“I thought you only…well, took things out of people. That’s not what you’re here for, right?”
She laughs, and for a second, she almost looks human, despite a bun twisted so tight at the back of her head that her forehead has been pulled taut. “On the contrary. I’m here to help keep things in you. Namely, your dinner. As you’ve no-doubt realized, we keep a small staff of menial laborers here, and we can’t really afford to have any of them out of commission.”
“Oh, well then I’ll just go.” I slide off the table and onto my bare feet. “I’m fine, really. I haven’t actually vomited. I just felt a little woozy earlier.” And I wouldn’t have come in at all, if I’d known she’d be the one to see me. I only reported my little light-headed spell in hopes that a visit to the doctor would give me a better idea of the security measures. Of the layout of this place, outside of the main floor and my dorm room.
Not that I know what I’m looking for. But the more information I have, the better, if I’m going to break Beau out of here. The very thought of which makes me feel light-headed again. What the hell was I thinking, promising him that? I don’t know how to break someone out of prison! Especially someone who can hardly open his eyes, much less stand up and run.
“You look a little pale, so let’s just give you a once-over.”
I try to control my panic while Dr. Borden gives me what feels like an absurdly thorough exam, which ends with her pricking my finger with a pen-shaped device.
A few seconds later, the device beeps, and she reads a line of text scrolling across the small screen. “Well, you’re a little anemic. That could account for the dizzy spell. I’m going to prescribe a vitamin with iron in it, and I want you to take it every day. If the dizziness persists, let me know. And iron supplements make some women sick to their stomach, so let me know if that happens, too. Other than that, everything looks pretty good.”
“And if there were something wrong with me? What would happen? Would you roll me out of here, straight down to the main floor?”
Dr. Borden looks surprised by my question, and she’s not the only one. I had no intention of asking. The words just kind of…came out.
“Of course not. If you weren’t in good health, you wouldn’t be a good candidate for organ donation, Ms. Mathern. Beyond that, we don’t just take random prisoners and ‘roll’ them onto the main floor. All convicts are given an initial physical after they’re convicted, as they’re processed into the justice system. Universal Authority uses that physical to assess their health and mark anyone who tests positive for a communicable disease. For the safety of his or her fellow prisoners.
“Our donors are selected during that process. When their bloodwork is uploaded into our system, it is automatically flagged if it’s determined to be a match for a patient in dire need of a particular transplant. After that transplant is completed, obviously we try to save as many more lives as we can, with the material that’s been donated to us.”
“The material? You mean the human being who’s been donated to you?”
“But we don’t just pull them in at random from the general prisoner population,” she continues, as if I never even spoke.
“How is that legal?” I demand. “How is it legal for you to just steal organs from prisoners against their will?”
“It isn’t stealing. It’s appropriating,” she insists. “But the truth is that our process isn’t legal everywhere. In fact, there are only a few planets that support what we do with official legislation, and I assure you those are the only planets our donors come from.”
A few…
“So, all those people out there…? Their homewards sold them to you? I mean, everyone involved is profiting from this, right? Everyone but the prisoners?”
“It might help for you to think about it like this: every sentence on Rhodon is either a death sentence or a life sentence, which eventually becomes a death sentence. None of the convicts who arrive here will ever leave this planet. And that’s a huge waste of viable living tissue. Tissue that can and does save the lives of innocent people. Children, even. So some global governments have seen fit to pass legislation legalizing the appropriation of viable prisoner tissue, in cases when that prisoner has no right to an appeal and will never be released.” She waves one hand at the far wall, as if to take in the entire planet. “All those lives out there are wasted. The prisoners have practically thrown themselves away. We’re giving them purpose. We’re saving the lives of law-abiding citizens who will go on to contribute to societies all over the galaxy.”
“You’re killing some people to save others. Choosing who lives and who dies, as if that’s up to you to decide!” Chills roll over me as the reality of that horror sinks in.
“We’re…reapportioning life, in favor of those who will live it in accordance with the law,” Dr. Borden insists. “And every prisoner who dies here in zone twelve saves between three and eight lives on other planets. So you can see that what we do here is for the greater good. Math doesn’t lie, Ms. Mathern.”
“And what do you do with them when you’re done with them? The donors, I mean. The ‘wasted lives?’”
“When we’ve made use of what biological material we can, they are euthanized in a painless procedure. The click of a single button. Then their bodies are donated to medical research, shipped to a Universal Authority laboratory off-world. Nothing is wasted, you see. They’re given a purpose, even in death.”
Now I really do feel like I’m going to puke. “That’s what they are to you? Just biological material?”
“That’s what they’ve turned themselves into. They made the choices that put them here. Universal Authority—my staff and I—are simply trying to save lives with material that would otherwise go to waste.”
For a moment, I can only stare at her. Stunned. “Is that what you think of us too? Of me and the other convicts who work here? That we’ve thrown our lives away?”
But…wasn’t that exactly what I’d done?
“If that were what I thought, you wouldn’t be here. This place is a second chance for you, Katerina,” Dr. Borden insists, and I realize that’s the first time she’s addressed me by my first name. “For all of you. You were selected because you still have something to offer.”
“But Jack said—” My mouth snaps shut when I realize I might be getting him in trouble.
“Jack said what?”
Dr. Borden looks more curious than angry, so I decide to answer. “He said that there are more female inmates than male inmates working here because the guards… Well, most of them like women.”
She crosses her arms over the front of her lab coat. “While that assessment of the guards’ sexual orientation might be accurate, it has nothing to do with which inmates are chosen to work here in zone twelve. Take Jack, for example. He was a nurse, in his life before prison. A good one. He certainly has something to offer, in a place like this.”
“But you’re not using him as a nurse.”
“No, but in an emergency, he’d know exactly what to do, to save a life. And his experience makes him highly capable of caring for the donors on the main floor.”
“So, let me guess. Nan was a chef and Lara was a janitor before they were arrested? That’s why you have them serving slop and emptying trash cans?”
“Not exactly. But like you, they had something to offer, and we decided to let them. Considering the alternative, I hope they’re all appropriately grateful.”
“They are. We all are.” But that doesn’t make us okay with the fact that Borden and her staff are cutting up prisoners like Beau and selling the parts off to people who can presumably afford to pay for whatever a setup like this must cost. “Do they…the donors, I mean. Do they know what’s happening to them?” Beau does, of course. But I really need to know whether or not the staff knows that. “Are they…aware?”
For the first time since I started asking questions, Dr. Borden looks uncomfortable. “I think we’re done here. There’s a guard waiting ou
tside to escort you back to your dorm room.”
She’s not going to answer. Which means that Beau isn’t the only one who understands what’s happening to him—and that Borden and her staff damn well know it.
“They are, aren’t they?” I demand, my voice soft with horror. “They’re aware. You know they’re aware, and you’re just…okay with that? Isn’t there something you can do? Some way to spare them the hell they’re living in, trapped in their own minds, just waiting to have another organ cut out of them? Or some more skin peeled off? Do you have any idea what that must be like for them?” I could hardly even wrap my mind around that kind of torture. “How can you do that to them? Isn’t that against some oath you took as a doctor?”
Dr. Borden exhales slowly. “Donor awareness is an unfortunate necessity. One we’ve—”
“Why? Why would that be necessary?”
“We discovered years ago that keeping the donors in medical comas led to complications down the line, for our recipients. Organs donated by donors in long-term comas have a higher risk of rejection by the recipients’ bodies, as well as a higher rate of infection. They also require higher doses of anti-rejection drugs. It’s better for our recipients if our donors are kept as healthy as possible. Which is the same reason we employee you and Jack to keep them clean and exercise them.”
“Better for the recipients. Who gives a shit if that’s not better for the donors, huh? After all, they’re just prisoners.”
“We’re serving the greater good, Ms. Mathern.”
“You’re serving your own bank account. Or at least, that’s what UA is doing. Right? I mean, this isn’t a charity, is it? I’m assuming all your recipients are pretty well-off?”
She blinks at me in silence for a second. “Does that make them any less worthy of good health?”
“So, you’re saying it’s okay to sacrifice the lives of criminals for the lives of the wealthy?”
“I’m saying nothing of the sort. You’re the only one here who’s passing moral judgments.”
“Then why are you telling me all of this? If you’re not passing moral judgement, why are you trying to justify all this to a prisoner?”
Dr. Borden exhales slowly. “Because you’re not wrong, Ms. Mathern. We are sacrificing the lives of the few for the lives of the many. For the greater good. And I recognize that that’s not fair to those few, out there on the main floor. I don’t celebrate that fact. But I do have to live with it. And obviously that bothers me more than I thought it did.”
“They call you the butcher, you know.”
Her expression goes cold. As if she’s just flipped some kind of switch. “The inmates?”
“No. The staff. That’s what they call you when you’re not there. The butcher.”
Something unpleasant flickers behind her eyes. The line of her jaw tightens. “Goodnight, Ms. Mathern. Please let me know if you have another dizzy spell or any nausea from the iron supplement.” With that, she taps the panel by the door, and it slides open. “Please escort Ms. Mathern back to her dormitory room,” she says to the guard on her way out.
When I step into the hall, I see that my escort is Officer Tinsley.
“Sorry to hear you’re sick,” he says as we begin walking toward the end of the hall, away from the staff medical facilities.
“I’m not. It was just a dizzy spell. Borden overreacted.” How can she care so much about my stupid vertigo, and so little about the donors under her care?
In the morning, the MRE dispenser spits out a vitamin tablet in a sealed packet along with my breakfast. I swallow it with my juice, between bites of oatmeal.
“What’s wrong with you?” Lara asks when I set my pouch down, having only eaten half my breakfast. “Still feeling bad?”
“I’m fine. Just not hungry.” All I can think about is Beau and the other donors, and how they’ll never eat anything again. Or sit, or stand, or speak again. Most of them couldn’t survive on their own, even if someone shut this place down tomorrow, because they’re being kept alive with machinery functioning in place of vital organs.
Yet Beau… He can live without one kidney and half of his liver. He could be fine—if I could get him out of here before they take something more vital. But I have no idea how to get him off the planet, even if I could get him out of bed and off the main floor.
Still, I have to try. So for the next week, I bide my time and focus on my surroundings, learning the interns’ schedules and the guards’ routines.
According to Ava, the women from the dorm room next to ours work as custodians in the other zone twelve building, but I decide to concentrate on the security situation here, because I’m trying to break Beau out of this building, not into another one.
The staff in this building is small, and I’m able to identify several potential weaknesses in the security, most notably, the fact that the guards—there are only a dozen or so of them—don’t expect any trouble from the inmates. They’re all twice the size of most of the female inmates and quite a bit bigger than both Jack and Logan, who have small frames. Which is probably part of why they were selected for their jobs.
The other weakness is Tinsley himself. His crush on Nanette distracts him from his duties.
While I assume there’s a larger staff upstairs, on the surgical floor, the main floor employs only four interns, that I’ve seen, along with two nurses and Dr. Herrington. They make rounds in the morning, and the nurses come back to check on specific post-op donors again in the afternoon. But for the rest of the day, they’re either doing paperwork in the office suite or they’re upstairs, assisting with surgery. Which is why Jack and I are usually alone on the main floor unless one of the monitors beeps. In which case Herrington and at least one nurse come running.
I think that if I can get Beau out of bed without alerting anyone, we’d stand a decent shot of getting off the main floor, assuming I can create a distraction to keep Herrington and his staff busy. And I have an idea for that. But I have no clue what to do after we escape the main floor. We need a way out of zone twelve. Off the planet, actually. Which means we need a ship.
I’ve never flown anything long-range, but I have a couple years’ experience as a shuttle pilot, from a job I had a couple of years ago. I’m pretty sure I can figure out the long-range thing, if I can get my hands on a ship.
But the more immediate problem is Beau himself. He hasn’t been out of bed in nearly a month, according to the chart on his headboard. He’s going to need time for the sedative to work its way out of his system before I can stand him up. And after that, he’ll probably need some time to readjust to being on his feet. To regain strength and coordination, after so long on his back.
Which means I’m going to have to find some place for us to hide out for a little while, once I get him off the main floor.
I peek through every open door into every open room while I study my obstacles and make my plans. And while I’m on the main floor, I whisper to Beau every chance I get.
For the first couple of days, I get no response. By now, I’ve become familiar with the standard dosages of all the standard medications, from seeing them flash on various monitors all day long, and I can tell with one glance at Beau’s monitor that he’s on high doses of both pain medication and the sadistic sedative that keeps the donors groggy and unable to move. Prisoners in their own butchered bodies, essentially. And those high dosages seem to be pretty normal, for donors who’re immediately post-operation. But I talk to him anyway, convinced that he can hear me, even if he’s actually asleep.
After a couple of days, Dr. Herrington scales back Beau’s medication, and I begin to see his lips twitch as I wash him and exercise his limbs. As I talk to him. I don’t dare tell him what I’m planning, in case someone overhears. But even without revealing my plot, I notice that his pulse and heart rate slow a little when I’m with him. As if just hearing my voice helps him relax.
That thought warms me from the inside. For the first time in my life, I’m doing
something that actually matters. That might just be making someone else’s life a little better.
I want to make Beau’s life a lot better. I want to get to know him, beyond his sweet little half-smile. Beyond his criminal record and a stunning physique that seems to be largely resisting the deterioration of immobility. So far.
But all I can do for now is talk to him, and keep checking his—
Fuck.
My finger hovers over the screen built into his headboard and all the blood drains from my face.
“What’s wrong?” Jack asks from one row over, having noticed the sudden pause in my chatter.
“Nothing.” I don’t want to tell him, because I don’t want Beau to overhear what I’ve just read in his file. So instead, I pull the sheet back up to Beau’s shoulders and push my sponge bathing cart toward the sink on the other side of the main floor, motioning with a subtle toss of my head for Jack to come with me.
He finishes with his own charge, then falls in behind me, his cart squeaking horribly. “What is it?” he asks as we refill our basins, low enough that the running water would cover his voice, if anyone were near enough to overhear.
“They just took half of Beau’s liver last week, but he’s already scheduled for four more procedures. All on the same day, next week.”
“Shit,” Jack breathes. “Sounds like they put him in the bargain bin.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s like a going out of business sale. You know, ‘everything must go.’ Did you happen to notice what they’re taking out of him next week?”
“No,” I admit. “I was too busy being horrified.”
“Well, I bet you my dinner tonight that the last thing on the list is his heart, or his lungs, or something he can’t live without. Once they schedule something like that, they try to take everything else that can be used, in advance of euthanasia.”
“Oh shit. Oh shit.” I’m breathing too fast. I think I’m going to vomit.
“Calm down, Kat.” Jack’s voice is low-pitched and soothing—he probably had a great bedside manner, before prison. “He’s no different from any of the others. You don’t really know him, no matter how it feels.”
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