked my head in, Marybeth giving me a questioning smile from where she was working on a stake of papers.

“What’s J-N positive?” I asked with a frown.

Her smile fell abruptly. “What?” she asked, her eyes widening a fraction behind her glasses.

“There’s an error code I keep getting. J-N positive?” I frowned.

She frowned and tilted back in her chair, her gaze becoming worried. “You got that code?” She asked, pushing her glasses up her nose. She looked...upset, almost.

I nodded. “I keep getting it. I’ve gotten it twelve out of a twenty batch.”

She seemed to relax then, laughing a little as she shook her head. “If it’s that many in one machine’s batch, that just means we need to clean out the machine – come with me and I’ll show you how to put it through a cycle. Remember when we talked about that on your first day?” She said as she stood, brushing off her long skirt and shrugging off her lab coat to drop it over the back of her chair before she went with me back to the machines.

She got a paper manual out of a drawer the draw of my desk and walked me through the twenty something steps involved in running a cleaning cycle, which I was told she only did once a month on Saturday usually, but if we got an error code to often, then it was wise to just do a cycle. Sometimes a vial could have to much of the mixture they added to the blood to make it something they could read and it could gunk up the machines, she said.

A cleaning cycle took about five minutes and was very loud, and once it done, the machine would be ready for normal use.

After she did a cleaning cycle on one machine, she had me do the cleaning cycle myself on the second machine in my cubicle – one I never used unless the first needed maintenance, since doing two machines at once was what was done with compatibility testing, not health testing. When I showed her I could do it, she told me to just return to what I was doing, taking my sheet and saying that she would have them send new samples for the patients that had been in the dirty machine.

I slowly went and started on the next two boxes, filling the first machine and then waited for them to finish.

When the code came up again on a third of all the samples in the machine, I scowled.

J-N Positive.

J-N Positive.

All the error codes were J-N Positive, whatever that was.

I licked my lips and tapped the screen on the first error message to bring up more details to see if it was a liver failure or heart inflammation error, putting in my administrative code to see it read the error’s details.

During my first week here, Marybeth told me about a bacterial outbreak that had nearly wiped out the entire Olive clan – which at the time only had thirty members – back in the early days of the colony. They had all consumed meat that was from the same herd of infected cows over the winter holiday, and the four pregnant women in the clan at that time all had the same error code signaling liver failure. They were able to save a couple of them, but most died from septic shock a few days later.

Had they of had their blood tested sooner, they might have been given a more aggressive medical treatment.

So it was important to know what the error codes were.

When I got my first of only two error codes in the two months I had worked here, I had checked and the first was heart inflammation, the second being that the mother had a poison in her system that was to small to show symptoms, but was building up in her blood.

That one made the news because her mother in law was trying to poison her.

But when I hit each J-N Positive error code, none were something like a liver failure.

The first read ‘Class A, Male’, the second code reading ‘Class C, Male,’, the third being ‘Class C, Female’ while the forth read ‘Class B, Male’.

What did that mean?