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At eight in the morning, Sharron slowly opened her eyes.
Her blue eyes gazed hazily at the cloth-patched hole in the "roof." After a while, she silently looked away.
Sharron lived in an abandoned carriage compartment. Since it was relatively intact, she had claimed it by force.
She slept on the carriage seat, which was about half a meter wide and less than two meters long. When she slept, she spread bedding over it and curled up to rest. At other times, she took the bedding down to use as a cushion and used the seat as a table.
The compartment was so small that Sharron could not even stand upright.
Beneath the seat's lift-up top was a small cabinet. But Sharron did not want to put anything inside, because it was dark and damp and bred all sorts of disgusting bugs.
Instead, she had nailed a wooden board to the wall of the little compartment to hold her clothes-she currently had only two sets, two of the simplest coarse-cloth dresses, and a white apron. Everyone had only two changes of clothes and a standard set of personal belongings. The Rose School members who came here had to abide by the creed of "temperance and thrift" while working.
Sequence 5s like them had almost inexhaustible strength and needed very little food, making them highly welcome laborers. Maric had been dragged into the construction crew as soon as he arrived. After participating in a series of infrastructure projects, he had built himself a small wooden house. It was not particularly big, with one wooden frame for a bed and another for a table. Though terribly crude, it at least gave him shelter from the elements.
Sharron, however, had not taken part in digging, turning the soil, farming, draining sewage, or