A happy story. While the practiced, mildly amused look, as if someone had just whispered an unpleasant joke about a person within her vicinity and now she was trying not to laugh, stayed on Constance’s face, there was hints of strain around the corners of her eyes and the edge of her lips. It had been a bluff, really. She had assumed Edward would’ve been like most other reporters and chased after something harrowing or exciting or scandalous instead of falling into the trap of publishing feel-good interest pieces that generally led to a decline in readership. Now she was stuck; she didn’t really have any happy stories, at least none that ended well for all parties involved. She cleared her throat and strung together a few words that sounded as if she was about to start something despite having no clue what to say, a thankful interruption from the intercom buying her another few precious moments to rack her brain for something from her life that she could spin positively.

“Okay, I got you one,” she said with a snap of her fingers and a gesture towards Edward. “A sort of rags-to-riches story. People love those ones, don’t they?” If she attended for the question to be answered, she didn’t give them a chance. “I maybe the great granddaughter of the Devil Diver James Holloway, but even when he was alive his family never had much wealth and, well, disappearing is a good way to let your loved ones be torn apart by the teeth of loansharks.” It was a tactic she had been accused of using before. She laughed lightly, although there was a hint of bitterness in her voice, and shook the thought from her head. “By the time I was born our family wasn’t just destitute, they were practically revelling in their poverty. I could never understand as a girl how my parents could never scrape together enough coins to properly feed us yet how my mother always seemed to find herself a bottle and my father always seemed to find a buy-in for a card game.”

“In the Bottoms—my hometown, Edgenook, sorry—there was only one way a child could really survive, and that was by working. Mostly in factories, even if they paid you rubbish and treated you as if rubbish was what you were. They’d deduce wages at the slightest offense; for slacking off, for talking, for breaking a product, for getting caught in the machines.” Constance looked out towards the horizon, as if she was trying to forget factory life, and then continued, “Another way to survive was to band together with other children and do whatever was necessary. Beg. Steal. Threaten. Most of them acted out of desperation, but I saw enough of them that actually enjoyed it that to this day I’m certain I’ll never have a child.”

“I just worked in the factories, but I had plenty of friends who went the other route. They were forced to do it, actually, because they weren’t allowed to work in the factories. Mostly for their fault, I guess—got caught stealing food from the foreman’s office, talked back to their supervisors, that sort of thing—although I remember there was one who had lost an arm to a set of gears at work and they fired him because he could no longer properly do his job. However, I must’ve felt bad for them; I practically begged Paxton to let me give them a hand.”

She paused abruptly and turned her head. That was a name she hadn’t spoken aloud in a long time, and for good reason. Any story involving Paxton was, by definition, an unhappy one. Reflexively, her teeth peeled back her lower lip and her eyes narrowed, only for her to quickly correct herself with a few blinks and a polite laugh. 

“Anyway,” she said, sucking in air and then rushing through the next words, “it turns out that the real way someone survives in the Bottoms is to get out of it, and that’s what I did once I had saved up enough money through hard work and dedication. I was fortunate enough to meet a businessman who saw my potential, yadda yadda yadda, and now I can buy up all the factories in the Bottoms if I wanted to—except they aren’t really profitable, so, well, you know.” 

She smiled, and then quickly moved to change the subject before anybody could point out how phony the rushed ending of her “happy” story felt. “Luna, I must say that you did an absolutely fantastic job of patching me up; Officer Raoul hardly did anything at all except talk my ear off. I swear, it was ready to jump overboard. Most girls I know just become nurses with hopes of finding a way to worm themselves into a doctor’s heart and, well, his pocketbook, but I can tell that isn’t your case. But still, it seems like an awful amount of work for almost no recognition—Raoul pretty much broke his hand patting himself on his back for the job you had done. I must say, I was rather bothered by it. I don’t know if I could stand someone taking credit for my hard work.”

“I have to ask,” said Constance with a mischievous glint in her eyes, “does that sort of thing happen often in your line of work? I’m sure Eddy’s curious, too, aren’t you, Eddy?”