by Tarah Benner
When she saw Lark, Portia tucked a strand of hair behind her ear in a very purposeful way, and the silver bracelet on her wrist caught the light.
A murderous rage rose up Lark’s chest. She knew that bracelet. It was her mother’s — a delicate silver cuff from the 1940s with moons carved along the sides and a pretty piece of turquoise set in the middle. Her mother had always said it was her good luck charm, and now that conniving bitch was wearing it.
Lark swallowed several times to keep herself from throwing up. She wanted nothing more than to march over there, grab a fistful of Portia’s perfect hair, and smash her head into the wall, but attacking one of Mercy’s own would have been the deadliest sort of foolishness.
The comforting warmth of Denali’s breath on her hand was the only thing that could have drawn Lark out of her murderous spiral. She glanced down and smiled.
Denali seemed to know Lark’s routine by heart, and he usually turned up after morning mess to follow her into the fields. He’d mill around, sniff the dirt, and scamper off after small animals. But on days Lark ventured into the woods to forage edible and medicinal plants, his long bushy tail would go haywire, and he’d stay by her side the entire day.
As they made their way toward the trees, several pairs of eyes followed Lark enviously. Even though Lark worked among the field hands most days during the planting and harvest, she wasn’t really one of them.
They all slept in skid-row shanties and were served their dinner next to last, but Lark had been singled out by Mother Mercy for her knowledge of wild herbs and her experience nursing problematic plants back to health.
Lark was the only one Mercy trusted to monitor the health of the colony’s crops, and she was the one Mercy sent to scavenge gumweed from the woods to soothe her cough. Lark wasn’t one of Mercy’s favorites, but she was useful to her.
As much as Lark hated Mercy, she looked forward to the days she was sent to forage. The moment she left the colony behind and entered the disordered thicket of trees, the ugliness of San Judas fell away, leaving only a peaceful emptiness behind.
It reminded her of all the places her mother had told her about from her travels: the windy solitude atop Wheeler Peak, the staggering vastness of the Grand Canyon, and the glorious away-from-it-all-ness of the Teton Wilderness.
When she was twenty-one, Lark’s mother had dropped out of school, sold all her belongings, and used her tuition money to hike the Appalachian Trail. She’d found it so addictive and romantic that she’d gone on to hike the Pacific Crest Trail and had attempted to hike the Continental Divide.
Checking off all three was considered the Triple Crown for thru-hikers, but a month into her journey, Lark’s mother had realized she was pregnant. Single and broke from her travels, she’d settled in New Mexico and had picked up odd jobs to support herself.
Lark had never been to the places her mother had, but she’d always dreamed of exploring them and completing her mother’s journey on the Continental Divide. She’d thought she’d have plenty of time to do it, but her freedom had been stolen from her before her life had really begun.
Over the past five years, Lark had become so obsessed with those adventures that she often felt as though she’d actually stood at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or the top of Mount Katahdin — the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.
After a few minutes, the gentle rush of the river reached Lark’s ears, and Denali’s bushy silver tail swayed from side to side. His mouth fell open in a heavy pant, and it looked as though he was smiling.
As they drew closer to the water, Lark saw that the river already looked high. Over the years, the snowmelt had diminished bit by bit. But the past winter had brought plenty of precipitation, which meant the crops wouldn’t go thirsty.
Crystal-clear water rushed over the dark rainbow of rocks, sparkling in the soft dappled sunlight trickling through the trees. Toward the middle of the river, the water changed from a gentle flow to a tumultuous rush, and on the opposite bank, a steep rocky gorge rose up at least two hundred feet.
If Lark focused on the dancing water, the rocks, and the soothing rush of the current, she could almost ignore the ugly metal fence that separated the women’s colony from the men’s. It ran along the length of the river, which meant Lark couldn’t even wade into the water.
On the other side, she could just make out an identical fence running along the edge of the gorge to keep male inmates from climbing down the Seam. It was a perilous rocky descent that nearly always ended in death, but every year at least one or two men attempted the climb.
Most of the jumpers made it over the twelve-foot fence on the men’s side without a problem. It was the treacherous journey down the gorge that sent most men to their deaths.
In the five years Lark had been at San Judas, only one had survived the fall. Several had been injured or killed when they hit the jagged rocks below, and another had drowned in the river.
After a few minutes, Lark resigned herself to searching for Mercy’s gumweed. It wasn’t usually too hard to spot. Its sticky little stems could stretch more than three feet high, and the buds bloomed a brilliant gold.
Lark searched along the bank for nearly an hour, taking extra care in the low areas where water liked to pool. Finally she found some, and she bent down to cut a few sprigs to take back to Mercy.
As she worked, the steady rush of water was loud enough to drown out most of Lark’s darkest thoughts, but it wasn’t loud enough to obscure the crack of rock from the opposite bank.
Lark froze, still bent at the waist. It happened so fast that she might have imagined it, but she could have sworn she saw a flicker of movement along the craggy rocks.
She stood perfectly still, not wanting to scare whatever it was. She didn’t think it had been an animal, which left only one other option. A man was watching from the other side of the river, waiting for her to move.
For several minutes, Lark stared at the mosaic of rock, daring the watcher to show himself. She knew he couldn’t have left. She would have seen him moving along the bank.
Finally, Lark straightened up and turned her head slowly to scan the mess of rock and shrubs crowding the foot of the gorge. Every hair on the back of her neck was standing on end. She knew she was being watched.
Her trance was broken by Denali crashing through the underbrush. Lark turned just in time to see a rabbit disappear under a fallen log, and Denali let out a loud, excited bark. Suddenly he was in full chase mode, and nothing else mattered.
Out of the corner of her eye, Lark saw another flicker of movement. She whipped her head around to catch the watcher, but he’d already disappeared.
“Thanks a lot,” she called to Denali, who was too far upstream to hear.
Still fighting the nagging feeling that she was being watched, Lark started back up the bank toward the colony. It was foolish, but somewhere in the back of her mind, she’d already made the decision to return to the river to see if she could lure the watcher out of hiding.
Whoever he was, whatever he wanted, Lark was determined to catch him in the act.
two
Soren
Soren was awoken before dawn by a series of loud, grating snores from the bunk across the room. For several seconds he grappled with his subconscious, fighting to stay immersed in his spectacular dream.
In his sleep, he could see the girl’s face. She was standing on the riverbank, looking up at him with a pair of striking amber eyes. Her knees were slightly bent as if she were preparing to take flight, and her long dark hair was fluttering in the breeze.
Soren hadn’t gone looking for the girl — at least not the first time he’d laid eyes on her.
One day last spring, he’d stalked a buck deep into the woods — his mind focused only on the gnawing hunger in his belly. The buck seemed to sense that he was being followed. He picked his way down the gorge along a rocky path that Soren had never noticed. Soren followed him all the way to the river, where the buck took a long, lazy d
rink from the freezing water.
Soren had hid among the rocks, preparing to take his shot, when he saw a flicker of movement on the opposite bank. He lowered his bow and stared across the water at a young woman standing on the other side.
Soren had never seen anything quite like her. She was tall and willowy with a tattoo of a bird beneath her clavicle. The level of detail was astounding for a prison tattoo, but it wasn’t the girl’s ink that left him transfixed.
She wasn’t out there looking for a place to shoot up, and she wasn’t trying to cross the river. Her eyes were fixated on the shallows, where a lone gray crane was ambling gracefully through the water.
The next week and every week after, Soren had looked for any excuse to sneak down to the river. Searching for the girl was dangerous — not to mention creepy — but he felt himself drawn to her by some unknown force.
She wasn’t like any other woman in San Judas that he’d glimpsed through the fence. She wasn’t jaded and aggressive or meek and forlorn. She was thoughtful and independent, practically one with the forest as she searched the treetops for interesting birds and scavenged plants from the forest floor.
What struck him most about the girl was that she hadn’t been consumed by prison life. She was trapped there just as he was, but his instincts told him that she’d focused her energies outward — to the freedom of a world just beyond the walls.
He hadn’t meant to reveal himself the day before. He’d gotten reckless, and she’d almost spotted him. Soren knew he must have spooked her, but he thought he’d seen a flicker of excitement in her eyes. It felt almost as though she’d been looking for him — an idea that gave him a tremendous thrill.
In his dream, Soren opened his mouth to call to her, but no words came out. Instead he heard a jarring snore, and Soren felt his dream world disappear.
He wasn’t standing in the forest. He was lying on top of his creaky bunk bed in the smelly ten-by-thirteen room he shared with five other guys. Below him, his best friend Shep was snoozing on his stomach, his enormous head hidden under a musty pillow to keep out unwanted noise.
Soren admired his ingenuity. He’d been pulled from his dream by a snore that sounded as though somebody had stuffed a handful of gravel into a coffee grinder and turned it on full blast.
The offending snorer was Axel — the beefy hillbilly from Louisiana who farted more than he breathed. He’d been busted for misdemeanor assault several years back, but he’d gotten tangled up in a bad bar fight while on parole and had landed himself three years in San Judas.
Axel was sloppy, smelly, and belligerent, but he was the type of guy you wanted on your side in a fight. He hit with the force of a Mack truck and was impossible to knock out. At that moment, Axel was sprawled on his back completely naked, swatting his nose to shoo away a fly that was using his face for landing practice.
In the upper bunk, Finn was curled up in a ball under a threadbare blanket. With his mousey brown hair, huge, bulging eyes, and oversized hands and feet, Finn looked like a baby squirrel. He was small, twitchy, and neurotic — known to most only as Goat Boy — but he was the only person who could stand to bunk with Axel.
Wolfe got into it with Axel at least every other day, but those squabbles only escalated into physical brawls about once a month. Eighty percent of the time, Wolfe was mellow and fun to have around, but he had one hell of a temper that could be triggered without warning.
For that reason, Soren and Shep had sequestered Wolfe in the far bunk with Simjay, the unflappable Indian/world-class bullshitter. How Simjay had survived three years in San Judas was beyond Soren. The only real defense he had was his ability to talk his way out of just about anything.
Simjay had used this skill to con his way across five continents in his early twenties. He’d posed as a tour guide, a gondolier — once even a Sherpa — finally settling in Southern California and setting up shop as a guru.
Simjay had been running one hell of a racket promising life-changing results to those who agreed to give up all their worldly possessions — until the feds got involved. Apparently, he’d been persuading his wealthy new age followers to auction off their Birkin bags, Aston Martins, and vacation homes for years, but instead of donating the money to charity, he was selling off their swag and pocketing the proceeds.
Soren knew all five of the guys almost as well as he knew himself. There was no privacy in the men’s colony. Damp towels and dirty clothes were draped haphazardly over the bed rungs like curtains, but all that seemed to do was maintain the off-putting funk that had become a permanent fixture. Even with the window open, the warmth of six bodies turned the air into a muggy stew of evaporated sweat and onion breath.
Before the rest of them woke up, Soren slipped out of bed, grabbed his towel, and headed out the door. The sun was just starting to peek over the horizon as he followed the well-worn dirt path to the outbuilding that housed the men’s showers.
Soren always tried to be the first to the showers in the morning so he’d have time to get to the library. Even though he knew accepting a place in San Judas meant forfeiting his parole, he was determined to find some way to escape.
Halfway across the square, something unusual caught his eye. At first he wasn’t sure what it was, but as he scanned the fence, his brain alerted him to the fact that something — or, rather, someone — was missing.
On a clear day, one could see the shadow of each guard stationed in his perch — but not that day. Soren blinked several times. His eyes were working fine.
The guard tower in the southwest corner of the colony was empty. He could see the railing and the light reflecting off the metal cage, but there wasn’t a guard in sight.
A sudden shiver rolled through him. Ever since Soren’s transfer to San Judas, he’d never seen a guard tower empty once — not in snow or sleet, not in flash-flood conditions, not even on Christmas. The guards worked in carefully timed rotations with breaks every two hours, but there always seemed to be a floater whose job was to watch the perimeter when the main guard left his post.
Forgetting about his shower, Soren sprinted toward the fence. In the year and a half he’d spent poring over the same musty law books, it had dawned on him that there was no legal loophole that would somehow exonerate him from his crimes.
Recently, he’d shifted his focus from law to learning everything he could about the prison’s many layers of security. If a legal escape wasn’t possible, he’d find another way.
Most of the information he’d gathered was hearsay, but some he’d been able to verify. Everybody knew that the prison’s first line of defense was the twelve-foot electric fence that wrapped around the perimeter. That fence, and all the rest of the electrical components inside the prison, were powered by solar energy.
On the one hand, collecting and storing its own power helped the prison’s bottom line. Arroyo Verde got an average of 281 sunny days per year, which meant San Judas could count on a steady supply of electricity without depending upon the power grid.
On the other, it meant that during overcast weather, San Judas was especially vulnerable to power outages. One or two cloudy days weren’t usually a problem. The solar grid only generated a fraction of its usual capacity, but it was enough to meet the prison’s power demands.
But after several days of overcast weather, the electric fence, water pump system, and hot water heaters could overtax the system and cause an outage. Soren knew San Judas maintained several backup generators, but the sheer size of the fence bordering 16,000 acres meant the generators would buy them only a few hours of power before the entire system shut down.
As an added safeguard, the prison had employed several dozen migrant workers to erect the outer adobe wall. Armed guards were stationed around the perimeter twenty-four hours a day, so even if an inmate managed to get through the electric fence, he’d be gunned down long before he could find a way over the twenty-foot adobe wall.
But even if someone managed to clear both walls without getting shot,
there was still the issue of being stranded out in the middle of the desert. There was nowhere to hide, and a chopper would make quick work of the barren landscape.
If Soren ever got the chance to escape, he decided, the first thing to do would be to steal a car from the prison’s fleet of vehicles and get on the road as quickly as possible.
By the time he reached the fence, every particle in his body was thrumming with excitement. Soren wanted nothing more than to reach out and climb, but this close, he could detect the hum of electricity coursing through the wires.
His heart sank. The fence was still live.
Stomping through the underbrush, Soren jogged around the perimeter of the colony toward the north fields. They were positioned in the westernmost corner of the prison — due north of the square — and surrounded on two sides by a thin band of trees that concealed the electric fence.
A fine veil of fog was hanging over the freshly tilled earth, giving the entire field a misty, dreamlike quality. Soren ran down the grassy path between the plots, hardly aware of the cold air stinging his lungs or the burn of his muscles as he pushed his legs harder.
He stopped fifty yards from the trees, his gaze fixated on the rusty metal roof of the guard tower in the northwest corner of the prison. The sun had risen in the east, bathing the tower in a soft golden light.
This guard was in position, gazing off in the distance to a point just over Soren’s shoulder. From where he stood, Soren couldn’t tell if the guard was watching him or the field hands plodding through the dirt.
Soren wasn’t supposed to be there. He was a hunter by vocation, which meant he spent nearly all his time in the woods, checking traps and waiting for more sizable mammals to wander across his path.
He shivered. The guard couldn’t possibly know who he was. San Judas was home to more than eight hundred other male inmates — an overwhelming number of prisoners for twenty guards to keep watch over.