I had been assigned to her for years when I asked her for the first time. It was evening, the cameras were off, and I felt safe. No one would be any wiser. I would not be labeled a traitor that night, and my curiosity would be sated. Hopefully. She stopped fiddling with the stencil, the bright overhead light reflecting off the skyblue of her mask, shiny.
"What do you mean, do I know that I'm being used?"
I brushed my fingers over the tail end of a scalpel, registering someone must have forgotten to send it down to be sterilized. Turned the words over in my head. Tried to make sense of how to ask in a way she would understand.
"Nevermind."
She didn't trun back around, the glaring light throwing weird patterns off her mask into the room, considering. Thoughtful.
"I find it ironic," she decided. "It's ironic, that I, one of the only ones who fell through the saftey net of this system, not by choice but by birth, should be the only one who can help those who fall through due to their own choices. That I, as someone who can never love, should be the one to restore that power to people who decided to throw it away."
She was about to turn back to her document when I blurted, "But doesn't it bother you? Being used to uphold the system that makes you a cast-out by law?"
"Not anymore," she said, already immersed in stenciling more of the little ridges into the paper, fingers following to check for mistakes. "there is no point in being angry, you know? I've made the best out of the cards I've been dealt, I have more value to your society than anyone else could truly achieve. Besides, my mother always used to say that, if I know someone is using me, yet I actively choose to let them for my own gain, who is really being manipulated, me, or them?"
"The more you tell me about your mother, the more I become convinced she was a real psychopath."
"Loving what cannot stay tends to do that to people. But I'm thankful that she was. I wouldn't be who I am, otherwise. And what would this world be without its blue angel?"
"Doomed, probably," I laughed, as she finally finished the page and turned to tuck it away in the newest blue binder.
Years later, when she vanished between shifts at the center, this was the conversation I kept coming back to. This one memory, that reminded me she knew much more than she ever let on, and made me all the more cautious when issuing the search warrant. Because I knew, that while everything pointed to a kidnapping, she had always known how to be hungry for more. She had always known we would crumble if she left.