The organizer pats him on the shoulder. "I'll email your whole batch the details."

...Yeah okay it’s hug time.

Hug. "You're going to do great. And you can always email with any questions."

"I will. Thank you."

That pretty much means it's time to say goodbye to everything. Not everyone, it might take a while but he'll see them again and anyway he can email them. But the neighborhood is going to be destroyed afterward, and so - if there's the slightest chance he'll wish he could check if that weirdly-shaped rust stain feels like anything if you poke it, or get up on the roof and enjoy being on his roof and not some grey building's roof, he'd better do it while he can.

He makes sure to hug his little sister. He skips down every street and pokes a really questionable fraction of the objects. He sorts his possessions, though at first only by writing up lists. Clothing can be washed, though it's old and will only be older when he gets out; he'll need a mostly new wardrobe anyway. His pocket everything can go to his little sister, though not until he's really actually entirely done using it and ready to touch a new one with clean (!) hands. Part of his aquarium could come with him, in theory - the slightly broken plastic bin that's serving as a tank is smooth and nonporous, almost trivial to clean, and the miscellaneous bits of hard plastic with all their sharp edges filed down that make up the cave are too, and the fake plant went through a really thorough scrubbing before being added to the tank and could probably tolerate that again. But the eggs can't and someone else might want to keep one more generation of annual fish; there's probably time for them to live and die before the district empties. He offers his little sister his stuffed axolotl again but she turns him down (he made it for her when she was a baby but she never did care for it much), so he pets it and informs it that it's very difficult to clean but he's going to do that and will only have to replace the stuffing - "and it won't hurt at all since you're lucky enough to be made of cloth and not actually a moral patient" - and cuts some seams and adds the pieces of the empty cover to the list of things to clean. His shoes can be cleaned. His hairpin can be cleaned. His horrible mattress has really belonged in the trash since it first ended up there and only belongs there more now.

He does still have to keep dyeing his hair red for most of the time he's in decontamination, it doesn't take that long to reach the maximum allowed length of non-red roots. He looks at pictures of short, stereotypically grey haircuts. And yellow, why not, might fit with the accent. He asks Citrus for tips on how to make new friends as a grey. He starts looking for apartments.

Citrus thinks that greys make new friends by playing sports together and suggests hanging around courts of various games that require specific numbers so you can volunteer to make up an odd count, or alternately ones that are extremely flexible on that front so you can insinuate yourself into an existing game. Social dance and of course parties and friends of friends are also suggested.

And Citrus can probably also tell him where to find social dances and the rules of various team sports. It’s so convenient like that.

It can super find that.

Grey apartments exist at a range of spaciousnesses and amenities. The bottom of the price range is where he can find little shoebox studios with a bathroom and a loft bed over a table/desk and just enough room for a fridge and a combination toaster/microwave. The ad copy suggests they are mostly for people who hate being indoors and will only grudgingly sleep there.

Wow, simultaneously cozy yet miserable. He’s not picky, he’ll take one of those. Assuming they'll take him.

They want to hear from his previous landlord.

...By phone or by email?

Either works for them.

Great! He has a previous landlord who has an email address.

And what does the previous landlord have to say about his tenancy and relationships with her neighbors?

He makes a habit of paying on time and doesn’t start drama with the neighbors.

Yeah that's most of what they need to know. He can put a deposit down for one of the interchangeable apartments in this block and they'll make sure one's empty for him when he's ready to move in.

He spends a lot of the wait euphoric, skipping anywhere he goes in the district, when the end looms large and freedom feels so close he can almost touch it.

But by the time they're ready to get started what looms large is the nine months of medical procedures it'll take to get there, and he's quiet and careful in the way he gets when he's scared.

The woman on his left is asking earnest questions of the nurses and practicing her orange accent. The guy on his right is trying to scroll through his feed on his everything but keeps bouncing off it and finally settles on trying to make conversation. "So what caste, for you?"

He kind of half listens to the questions and answers; he's interested, or at least would be interested if he were up for feeling things other than nervousness.

"Grey. You?"

"Wow. Better you than me. Purple."

He laughs. "Likewise. Why purple?"

"If I go on a purple employment website it's just full of things that I think I could figure out. Laundry service. Delivery driving. Warehouse picker. Straightforward things like that."

"I guess. I feel that way about orange - not that any of it is straightforward but that half the jobs are the kind of thing I have the aptitude for, but it's all stuff you have to study for a year for and a lot of the studying has to happen in person."

"Well, she seems to have a plan over there," says the future purple, inclining his head toward their neighbor, who has convinced the nurse to let her try depressing the drug plunger.

"Yeah. Hope she can pull it off."

"No kidding. I am here going purple to enable your weird risky gambles, I guess."