by Ben Oliver
“Fuck you,” I groan.
“Take him to the Chair,” Petrov mutters, and the door to the anesthesia room slides open.
I’m dragged into the sterile white room, empty apart from the Chair in the center. It’s a large and uncomfortable wheeled dentist’s chair, the seat and arms covered in blue plastic, easy to wipe the blood off. I struggle against my restraints as the two guards drag me over to it. The stainless-steel frame glimmers under the lights as I’m turned around and shoved into a sitting position.
This is the worst part of any Delay—no matter what they do to you on the table, nothing is worse than the Chair.
There’s an electronic hum from the Chair as the needle is raised. I feel the jab at the base of my spine and immediately become paralyzed.
Every muscle in my body lets go completely, and I’m a limp bag of blood and organs. I can’t even blink, drool runs out of my mouth, and the angle that my head has fallen makes it hard to draw breath. The only things I’m in control of are my breathing and my bodily functions.
I hear the whirring of the automatic doors, and a few seconds later, two orderlies come in wearing dazzling white uniforms, casually chatting to each other about their upcoming Saturday night plans. One of them, sporting dreadlocks, is planning to go to a music festival and take Ebb; the other sounds disappointed to just be spending time with her wife.
Together, they manually adjust the Chair until it’s a bed. As soon as I am lying horizontally, I can breathe properly again. Dreadlocks sprays my drying eyes with a mist from a canister, and they wheel me through the automatic door and into the trial room.
“Bye, bye, Luka Kane,” Officer Petrov calls out, his voice muffled by the dividing glass. I can only hope that the humiliation of being overpowered by a teenage boy loses him his job and his place in Tier Three, whatever the hell that is.
As I don’t have the ability to move any part of me, all I can see is the ceiling high above and all I can do is hope that I don’t feel the madness that they are about to infect me with, that there’s no part of me left alive inside my mind once the insanity kicks in.
I have never felt fear like this before.
A face appears above me—a middle-aged woman wearing a surgical mask. She has a horrible grin in her bright Alt eyes and speaks in gleeful tones.
“You must be Mr. Kane?” she asks with no possibility of an answer from my frozen vocal cords. “The escapologist—you’re famous around here. Shall we get started?”
She disappears from my vision, and I hear the metallic rustling of surgical instruments.
I want to run—I beg my body to obey the commands of my brain, I will my legs to move, to carry me away, to not let them operate on me, but there’s nothing I can do except wait.
The doctor’s face reappears. She’s holding a syringe.
“Here we go,” she mutters as she pushes the giant needle somewhere into me. I can’t be sure where it has gone, but from where she’s standing, I imagine it to be my upper arm or neck. I hear the clunk as she drops the syringe back into a tray, and then she appears with another one.
“Number two,” she says, positively singing the words, and ducks out of my field of vision to inject me again.
“Annnnnd three,” she says, producing a third needle. This one, I’m sure, is twice as long as the others.
And then there’s silence for what feels like a full five minutes, and for all I know, they’re removing my skin or sawing my feet off. It’s not like I’d be able to feel it.
“Okay, that should be long enough,” the doctor says, and then she makes a surprised little oh sound. “Doctor Soto, welcome. Come to witness the fruits of your labor?”
“No,” comes the curt reply of the female doctor who moves—just out of my field of vision—and grabs something from the tray beside my head, then leaves the room.
Then I’m moving again; my bed is being wheeled to the other end of the room, and I’m pushed into some sort of plexiglass container that looks like a cheap greenhouse.
There’s a hissing sound, and the chamber is filled with pale white gas. My instinct is not to breathe, so I don’t, but the gas is pumped into the container for far longer than I can hold my breath. Finally, I give up and breathe the gas in. I can’t feel anything, but I can imagine the caustic mist burning into the tissue of my lungs, blistering my windpipe, poisoning my blood.
The hissing sound ends, and I lie there waiting for something to happen, waiting for the effects of the gas to do whatever they do, waiting to become like Harvey, like Chirrak, Catherine, and whoever else was in Group A.
I try to think of something, a happy memory to cling on to before my mind shuts down and I become something else. My mind cycles through memories of my mother before she died, my sister and me sneaking into the sky-farms when we were kids. I think about Kina on the platform, then my mind settles on Wren, the first time she handed me a book and changed my world, and if I could work the muscles in my face, I would smile.
I hold on to the thought, and I wait.
Nothing happens.
After a while, the door to the container is opened, and I’m wheeled through a door on the other side of the trial room, where I’m left alone. The needle that is embedded into my spinal cord is retracted, and the paralysis is immediately lifted.
I scream, an involuntary sound of pain and fear and mostly relief that the nightmare of the Delay is over. I feel the sting of the puncture wounds in my neck from the syringes, I feel the incredible sensation of my limbs obeying the commands of my brain, I wiggle my toes and stretch out my fingers, and I can’t help but sob a few times before taking four or five deep breaths to try and get ahold of myself.
“I’m alive,” I say, my voice shuddering. “Why am I alive?”
They should have killed me when I tried to escape, they should have either shot me right there or taken me to the courthouse to be Deleted, but they didn’t.
Why?
What had Galen meant when he’d said I’d make an excellent battery? Why are they refusing requests to renege? And why didn’t the Delay put me into a coma or turn me crazy like it did to Group A?
Maybe that comes later, I think.
But in this moment, I decide that it doesn’t matter. I’m alive, for whatever reason they decided not to kill me, and—for now at least—I have survived the Delay. I smile and think back to the morning, waiting on the platform, seeing Kina’s face; she recognized me, she said hi, and we shared a laugh.
“Kina,” I say again, and my smile grows.
It’s amazing how much a simple moment can be worth to a person starved of connections.
Happy tells me to change back into my prison uniform, and I obey her.
I blink away the tears from my eyes and try to look as calm as I can when the door that leads back to the Dark Train opens. Three guards come in; one links their trigger with my heart, and the other two keep their guns aimed at my head. “Let’s move, superstar,” the one with the trigger says, and they take shuffling steps backward all the way to my carriage on the Dark Train.
* * *
There is always a recovery period after a Delay. You need a little time to get back what the government has taken from you. Maddox used to call it R & R for the soul.
I don’t have time to feel any of that today, though; I’m too lost in thoughts of why I wasn’t killed for trying to escape.
On Delay days, they don’t make us take part in the energy harvest, so I guess that means the whole place will be running on stored power tonight. But I can’t even enjoy the moment that the harvest is supposed to come; Wren still hasn’t arrived, and my mind is so wrapped up in maybes and what-ifs.
By midnight, I’ve worked myself into such a state that I have a pounding headache. I move over to the window to watch the rain, and as I wait, all my turmoil slowly turns to the now-familiar sense of apprehension as, minute by minute, the rain doesn’t come.
As I stare up at the sky, an hour passes, two, and still no rai
n. I give up at 2:30 a.m. and go to bed. I lie there in the darkness, staring into the void, too scared to sleep in case I fall into the coma that preceded the madness that killed Group A.
I know something is wrong as soon as I open my eyes.
At first I think it must still be the middle of the night, because the lighting inside my cell is all wrong, but then I realize that it’s because the only source of illumination is the thin strip of sunlight beaming through the small window in the back wall.
Instinctively, my eyes dart over to the screen to check the time.
The screen is off.
I get out of bed and walk over to it, staring at my own reflection looking back at me in the black mirrored surface.
The screen is never off.
“What’s going on?” I whisper to no one. And then, “Happy?”
There is no reply from the blank screen.
“Happy, where are you?” I ask. I try to ignore the tremble in my voice, try to ignore the horrible attachment I have to the operating system that runs this world.
With the screen off, I have no idea what time it is; my wake-up call is controlled by the screen, so it could be long after or long before 7:30 a.m.
No, wait, I think, and walk to the back window, where I look up to the sky and see that the sun is high above me. After seven thirty, long after.
“What’s going on?” I say, louder this time. I wish my sleeping patterns weren’t all messed up, because my body clock is usually pretty reliable at getting me up a few minutes before the alarm, but now I have no idea what time of day it is.
All right, all right, I think. Stay calm. At least you’re alive, you’re not in a coma yet. Go about your normal routine. It’ll be exercise soon, and you can ask the others if they know what’s going on, and if they don’t know, you just have to hope that Wren will eventually show up and explain everything.
But it’s hard to do all my exercises without any breakfast for energy, and by the time I get to the third set of push-ups, I’m dripping with sweat and exhausted.
I sit on my bed and just wait for something to happen, but nothing does.
Time passes, I can’t tell if it’s hours or minutes, but the back wall doesn’t move. I’m certain that exercise hour has come and gone, but it’s so hard to be sure when there’s no way of tracking time.
I pace again, I try singing like Pander, but I’m tone-deaf and the sound only annoys me. I look through the window again and see that the sun is still high up in the sky, or is it a little bit lower now?
Wren didn’t come after she gave you the warning about the Delay, I think. They must have found out, they must have caught her.
I wait and wait and wait. Too distracted to read, no energy to exercise, mind racing at a million miles an hour trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
I pace and I sit and I stand and I watch the sun sink lower and lower.
Is this punishment? Does the government know what Wren has done? Did they torture her until she confessed to everything? Did they watch her Panoptic footage without her permission? Are they just going to leave us here, locked up, no food or water, no contact, just left to die in our cells like caged rats?
I notice something as I stare up at the sky: The little lights that encircle the drones on top of the pillar are still on. That doesn’t make any sense; why would those electronics still be working when my screen is off and the lights in my cell are out? I had been working on the assumption that all the power in the Loop is out, but maybe it’s just my cell. And then I remember that Wren explained the security system in the Loop to me, how if there was some catastrophic power failure, everything would shut down except the security features, which would run off energy from the harvest stored in a massive battery twelve feet belowground. The mechanical instruments that run the doors and a supply of triggers to activate heart devices would also use the backup supply, and these things are protected from every kind of attack they could think of, from escape attempts to nuclear blasts.
Dusk begins to settle in, and I remember that it’s been getting dark at around 7 p.m.
It can’t be seven, I tell myself. Where’s Wren? Where’s anybody to explain what’s happened?
The conversation between Alistair and Emery replays in my mind, and Kina’s words about the war.
What if it happened? What if some cataclysmic bomb has been dropped and wiped out most of the population? What if my family is dead? What if Wren is dead?
Just as the thought crosses my mind, the hatch in my cell door opens, and I turn to see Wren staring back at me. The feeling of relief is so immediate that I think for a second I might collapse to my knees.
“Wren, thank god, what the hell’s happened? The screen is off, the back wall never opened, I haven’t heard from anyone all day.”
Wren doesn’t reply, just stares at me, her blonde hair hanging disheveled over her face, her eyes blinking unnaturally fast over and over again, and for the briefest moment, a wide and crazy smile spreads across her face.
“Wren, are you okay?”
She blinks five, six, seven times and then shakes her head as though trying to snap out of a trance.
“Luka?” she says, her voice unsure. Her eyes are clear, and she appears to recognize me for the first time since opening the hatch.
“Yeah, it’s me, Wren. What’s going on?”
Wren steps aside, and Malachai’s face appears in the gap in my door.
“Are you okay, Luka?” he asks, and I hear my door being unlocked.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, unable to hide the disappointment from my voice.
The door swings open, and Wren walks into my cell, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and wraps her arms around me. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” she says, her breath against my ear somehow sending shivers down my spine despite the situation. I gently push her back.
“Wren, what happened?”
“There’s no power anywhere, Luka. The whole city is in a blackout, and things are … weird.”
“Weird how?” I ask.
“She heard things,” Malachai answers for Wren. “Screams and gunshots.”
“Looting?” I ask. “Maybe the homeless?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Wren agrees. “But it sounded like … I don’t know, it was scary.”
“You didn’t come on Friday, what happened?” I ask.
“I was put on paid leave; they wouldn’t let me come in,” Wren tells me. “I had two armed officers with me until late last night. I think they might know something, Luka.”
“It might not even matter,” Malachai says, putting an arm around Wren’s shoulder, the sight of which makes me grind my teeth together. “There hasn’t been a power cut in ninety-seven years; something big is happening.”
She let him out first, I think, staring at Wren’s hand as it reaches up to squeeze Malachai’s. She went to him first.
“So, what now?” I ask, tearing my gaze away from their interlinked fingers and into Wren’s eyes.
“I don’t know,” she says, looking away from Malachai, frowning at me. “The trains are running on backup power, but they’ll be offline within three hours, same with the streetlights and anything else that runs off stored power. We need to figure out how serious this is and then make a decision.”
“A decision?” I repeat. “What kind of decision?”
“Luka, if this is something big, then we need to think about leaving the Loop. All of us.”
“Something big? Like what?”
“Like a war,” Malachai says.
“War?” I turn to Wren. “I asked you about a war days ago, and you told me it was impossible.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem so crazy now, all right?” she snaps back.
“Hey, let’s not start arguing among ourselves,” Malachai says. “I won’t lie—I hope it’s a war. I know that’s immoral or whatever, but my prospects grow infinitely brighter if the world is in chaos. I’m thirty days from the Block—you think there’s a
2 a.m. club in the Block? There isn’t, and they say there are no Delays; they say that they experiment on you constantly. If this is a war, I’ve never been happier.”
I nod in agreement, remembering my own confused longing for anything, no matter how terrible, to end the monotony of the Loop. “So, what now?” I ask.
Malachai sighs. “I guess we gather the team.”
* * *
One by one we open the cells of Wren’s chosen few, the ones who were lucky enough to be put into Group B: Pod, Igby, Pander, Akimi, Reena, Juno, Alistair, Emery, Adam, Fulton, and finally, Woods.
They all want an explanation, and we tell them to wait until everyone is free of their cell.
The group gathers, and I look over to Kina’s cell. I want to go over there and let her out, or at least explain what’s happening, but Wren begins to talk.
“Early this morning, at about five a.m., the power went out across the whole city. At first, everything was fine. There was a little bit of panic—people thought it might have been the Missing, maybe they had been planning some sort of attack all along—but by six a.m. everyone was enjoying the blackout. They carried candles in the streets and laughed about the first power cut in most people’s lifetime. Then we started hearing screams near the center of town, then more from the financial district, and later we heard gunfire. My family and I locked ourselves in our cellar. We were there for hours. My dad went out to find out what was going on, and he didn’t come back. Sometime later the ground shook, and I heard the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. We thought a bomb had dropped, we thought it was the end. I held my brothers and we said goodbye to one another, but the sound stopped. I’m the second oldest in my family so, after some more time had passed, I went upstairs to get food and water for the boys, and outside the kitchen window I saw that a plane had fallen out of the sky. Everyone who had been on board was … their eyes, they were staring …” She breaks off and stifles her tears. She takes a deep breath and composes herself. “I came here as soon as I could; I couldn’t leave you to die. The trains are running on emergency power, but they’ll be offline soon.”
“So, we’re under attack?” Reena asks, pushing a strand of curly red hair behind her ear.