by Tarah Benner
They moved Soren’s bed frame to the middle of the shanty and lowered it to the ground, legs up. As Soren had suspected, the metal tubing was hollow. He slid the first tine of the pitchfork inside the closest leg and used the leverage from the handle to bend it back at an angle.
Within half an hour, Soren had a crude four-pronged hook, and once he sawed off the wooden part, he could attach a length of stolen bedsheets. He still didn’t know if it would work as a grappling hook, but it was their best shot at getting over the wall.
“We need another one of those,” said Simjay.
Soren didn’t respond. He tossed the repurposed pitchfork into the corner and helped Shep put their bed back together.
He didn’t want to say anything, but he knew Simjay was right. Getting one person up a wall with a homemade grappling hook was one thing. Getting five people up and over without incident was another.
Even if the hook worked perfectly, it would take them at least four or five minutes apiece. And if someone fell or didn’t have the strength to haul themselves up, it would add even more time to their escape window.
Soren could tell Simjay wanted to hash out their plan some more, but he was too exhausted to go through it again. As soon as they’d knocked the pins back into place, he climbed into his bunk and collapsed on his lumpy mattress.
The others were too keyed up to sleep, so they played their way through several hands of seven-card stud. Soren lay awake, listening to Simjay babble about what he was going to eat for his first meal on the lam.
Even with their looming escape, Soren couldn’t stop thinking about Lark. Mercy could be torturing her, for all he knew. Nobody had seen or heard from her in days.
Soren fretted about this for over an hour. He decided that if he didn’t hear from Lark by that time the next day, he was climbing over the fence to look for her.
Finally, the card game seemed to lose its appeal, and the others climbed into bed. Within minutes, Axel’s grating snores filled the room. The sound lulled the others to sleep, and soon Soren could make out Shep’s heavy sighs, Finn’s light wheezes, and Wolfe’s loud grunts.
Soren sat up and carefully lowered himself to the floor. Long slivers of moonlight were trickling through the open window, illuminating a path through the tunnel of hanging towels and stray work boots. He lifted the latch with delicate fingers and carefully pushed the front door open.
Outside the moon was blindingly bright. It allowed Soren to see exactly where Hudson’s men were stationed, but it also left him feeling exposed. All it took was one insomniac staring out his window to snitch on Soren and wreck the entire operation.
He was on his way to the mess hall to steal rations for their escape — an offense punishable by a brutal beating in the square.
To minimize his chances of being seen, Soren moved around the colony in the shadows of buildings and trees. His footsteps seemed unnaturally loud as his boots scraped the rocky dirt, but he managed to reach the kitchens without being intercepted.
The colony’s food was kept under lock and key — especially during a shortage. Fortunately for Soren, the kitchen workers weren’t that careful. The dishwashers were notorious stoners, and Jorge’s brother Hector liked to smoke in the storeroom.
It was a long shot, but it paid off. Hector had left the window open. It was half-hidden behind a scraggy juniper tree, and it was just large enough for a man to squeeze through.
Stepping up on a busted wooden crate, Soren lifted himself through the window and tumbled into the storeroom.
It was completely dark inside the building. Soren felt his way to the front of the storeroom, banging his shin on something solid, and lit the kerosene lamp suspended inside the door.
His heart sank. The hefty metal shelves were mostly bare.
If they’d gotten their shipment of seed, the baskets along the bottom would soon be bursting with produce. Instead, all they had were a few dozen bags of rice and beans.
Feeling horrible, Soren shook out the dirty pillowcases he’d stolen from the laundry and shoveled several scoops of each inside. Rice and beans were among the most difficult items to inventory, so it was unlikely the kitchens would notice if a few pounds went missing.
Next came the root cellar. Soren extinguished the kerosene lamp and quietly let himself out of the storeroom. He stole the key hanging on a hook next to the stove, unlocked the back door, and sneaked across the small courtyard to the square concrete structure protruding from the dirt.
An old chain with a rusted padlock was hanging from the door handles, and it took some careful maneuvering to get it unlocked. When the heavy wooden doors swung open, the stench of earth mixed with sawdust reached Soren’s nostrils.
It was pitch black inside the root cellar, and Soren wished he’d had the good sense to grab the lamp from the storeroom so he could see what he was doing. Feeling his way down the makeshift wooden steps, he fumbled around in the dark for anything that was left from last year’s harvest.
He grabbed what felt like a few moldy potatoes, two fistfuls of beets, and half a dozen turnips. He stuffed them into his pillowcase and was just about to leave when a sudden high-pitched whistle made him jump.
Soren froze, his heart hammering in his chest. The whistle sounded as though it had come from just a few yards away. If someone had seen him go into the root cellar, there was no way he could talk his way out of his predicament. Hudson would know he’d been stealing, and he’d be in deep, deep shit.
Fumbling toward the square of light at the top of the steps, he climbed up and squinted toward the kitchens.
The whistle sounded again.
This close, he could tell the sound had come from just outside the mess hall — probably along the west side, which was cloaked in shadows. He didn’t think the intruder had spotted him yet, but if they wandered just a few feet north, there was a chance he could be seen.
Thinking fast, Soren hopped out of the cellar and carefully lowered the doors back into place. He fumbled with the padlock until it finally clicked and then dashed behind the compost pile to see what the intruder was waiting for.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but once they did, he could see the outline of a man standing just beyond the dusty storeroom window.
Soren’s insides squirmed. He still had the key to the root cellar, and he needed to get back inside the kitchen to lock the back door from the inside. If he didn’t, the workers would be suspicious, and Jorge could get in trouble.
Soren stayed crouched in his hiding spot for several seconds, weighing his options. He could make a run for it and come back to return the key, or he could wait it out in hopes of identifying the man who had whistled.
He’d just about made up his mind to leave and return before sunrise when a second shorter figure emerged from the opposite end of the building.
The whistles Soren had heard must have been some kind of signal. When the men spoke, they kept their voices low, but Soren could still hear every word.
“Hope you got somethin’ for me this time,” said the first man.
The newcomer shook his head. “We missed our shipment. It normally comes with the supply drop.”
“What? You don’ got no backup or nothin’?”
The newcomer let out an angry scoff. “’Course I have a backup, dickhead. Whaddyou think? But nobody’s seen my man on the outside for over a week.”
Soren’s heart skipped a beat. The short man had to be talking about one of the guards.
“That sounds like your problem,” said the first.
“Look, man — there’s nothin’ I can do. Nothin’s comin’ in that I don’ know about, and I’m tellin’ ya —”
“What about one of the other guards?”
The shorter man shook his head. “Can’t be trusted. But I’ll tell ya one thing . . . My man on the outside wasn’t laid off or fired. He was careful — model employee and shit. He had to’ve stopped comin’ to work.”
“How many are gone now?”
> “Anton and the others make four.”
“Why?”
“Dunno. Maybe they goin’ on strike or somethin’.”
“This is bullshit.”
“Listen, man. I can’t sell what I don’ have.”
“What about Hudson? You tell him you’re out?”
“Hudson’s got other things to worry ’bout right now . . . like how they’s gonna feed eight hundred and fifty inmates with no new seed comin’ in.”
“Yeah.”
The shorter man mumbled something Soren couldn’t quite make out, and the first man scoffed. He shook his head, and the shorter man slinked off into the darkness.
Soren waited with bated breath. Finally, the first man left, and Soren sucked in a huge burst of air.
This wasn’t good.
He knew he couldn’t have been the only one to notice the guards’ disappearances, but now that supply lines for the drug runners had been cut off, more inmates were about to take notice. And once they did, someone else would try to escape.
Soren, Lark, and the guys didn’t need to be the only ones to escape San Judas, but they had to be the first. Otherwise, the prison administrators would step in and tighten security, and their perfect plan would crumble.
Soren carefully returned the key to its hook on the wall, locked the back door, and climbed out the storeroom window. He left it propped open the way Hector had and dived back into the shadows.
Soren was tingling with nervous energy, and one of the short man’s assumptions was still nagging at him. The drug dealer seemed to think the guards were leaving of their own volition, but Soren wasn’t so sure.
One guard leaving made sense. He might have fallen ill or found another job. But four guards? There had to be another explanation.
That thought plagued Soren the entire walk back. He was so preoccupied that he would have missed his shanty entirely if it hadn’t been for Axel’s snores.
Soren pushed the door open just wide enough to slip inside and stopped beside his bunk. There was a large hole in the side of his mattress that had been there the entire time he’d owned it. Once inside, the pillowcases full of food created a sizable lump near his feet, but it flattened out a little when he sat down on top of it.
When Soren laid his head down on his hard buckwheat pillow, the full weight of his exhaustion sank in. He could feel the tension in his neck and back — deep knots of stress about Lark and their looming escape.
It was only a matter of time before the other inmates caught wind of the guards’ disappearances. And once they did, all hell was going to break loose.
thirteen
Lark
Down in the pit, minutes felt like hours and hours stretched into days. If Lark hadn’t been marking each sunset with a scratch on the wall, she wouldn’t have been able to remember if she’d been down there for four days or four weeks.
Dehydrated, starving, and exhausted, she drifted in and out of awareness. She couldn’t pace the bottom of the pit because she couldn’t afford to expend the energy. All she could do was lie there thinking about Soren, Portia, and Mother Mercy and wondering how her life had gotten so fucked up.
Being trapped in the pit stoked the now familiar feelings of claustrophobia and loneliness.
When she’d first arrived at San Judas, everything had seemed surreal. Coming from a traditional prison, Lark had just been amazed to have the freedom to move around. She’d walk laps around the fields just to stretch her legs and savor the feeling of sunshine on her face.
But slowly, the wonder of being outside in the open air began to wane. Lark was still stuck in prison — albeit a much larger one — and she had no way of knowing what was happening in the real world.
She couldn’t turn on the television or pick up a newspaper to see what was going on outside San Judas. She couldn’t drive off to explore a newly discovered forest service road or go for a hike someplace she’d never been. She could only dream of something more.
Total immersion was part of the rehabilitation process, they said. But in realty, isolation was their most devastating weapon.
When an inmate was surrounded with nothing but suffering, she too suffered. And when her surroundings were primitive, she reverted back to her most primitive self.
In theory, struggling to meet basic needs like food left little time to think about anything else. Lark imagined that San Judas had been conceived as a modern utopia — all green fields, clear water, and fresh air where inmates worked the land and celebrated small victories.
But when the weather was bad and food was scarce, survival was a bitter struggle. Inmates turned on each other at the drop of a hat, and instead of working together, it was every woman for herself.
People would do anything to survive — steal, cheat, maim, kill. It was human nature in its most base form.
Now the outside world felt like a dream. The days Lark had spent getting lunch with friends, hiking in the Santa Fe National Forest, and going to the grocery store felt a million miles away. The ease of life back then seemed laughable now — a closet full of clothes, a pantry full of food, and an old Jeep Lark could use to go wherever she wanted.
In San Judas, the few things she had she guarded with her life, and her belly was never completely full.
By her second day in the pit, a gnawing hunger and bitter thirst were all that consumed Lark’s thoughts. She lay awake that night as her stomach ate itself from the inside out and sapped all her energy.
On day three, she began to fade in and out. Her mouth was dry, her lips were cracked, and she could barely lift her head off the floor.
That afternoon when the rain came, Lark cupped her hands and drank greedily, her tears mixing with the rain that trickled down her face.
It wasn’t a lot, but that small amount of water was what kept her alive on day four. As the sun moved across the sky, Lark felt herself grow heavier and heavier. Her body sank into the packed dirt floor, becoming one with the earth and rock.
Eventually the pit was thrown into shadow, and the temperature began to plummet. Lark shivered violently under the lumpy mattress, hugging the pathetic blanket to her body and willing it all to be over.
Then, out of nowhere, she heard a noise — an uneven scuff of boots scraping over the rocky soil. Lark’s eyes flickered open, and a lumpy shadow appeared.
She opened her mouth to call out to the visitor, but she was too parched to yell.
“Hold on, Lark!” the visitor called.
Summoning all the energy she had left, Lark forced out a cry that ripped her throat like a knife. Her voice sounded feeble and useless, but she managed to expel something between a mew and a whimper.
Finally, the visitor’s face swam into focus, and a surge of joy washed over Lark.
“Bernie?”
“I’m coming!” she yelled.
Bernie’s face disappeared from view, and Lark got a sudden pang of desperation.
“Don’t!” she croaked.
“I’m still here!” Bernie yelled. “Just a second. We’re getting you out!”
Lark let out a pitiful gurgle of emotion, and a few seconds later, Bernie tossed down a rope ladder.
Lark watched it unfurl with a mixture of relief and embarrassment. It had stopped just a few feet from the ground, but climbing it at that moment seemed an impossible task.
“Can you make it?” Bernie called.
Lark didn’t answer right away. She was pulling her body into an upright position, and that simple motion took everything out of her.
“Lark?”
“I think so.”
Bernie waited. Lark knew she was contemplating climbing down to help her, but Bernie was a tiny thing. She couldn’t have hauled Lark up if her life depended on it.
She reached out a shaky hand toward the swaying ladder and caught it. Gripping the lowest rung as hard as she could, Lark pulled herself into a standing position. She felt lightheaded and extremely unsteady, but she was strong enough to step onto the first rung
and begin the climb.
Bernie was splayed on her stomach, trying to hold the ladder still, but it still swung wildly from side to side. Lark felt as though she might be sick, but she had no food in her belly anyway.
Finally her head cleared the top of the pit, and two sets of arms reached down to pull her out. She let out a gasp of relief and collapsed onto the ground, savoring the rush of fresh air on her face.
“Oh my god,” Bernie muttered, collapsing over Lark’s upper body. Her eyes were red, her hair was a mess, and it looked as though she hadn’t slept in days.
As Lark hugged Bernie, her brain finally registered that there was another woman standing off to the side. It was Amara, one of the healers.
Amara was young and very beautiful. She had satiny mocha skin, big eyes framed by long lashes, and a hundred tiny braids curled into knots along the top of her head.
“She’s dehydrated,” Amara muttered, lifting Lark’s head to slide something soft underneath it. “And she’s got a fever.”
Bernie let out a noise like a muffled whimper.
“But once we get some fluids in her and she has a chance to rest, she’ll be all right.”
Lark felt a peculiar tickle against her chest as Bernie let out a sigh of relief.
Amara took a few minutes to examine Lark more thoroughly. She stared into Lark’s dazed eyes, took her pulse, and pinched a bit of skin on the back of her hand. For the first time since she’d been in the pit, Lark noticed that the light from her sensor was blinking an alarming shade of orange.
When Amara was satisfied that Lark was in no immediate danger, she draped a heavy blanket over her shoulders and handed her a large waterskin.
Lark took it and drank greedily. The water had an odd flavor — tart and a little bit sweet.
“Honey and salt,” said Amara as she snapped an aloe vera leaf in half and smeared the cool gel over Lark’s face. “We need to replenish those electrolytes.”
Too soon, the waterskin was dry, and Amara shoved a shallow jar full of warm mush into Lark’s hands. It was a suspicious grayish-brown color, but Lark hardly tasted it as she shoveled it into her mouth.