Feedback

by Mira Grant

  We would all gather by the door and proceed to the showers, where we’d each be given a towel, a bottle of all-purpose wash, and a blood testing kit. As soon as I was confirmed biologically clean, I was allowed to make myself physically clean, showering alongside ten to twenty other women ranging in age from their midteens to their late fifties. I wasn’t sure whether there were any children here, and if so, where they were kept, but as none of the teenagers seemed to think there was anything strange about the way things were done, I had to assume they’d grown up inside the Maze. Twenty years since the Rising; at least ten years since Clive had set up camp in this abandoned rural hospital, spreading his resources and his recruits out until he owned most of the area. A sixteen-year-old girl could easily have been raised within this community, never knowing anything else, never recognizing how odd it would all seem to an outsider. In that regard, being here was a lot like being in a commune, or a cult.

  There were female guards. Not many, but enough that they could watch us shower, keeping the men at a respectful distance. It was nice to have the privacy. It was also distressing, a reminder of why Clive kept so many pretty women around. Maybe he didn’t force the issue, and maybe he didn’t insist, but anyone who looked at us could tell that we were essentially his harem. We belonged to him, and he was keeping us as pristine as possible.

  The one time I’d seen a male guard near the showers, I hadn’t seen him again after that. Not in our space; not anywhere in the compound that I was allowed to go. He’d simply vanished, like mist, and the remaining guards had been on edge for days, making me believe that he hadn’t just been reassigned. Breaking Clive’s orders was not something to be done lightly, or at all.

  After the showers, we’d return to our rooms—either solo or communal—to find our clothing for the day waiting on our beds, along with whatever toiletries we required. I got a hairbrush, and sometimes a hair tie or two, depending on Clive’s mood. We didn’t have uniforms, thankfully; our clothes were drawn from a communal wardrobe, assigned according to a chart that must have existed somewhere. I’d been given a day’s use of several of my sundresses, and had seen others on girls I didn’t know, catching glimpses of familiar fabric from across crowded rooms or down darkened hallways. Nothing was wasted here. At least a few of us wore patchwork blouses and twice-mended trousers every day, and no one complained. What good could it have done?

  That was an attitude that was also surprisingly easy to fall into. What good could anything have done? We were trapped, and while we were together, we were each and every one of us alone.

  Breakfast was surprisingly varied, mixing canned and dried goods with fresh fruits, vegetables, and fish, obviously harvested from the surrounding land. There were work crews that went outside, either to hunt or to farm, and while I had yet to be allowed to go with them—and might never be, considering my dual status as newcomer and woman Clive eventually wanted to fuck—it was clear they covered more ground than I would have thought possible. We ate salmon, catfish, and small, heavily stewed scrod that could have been from virtually any freshwater species. Blueberries, blackberries, and tart red huckleberries were a major part of every meal. At least scurvy wasn’t going to become a concern any time soon. The amount of vitamin C we were getting, even before our supplement pills, was astonishing.

  For the first week or so, I’d watched everything like a hawk, waiting for the opportunity to make a run for it. That opportunity had never come. Clive’s people were well trained, methodical, and most of all, loyal. Whether that loyalty was born of contentment or fear didn’t matter, because the end result was the same. And at the end of that week, I had been deemed sufficiently settled, and had been put to work.

  My work crew was responsible for basic maintenance and light cleaning. We weren’t janitorial, to be doing all the big muck-outs and major decontamination, and we weren’t tasked with the small but constant repairs to everything in sight. We… dusted. We did dishes, and moved items from one place to another. It felt like make-work to justify Clive’s airy claim that everyone contributed to the whole, and it was no surprise that every single person I worked with was an attractive female of childbearing age. People looked at us and snickered, or rolled their eyes and looked away. It made my palms itch, my hands aching to ball into fists and start breaking noses.

  It didn’t help that I still didn’t know whether Ben and Audrey were alive or dead. I’d tried, several times, to convince my fellow workers to help me, and my pleas had fallen on deaf ears. It wasn’t until the end of my second week that one of them took pity and turned on me while we were washing the mirrors in the communal bathroom, saying, “Look, we all know you’re the new favorite, and we know it’s not going to last. Half of us were the favorite once, when Clive liked blondes, or brunettes, or girls with pierced navels. That doesn’t mean we’re going to help you get things he doesn’t want you to have. Maybe you’re only going to be in the hot seat for a little while, and maybe that makes you greedy or maybe it makes you scared—it’s hard to say, with you new girls—but either way, we’re not going to attract attention to ourselves just because you feel like you deserve more than just the boss man’s eyes on your ass.”

  It was a reasonable, even rational response to my agitating for more information. That didn’t mean it didn’t sting, or keep me from viewing my interactions with the other girls in a new, more negative light. They’d never been nice to me, and that had always been fine, because I wasn’t overly interested in being nice to them; civility was the best I had to offer, and the best I was hoping to receive. But if they were looking at me as temporary competition, destined to age out of my current status and join them in whatever the next step down on the ladder of local status was, then they had no reason to be even friendly. I was a rival, not a fellow prisoner.

  We were all trapped here, even those of us who would never see the bars on the windows as anything more than protection.

  Jill moved through the work crews like a ghost, rarely interacting with anyone unless it was to deliver a cup of pills or a sudden injection of some unidentified substance. There was never any warning before one of those “medical interventions” occurred: Three times, I saw girls in the middle of a shift stop, roll up a sleeve, and receive a needle to the arm. They never spoke to her more than they absolutely had to, which struck me as odd. Where I’d come from, a little jocular joking around with the company doctor would have made sense, and maybe taken some of the sting out of the injection itself.

  Then she came for me.

  I was working with the others, sorting crates of pre-Rising liquor according to some mysterious chart that didn’t seem to be based off any known properties of alcohol. Scotch and vodka would have made sense—they didn’t mix well outside of a Long Island Iced Tea, but they were powerful intoxicants, and anything that put people on the floor clearly had its uses here. But Scotch and grenadine? Tequila and white wine? It was like we were filling a dozen different orders, all made by people who should never have been allowed to mix their own drinks. I wanted to ask if anyone knew what the hell was going on, but I kept my mouth shut. Questions never got me answers here. They only got me rolled eyes and stifled scoffs, and honestly, I was going to put somebody’s teeth out if that happened one more time.

  “Aislinn?” There was nothing querulous or quiet about Jill’s voice. I looked up. She was standing in the doorway, still in her stained lab coat, looking at a clipboard, like that would keep her from needing to look at any of the rest of us. “You need to come with me. It’s time for your exam.”

  Giggles and low “ooo”s broke out around me as I put down the bottle I’d been cataloging and pushed myself to my feet. Even a week ago, I would have swaggered, or at the least talked back. Now, I simply walked, head and shoulders down, to join Jill in the doorway. I had finally found the answer to what it took to break me: unrelenting, unforgiving exclusion, and nothing I could fight against. This was my hell, and I was trapped, like a rat in a cage.

  �
�Excellent.” Jill lifted her head then, looking at the rest of the work crew. “Clive wanted me to inform you that Aislinn will be gone for an extended period, on his order, but the deadline hasn’t been shifted. He has faith in you.”

  There was some grumbling. To my deep relief, it wasn’t directed at me. They were apparently used to Clive pulling one or the other of them off the crew according to his whim, and while they might wish to be in my position—and I would gladly have traded with any, or all, of them; let me sort the bottles alone, while they went off to fraternize with the boss—they weren’t going to blame me for being the target of his affections. Thank the good Lord. The last thing I needed was for them to get even more unfriendly than they already were.

  That, alone, showed how much my world had narrowed since my arrival. There was a time when I’d had much better things to worry about, and much more legitimately, than the hostility of a few women who wouldn’t even speak to me. My life had been all about survival, and now it was all about trying not to alienate the people around me. Maybe it was those rose-colored glasses that people always slapped on their pasts, but I genuinely missed the adventure, and the companionship, even if it had come with the constant knowledge that we were all about to die.

  Jill turned and left the sorting room, giving me no choice but to follow her. I was still looking down, and I realized that she walked with a slight stagger. It wasn’t pronounced enough to be a limp, not quite, but there was a distinct catch in her stride.

  “How long ago did you lose your leg?” I asked.

  Jill glanced back at me, apparently startled. Then she smiled and said, “Years ago. I grew up on a community farm. Your food has to come from somewhere, you know. Only I got my foot caught in a wheat separator, and by the time my uncles were able to shut the machine down and extricate me, there was nothing that could be done to save anything below the knee. Ruined a whole crop of winter wheat, too.” She sighed. “We had to buy a new separator. Industrial accidents are the primary cause of dismemberment and loss of limbs in both the United States and Canada, now that we’ve removed cancer and car accidents from the equation.”

  It took me a moment to realize we’d removed car accidents from the equation not because they didn’t happen anymore—if anything, people get less safe behind the wheel every year, because fear motivates them to speed—but because getting medical intervention to someone who’s been hurt in a wreck before they either bled out or amplified is virtually impossible. Even EMTs won’t risk their own lives for nothing.

  “Sorry,” I said, the word feeling mealy and inappropriate in my mouth.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “It was a long time ago, and I don’t so much miss my original leg as wish there’d been a way to get me into the hands of decent doctors without cutting it off. I would never have gone into medicine if it hadn’t been for that accident. I’d be a good farm wife by now, with four or five children of my own, and all this”—she waved her clipboard—“would be nothing but a bad dream.”

  I didn’t say anything. My brief associations with Jill had given me no reason to think she was on my side, apart from her update to my contraceptive implant, and even that could be self-serving as much as anything else. Maybe she wasn’t entirely on Clive’s side—it would be hard to think of anyone who’d known a world outside this compound as being entirely on his side—but she certainly wasn’t on mine. Silence was my best defense.

  Jill either agreed with my assessment or had nothing else to say. We walked through the halls of the old hospital, passing other work crews and people running hither and yon on whatever errands they’d been assigned. As always, I scanned the people around me, looking for familiar faces, and as always, I didn’t find them. I did find three of my sundresses, two being worn by women reasonably close to my height and build, and one being worn by two little girls in the company of an older woman who was apparently their nanny. It had been cut in half and refashioned into cute pullovers for the children, and seeing it broke my heart a little. Not because the children weren’t adorable—they were—but because if our things were already being recycled into the greater community, then it was finished. We were never getting out of here.

  The people grew farther spaced as we walked, becoming less and less frequent, until we were the only ones walking along a dimly lit white hallway. “This used to be part of the oncology ward,” said Jill, sounding distracted. “It’s not very well connected to the social areas, I suppose because people didn’t really want to think about cancer when they had a choice. Kellis-Amberlee did us a lot of favors, if you stop and compare the world that was to the world where we’re living now.”

  “Oh, yes, this is a fairy-tale wonderland filled with candy floss joy,” I deadpanned.

  Jill turned to flash me a quick, self-satisfied smile. “I think you’re closer to the truth than you realize,” she said, and stopped, and opened the nearest door.

  The room on the other side was small, lit by the stark electric glow that had become the norm, with no windows. The shelves were virtually empty, holding nothing but a few boxes of surgical gloves and tongue depressors. Either this wasn’t a place they used very often, or the medical staff was on tight rationing, forced to justify everything they requested from supplies. The truth was probably somewhere between those two disparate solutions, and the truth didn’t matter, none of this mattered, because Audrey, my Audrey, was in the middle of the room.

  She was wearing a stained lab coat, much like Jill’s, over ill-fitting hospital scrubs. Her hair was loose and her eye was blackened and she was crying, and I noticed all those things later, after I’d gone to her—crossing the space between us in three long steps, each faster than the last, until I was virtually running—and put my hands to either side of her face, and pulled her close, and kissed her for all that I was worth. She returned the kiss with equal urgency, her tears increasing in both volume and speed. Her lips were chapped. That seemed like such a small detail to fix on, but something about it bothered me. I kept kissing her. There would be time to talk about such things later. Or there wouldn’t be, and either way, I didn’t want to be the one who had pulled away first.

  There was a click from behind me as Jill closed the door. “Sorry, but you’re going to need to rein your hormones in,” she said, sounding utterly non-apologetic. “I know it’s hard, and I wish I could let you keep going, but we have very little time, and we have a lot we need to talk about.”

  I pulled away from Audrey. I still didn’t turn to face Jill. Instead, I put my hands on Audrey’s shoulders, and said, “You’re alive. I was afraid I was never going to see you. I’m so sorry. I missed you so much. I love you.” That last part seemed like the important one, and so I repeated it: “I love you. Never scare me like that again. What happened to your eye?”

  “Clive,” she said. “He wanted to test me on what I knew. I got an answer wrong. He said if it had been two, he’d have blackened them both. Three, and I would have lost one.”

  “Well, I’ll just have to kill him, then,” I said, keeping my voice soft to quiet the roaring fury in my gut. “Have you seen Ben? Is he all right?”

  Audrey laughed, voice thick with tears and snot. “My violent girl,” she said. “I saw him once at a distance, while we were on our way to do a count in the drug room. He looked okay. No casts or visible stitches. I don’t think they’ve hurt him.”

  “They haven’t,” said Jill. I finally turned to look at her. She looked amused, like she’d been expecting to be ignored for a while when she got me to the room. “Audrey is a special case; Clive thought she was a liar. He doesn’t torture his workers, not even the new ones whose loyalty hasn’t been proven yet. That would be counterproductive. He keeps them or he kills them, full stop. Your friend is still alive, so that means he’s been toeing the line, at least thus far.”

  “That’s not going to last,” I said. “Ben’s one of the most stubborn people I know.”

  “Then we need to move up the timetable.” Jill glance
d past me to Audrey, then back to me. “She was telling the truth about being a doctor.”

  “I told you,” I said. “Bit odd that she’s already monitoring your drug usage, what with her being new and all. Nothing in this place makes a lick of sense.”

  “It all makes perfect sense, once you consider the name,” said Audrey. She sounded tired. I turned back to her. “He called it the ‘Maze.’ Why would he do that, when there were so many other names he could have chosen? Hell, he could have called it the Free Nation of Clive, and no one would have been able to stop him.”

  “When you put it that way, I’m surprised he didn’t,” said Jill. “His ego would really appreciate having a country named after him.”

  “Mazes are where you keep rats when you’re trying to condition them,” continued Audrey. “It’s where you train them. Teach them to go for the cheese and not the floor with the electric shocks. Clive doesn’t expect me to be loyal, not now, and maybe not ever. But he does expect me to follow directions and do as I’m told, and part of how he can make sure that happens is by putting me in the path of temptation. So I get to count the drugs that someone else has already counted, and then he checks my math, or has it checked, and if I’m wrong…”

  “Is that why he had me filling ludicrous alcohol combinations today?” I asked, looking at Jill. “To see whether I’d really give someone good Scotch and bad beer?”

  “You’re Irish,” she said.

  I wrinkled my nose. “That’s a foul stereotype. Really, if anything, it would be the fact that I have taste that kept me from filling out some of those combinations.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether you’re stealing or deciding that you know better than the person giving the orders: Intentionally breaking the rules will get you punished,” said Jill. She hesitated before asking, “You didn’t, did you?”