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by Mira Grant

  “Yes, sir,” said the woman—Jill, her name was Jill—before starting to unstrap me. Her hands were trembling. I couldn’t blame her. Somehow, this didn’t strike me as the friendliest of working environments.

  “Besides, she’s not going to make any trouble for me, are you, Ginger?” The man grinned at his own joke, displaying surprisingly white, even teeth. “She’s a smart little thing. She’d have to be, to have made it this far from civilization. Not too smart, however. She would have chosen a different route and less breakable traveling companions if she’d been too smart.”

  My heart sank at the mention of my traveling companions. I forced it back up again. They weren’t dead. They weren’t dead. I wouldn’t allow it. I sat up as soon as the straps allowed, making a show of rubbing my wrists, like they’d been chafed.

  “I’m not here to make trouble,” I said. My change of position had answered the question of what I was wearing: My sundress was gone, replaced by a white sports bra and a pair of running shorts. Good gear for working out. Not good gear for much of anything else. Still, under the circumstances, I was grateful. I could as easily have been naked. “Sorry to have blundered into your hunting party, or whatever that was out there. If you’d return my people and my vehicle, we’d be thrilled to get out of your hair. We won’t come back, I promise.”

  The man blinked, looking like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Then, to my annoyance—and relief, which annoyed me even more—he burst out laughing. “Oh, I like you, Ginger. You have a sense of humor. You have no idea how rare that is around here.”

  “Given that you’ve had me shoved into a cadaver drawer for the last little while, I’m not even at my best right now,” I said. Finding the right balance between cocky and insulting was never my strongest suit. I wished desperately for Mat. Mat would have been better at walking this tightrope, saying the right things without crossing the line and going too far. “Look, I don’t mean to be a bother, but we have somewhere we need to be. It’s quite important we make it to the Canadian border before the elections.” Once the elections were over, we’d know how much trouble we were really in. If Ryman won, the Masons would draw the majority of the attention. If Kilburn won…

  People might start wondering about our conveniently timed deaths. They might start asking why no one ever found the bodies.

  “Then you’re in luck, because the elections aren’t for months,” said the man, with another flash of those straight white teeth. “I’m Clive. This is my place. While you’re here, what I say is what goes, and what I say is that you’re going to stop asking about things that don’t concern you anymore. You’re going to be staying with me for a while, Ginger.”

  He reached out and gripped my chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting my head back until my eyes were locked on his. I didn’t look away. I didn’t dare. When a man like this started throwing his weight around, it was better to hold my breath and ride it out.

  “You’re pretty,” he said. “I like the way you roll your ‘r’s. Makes me think you must have a clever tongue. If you can learn to control it, we might be able to make a go of it.” He shoved me when he let go, sending me back down to the bunk where I’d been strapped. I managed not to cry out when I hit the metal, still warm from the weight of my body. It was a near thing.

  “Get her cleaned up and explain how things work around here,” he said to Jill. “I’ll be back.” He turned and strode toward the door, leaving us alone.

  “What—” I began. Jill’s eyes widened and she held up her hand, signaling me to silence. I closed my mouth and waited.

  After a count of twenty, Jill’s shoulders relaxed. “He always waits a few seconds,” she said. “It lets him be sure the people he’s walking away from don’t immediately start plotting against him. I think he read it in a book of management tips somewhere, that if people are going to talk behind your back, they’ll do it quickly, before they lose their nerve. He likes self-help books. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he does.”

  I pushed myself upright again, giving her a bemused look. “You’re talking a blue streak, but you don’t seem to actually be saying anything,” I said. “Where am I? What is this place? Where are my friends?” The last question was really the only one that mattered, and the only one I was afraid of having answered. If they were dead…

  Well, if they were dead, I could burn this whole place down, and not worry overly much about whether or not I made it out. I wasn’t the suicidal sort, but some things were worth risking for a good revenge.

  “The man you came in with is in general holding. The woman has been removed for further study,” said Jill, her eyes darting to the side. “When you hit your head—”

  “You mean when the people who pulled me out of the car slammed my head into the pavement, after shooting another of my friends dead,” I corrected gently.

  “Um. Yes, that. When you got hurt, the woman started saying she was a doctor and trying to get to you. If she was telling the truth, she’s valuable, and she won’t be hurt. If she was lying to make them spare her, she’s… she’s in trouble.” Jill swallowed as she turned back to me. “Clive doesn’t like liars. He says someone who lies once will lie again, no matter how good their reasons may have seemed in the beginning. So liars don’t get to stay here for very long.”

  “And I’m guessing, from the look on your face, that they don’t get to walk away clean and easy,” I said, with a grimace. “Well, Audrey’s a real doctor, so I suppose she’ll be valuable to you lot. I’m still going to want her back before I go. Both of them. I’m attached to them, you see, and I can’t really see walking off and leaving them behind.”

  Jill laughed, taking a step backward. “I can’t tell whether you’re brave or just stupid, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re not going anywhere. What Clive wants, he takes, and what he takes, he keeps. This is home now. What kind of home it is, well, that’s up to you. It can be a pretty nice one. It can also be hell on earth. It’s your call either way.”

  “No, see, that doesn’t work for me.” The throbbing in my head seemed to be the whole of the pain: Nothing else had been damaged when I was taken. Maybe there was something to be said for concussions. “We’re on our way somewhere, and while this is a fascinating pit stop for our memoirs, it’s not the sort of place that winds up holding our bones. We’ve escaped from bigger men than your boss. It’s in everybody’s best interests if we’re just allowed to go on our merry way, and we won’t make any trouble for those of you who choose to stay here.”

  Jill gaped at me, openmouthed and disbelieving, before she began slowly shaking her head. “I can’t tell if you’re thick or just stubborn, but the end result is going to be the same: your head on a pike.”

  “My issue is that you can utter that sentence without seeing how bloody idiotic you sound,” I shot back. “Where are we? How did we get here? Where are my people, and how do I get us out of here?”

  “God forbid you listen for two seconds.” She turned and began rummaging through a black bag on the nearest counter. “What’s your vaccination status? Any recent infections or illnesses? Are you on a contraception implant, and if so, which one?”

  “To answer your last question first, I’m a lesbian, so contraception has never been high on my list of things to do.” I tried to make my answer sound airy and unconcerned, but she was rattling me. Usually, my steamroller approach to diplomacy is enough to gain me a little ground, even if it doesn’t always get me what I actually want. Jill seemed to be shaking off every attempt I made at forward momentum, locked as she was in her own version of whatever all this was.

  She turned and looked at me flatly. “You’re an Irwin, aren’t you? There was a license tag in your things when they brought you in, you’ve got a lot of minor scarring on your knees, fingers, and palms, and you have the skin tone of someone born pale and kept pale by high quantities of sunscreen, rather than indoor isolation like the rest of us. The bleach damage to your hair is too extens
ive to be explained by normal washing, which means you’ve gone through a lot of decontamination cycles. Either you’re an Irwin or you’re with a governmental group—and I assume that if your group was here to try infiltrating us, we’d be meant to keep the Chinese woman. That would make you the expendable brute force. You’re a terrible bruiser. Too short, too skinny, too wearing a floral dress when they pulled you off the road.”

  “Her name is Audrey, she’s my girlfriend, and we’re not here to infiltrate you; we don’t even know where ‘here’ is,” I said. “We’re heading for the Canadian border, as I’ve said. Repeatedly.”

  “You were heading for the Canadian border,” said Jill. There was a hint of sympathy in her tone, like she wasn’t happy to be the one hammering this point through my thick skull. “This is where you are now, and if you want to live long enough to see your friends again, you’re going to start answering my questions. Do you have a contraceptive implant or not?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, sullenly. “Five-year, standard issue from the nice folks at Immigration. It was supposed to keep me from giving birth to an American citizen before they’d finished processing my paperwork and decided they were going to let me stay.” It all smacked a bit of xenophobia and paranoia to me—even Ireland didn’t insist on temporarily sterilizing their new citizens while things went through proper channels—but as I’d never intended to have a child with Ben, I hadn’t protested as loudly as I could have. Besides, not having to suffer through my period anymore was a joy, especially for someone who spent as much time in the field as I did.

  “How much time does it have left to run?”

  It would run out in six months. There was something I hadn’t considered: What was I going to do when it ran out? Not that I was suddenly going to turn heterosexual and start romping about with all the boys in Dublin, but I didn’t know how long we were going to be trapped in Canada before we could find a plane to take us to Ireland, and menstruation was messy, difficult, and smelled of blood. Most normal humans couldn’t detect it if the person doing the bleeding kept their trousers on. The infected, with their increased sensitivity toward both the living and the smell of blood, could. If we were still in Canada in six months, without a permanent residence with walls thick enough to keep the dead out, our lives were going to get a lot harder.

  I opened my mouth to answer.

  Jill cut me off.

  “Wow, the full five years? That’s rough. I mean, good thinking having your meds topped off before you went out into the field, but Clive’s not going to be thrilled to hear that even if he sweet-talks his way into your panties, he won’t be getting any little redheaded babies for a while.” She produced a capsule injector from her bag, and mouthed ‘Hold out your arm.’

  My eyes widened as I put two and two together and came up with the potential that she was going to help me—help us—after all. I stuck my arm out, only tensing a little as I asked, “Is he the sort who takes what he wants, then?”

  “Yes and no.” The barrel of the injector was cool against my skin. She knew her stuff: Without prodding, she chose an injection site several inches above the spot where the Immigration Authority had inserted my last implant. I was briefly worried about the effects of getting a double dose for the next six months, and then decided I had much, much better things to be worried about. “He wanted your group and so he took you. He wanted a lot of the things you had—you had some great medications, thank you for those—and so he took them. But if you’re asking whether you need to be worried about him pushing the issue, no. That’s the one area where he’ll take no for an answer.”

  There was a brief stinging sensation as she shot the contraceptive implant into my arm. She pulled the injector away, looked critically at the already-bruised circle of skin, and handed me a gauze pad.

  “Put this on and tape it down,” she said brusquely. “If anyone asks what happened, it’s one of your injuries from the road. If you point the finger at me, no one’s going to believe you.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “In general, or with this?” Her expression hardened. “Clive won’t force you. He won’t slip anything into your drink or put his hand up your skirt to see what kind of underpants you’re wearing. His ego won’t let him resort to that. But he’ll pursue, and he’ll do it a lot more energetically if he thinks you’re fertile. He’s an empire builder, is Clive. He wants an army of little Clives to be running around long after he’s gone. A woman who might be able to bear his children, it doesn’t matter how beautiful she is, she’ll be essentially off-limits to everyone—and I do mean everyone—until he’s sure it’s never going to happen. Or, in your case, until her implant wears off. He’ll want to know that you’re healthy and STI-free when that day finally comes.”

  “Won’t he just dig the implant out of my arm?” I’d heard of that happening when good Catholic girls visited countries with less restrictive rules about birth control and came home ready to have sex for reasons other than procreation. Some people thought it was a hoax, but I’d seen the scars.

  “No,” said Jill. “We don’t believe in unnecessary medical procedures here. Infection is enough of a risk that we try not to cut people open when we don’t have to. I really do hope your friend is an actual doctor, and not just telling stories. We need all the help that we can get.”

  “She’s a doctor,” I said. “A good one.” Or she had been, to have been recruited by the EIS. The fact that she hadn’t practiced in years was beside the point. Please, let her remember how to do the things they’re going to ask her to do.

  “Then she’ll probably be all right.” Jill thrust a piece of paper at me. “Write down all your vaccinations, and when you had them. Try to be as precise as you can. We’ll get them updated, and then we’ll follow up with a full physical exam. Once that’s done, we can talk about what your life here is going to be like.”

  I took the paper and began writing. Protests seemed useless. What I needed now was a plan, a means of getting the hell out of here while we were all still breathing.

  When I was done, Jill plucked the paper from my hand, scanned it, and offered me a tight smile. “Excellent. I’ll prepare the injections. In the meantime, welcome to the Maze. It can be a bit of an adjustment, but I think you’re going to learn to like it here.”

  “And if I don’t?” I asked.

  She looked at me with tired eyes. “Then your life just got a hell of a lot harder, because you’re not going anywhere.”

  I saw a calendar this morning. I think I wasn’t supposed to—we’re not meant to know or care about what time of year it is, because it’s not like we’re ever going to see the sun again. We’re not worthy of the outside. (And I wonder how many rich assholes would think this was the perfect society, just with the status markers flipped. Let the most prestigious live in their rat holes while the proletariat venture forth to bring them back the things they want and need. Morlocks and Eloi for a new world. H.G. Wells got so much right, even in the process of getting so much wrong.) But my work group was passing through the medical center, and someone had left a door open, and I saw a calendar.

  It’s been more than a year since we buried my mother.

  I barely have the mental acuity to wrap my mind around that thought. I’m writing this longhand on a yellow legal pad that I bartered from one of the janitors, and I know the guards read every word while I’m at work, because they leave thumbprints on the margins and make nasty comments about how I should save my strength, and none of that matters. Let them mock me as much as they want. It won’t change the fact that I’m a prisoner, and it won’t bring back my mother, or tell my sister I’m alive. As far as Governor Kilburn is concerned, we’re in Canada and long gone by now. If she thinks it’s strange that we stopped posting before we “died,” well, she probably has better things to worry about. The campaign is still going. Elections aren’t until November, and she has a long road ahead of her.

  I’m not worried about Clive—the man who runs
this place—figuring out who we are and trying to ransom us back to the governor. We’ve been very clear about the fact that she sent us away, and that she wouldn’t pay to get us back. (I recognize that I write this sentence once every three entries, but I feel it remains important enough to bear repeating. We cannot be sold back to our powerful friends. They have washed their hands of us. We are not a lever. We’re barely even tools.)

  But I really do wish I’d been able to visit my mother’s final resting place, and leave her flowers. I wish I could have been there when my sister scattered her ashes.

  I wish a lot of things.

  —From That Isn’t Johnny Anymore, the blog of Ben Ross,

  July 23, 2040 (unpublished)

  Nineteen

  It was surprisingly easy to fall into the habit of captivity. A guard unlocked my bedroom door every morning at six o’clock. As one of Clive’s fancy-to girls—as in, the girls he’d taken enough of a fancy to that he wanted us kept safe, secure, and locked away from other blokes—I got my own bed, crammed into a narrow space that probably started as a supply closet. I also got a door that locked, keeping me in and keeping the rest of the population out. I’d felt trapped at first, but as the envy of the less favored girls in my working group became more and more apparent, I’d started to see that door as the blessing it was. When it was closed, I was safe. That was more than could be said during working hours.

  Once the door was open, I was expected to wait while the guard finished letting the others out. About half of us had private supply-closet bedrooms. The others slept on pallets on the floor, and they always woke up looking exhausted, like they hadn’t gotten a lick of sleep. There were dangers in the Maze at night, dangers I didn’t have to know about as long as I was in favor.

  I was torn, really, on whether it would have been better to know or not. Knowing would have meant restless nights spent on the floor in a room packed with other bodies; it would have meant exhaustion. It might also have made finding a way out easier, assuming I was awake enough to take it.