Iris (The Color of Water and Sky Book 1)

by Andrew Gates

  “But… but that guy had a point, didn’t he?”

  “That guy was a moron, just a fucking trog. Ignore him,” Dan explained, trying to be reassuring.

  Iris shook her head and stood up.

  “No, but he had a point though. What’s the point of doing this if there’s no future?” she paused to gather her thoughts. “I guess the reality of the situation is finally hitting me and… and it hurts.”

  Dan stood up too and held both her hands. Iris wiggled out of his grip, not wanting to draw any more attention.

  “Sorry,” Dan said, “I don’t mean to make you feel-”

  “Like what? Don’t touch me here, Dan. Not with all these people. Look, why do people go on dates? Answer me that.”

  “To have fun?”

  “That’s… I guess that’s what I thought too… but that guy is right though, isn’t he? I mean dating starts off as fun, but that’s not the point. People date to find a match, a partner, someone they can eventually spend their life with.”

  “You’re letting that guy get to you. Think about how right this felt just five minutes ago.”

  Iris shook her head.

  “It’s not going to work, not in the long-term,” she explained. This time she sat herself back down against the wall again.

  There was a long pause. For a while nobody said anything. But eventually Dan sat back down and looked at her after taking a deep breath.

  “I had fun tonight and I’d very much like to see you again. What do you say?”

  Iris looked back towards him and stared into his dark eyes for several moments, not saying anything at all.

  The old man was right. No matter how well these dates went, they could never be together. Yet for some strange unexplainable reason, despite the hopeless impossibility of the whole thing, Iris felt compelled to see him again.

  “Yes,” she eventually said. The answer brought a smile to Dan’s face. “I had fun too. I’ll send you a message.”

  And with those words, Iris got up from the floor and walked away. Date night was over. It was time for more research.

  THE RUBBER BALL BOUNCED BACK INTO his hand. Tracey must have thrown that goddamn ball against the cold metal wall of his cell thousands, maybe millions of times since his captivity started almost a month ago. He could hardly believe that he had been safely sitting at home only a few weeks earlier. Time seemed to slow down here. Each day felt like a week. It would help if they gave me something to fucking do.Periodically someone from the kunda government contractor’s staff would come and visit. They would ask mundane, vague questions that proved they had no idea what he was up to.

  “What are you planning?” they would ask.

  “I’m not planning anything,” he would respond truthfully. But the look in their eyes would always say the same thing.

  Liar.

  One time Parnel herself showed up to say hello. The bitch wore a white pantsuit, straight out of the politician stereotype store. Her stern eyes did nothing to intimidate Tracey, who had been imprisoned for well over two weeks by this point.

  “What did you learn of the surface?” she asked.

  “Nothing more than you know,” he had answered. “You know what I do.”

  “We uncovered your pod. That’s how we linked you to the crime. You have no bargaining power here,” she responded.

  Tracey threw his hands into the air.

  “No shit, Parnel. You think I didn’t know that?”

  “We just wanted to make sure you’re aware. We’ve contained your device.” She tried to sound dominant, in command.

  “What have you done with my daughter?” he asked.

  The contractor ignored him.

  “You accessed classified documents of the surface.”

  Tracey remained strong.

  “Where is my daughter?”

  “You will not be seeing her.”

  “Ever?”

  The woman brushed off some dust from her off-the-racks pantsuit and looked at him sternly.

  “Tracey, you have been nothing but a nuisance to my investigation since it began. I gave you leeway until this point, but you have crossed the point of no return. When it comes to breaching classified security, the rules are really quite arbitrary. You see, accessing classified documents like the ones you did gives us government types the authority to detain you for basically as long as we want. I gave you a chance to remove yourself from the equation and you didn’t take it. You wouldn’t stop pushing further. As you might be able to tell, I’m not a patient woman. There is not going to be a second chance for you, so you might as well tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Tracey replied truthfully. “I wasn’t looking for anything specific, I just want to see my daughter, and if you say I will never see her again, then there’s really no point in me helping you, is there?”

  “What did you see of the surface? Did you see the hurricane?” she asked.

  At first he thought this was an odd question. He had no idea what a hurricane was, but he took video of the footage so she must have known what he saw. That’s when it hit him. She hasn’t checked the video on my pod. She doesn’t know about the footprints.

  “No,” Tracey replied, “I saw sand. That was all.”

  She did not seem to believe his answer, though this time for once he really was lying. After a few moments of silence, she took a few steps back towards the door of the cell.

  “You’re stubborn, Tracey,” she said. “You could have waited until the end of your time in the Navy. You could have left honorably. But you chose to make a scene. You chose to make a point because you thought making a jab at the government was more important than your career. Well look how that has treated you.”

  Tracey had heard this all before. He turned away from her and faced the inactive emergency LED lights lining the corners of the room. Anything to take my eyes away from her.

  “You can look away if you want, but know that this cell will be your final resting place. You will never leave this prison, and that makes me very happy.”

  And with those words, she tapped twice on the cell door. Two guards stood behind the door as it opened and she left, walking through the bright hallway of light. Tracey had to put his hands before his eyes in order to see.

  They don’t know, he realized as the door shut. He sat there alone in his dark cell once again. They don’t know about the footprints. Finally, I know something these assholes don’t.

  When he was not being interrogated by one of the doctor’s mindless hacks, Tracey’s only contact with the outside world was during food delivery and inspection three times a day. The guards would come in, bring him some shit to eat on a plastic plate, occasionally check to make sure his sink and toilet were in working order and that nothing suspicious was happening. Tracey was surprised how much he looked forward to these moments every day. He would usually take the opportunity to make some sort of comment to the guard. After a while he began to recognize the guards and in some cases, they would say things back to him, though he doubted they were encouraged to do so.

  A week after his encounter with the doctor, one of the guards gave him the rubber ball to bounce around. Tracey was not sure if this was part of some plan, or if the guard simply did it on his own. He thanked the guard and smiled whenever that particular man came back to his cell. Whether he was meant to have it or not, it helped that he at least had something to help him occupy his time.

  At times the lonely prisoner would think of Baltir. Tracey envisioned him sitting in the same small cell, getting food three times a day. But Tracey knew it was more likely Baltir was killed. He was a half-breed after all. The government would have no issue taking him out.

  But mostly Tracey’s thoughts revolved around Ophelia. He wondered what it must have been like for her all alone without a dad. He did not know what would happen to her. Where is she staying? Who is she with? These were questions that plagued his mind. He would often jump to terrible conclusions. He wou
ld imagine her mixed up in drugs or gangs or adopted by someone cruel. Sometimes he would even envision her dead somewhere in the yellow zones. But in the end he would always calm himself down. She’s probably fine, he would reassure himself. She’s a smart girl.

  At first Tracey thought Dr. Parnel was bluffing when she said he would never see Ophelia again. But as time went on, there was no mention of her. Tracey slowly began to realize that her words were more than likely true. After all, his imprisonment was not intended to reform him: it was meant to remove him from the equation.

  There were things he knew about this cell that a normal man would never bother to know. He knew it took only six paces to walk from one wall to the next and that if he stood in the very center with his arms outstretched, his fingertips barely grazed the sides of the walls. He knew how to match the pitch of the humming sound that came from the fluorescent light above his head whenever it turned on or off. He knew that someone must have been staying in the cell to his left, but not the cell to his right, just by listening to the footstep patterns of the guards. He knew which part of the walls made a different noise when you hit it, which part of the bed creaked, which side of the room was colder; and that if he pressed his ear against the floor at noon, he could hear noise from a kitchen directly below him. These were things that nobody should ever know, but Tracey knew it all.

  Even the air in the room seemed wrong. The air felt heavy and full of moisture, as if someone had left a powerful humidifier running. The wetness in the air combined with the cold metal walls made him shiver at first, though he eventually grew used to it.

  At his lowest point Tracey got on his knees and asked for help from the person who turned his back on him years ago. But his prayers remained unanswered. If there was a higher power, no sign of it showed in this metallic hell. Though Tracey always held a belief in the Lord Beyond Both Seas, he now started to question his faith. Perhaps putting faith in Him was as reasonable as putting faith in the Atlantic Federation and it was just hopeful optimism that guided his beliefs all along.

  A normal man would break under these kinds of circumstances, and perhaps that was all part of the plan. But now Tracey knew a secret that no one else knew, one that gave him comfort in these dark, solitary times. My brother is alive, he would think to himself whenever it got bad. Nobody else knows but me. The thought made him smile.

  But here he was now, alone and tired in dirty prison clothes, tossing a rubber ball against the metal walls of his cell. As the ball left his hand, he thrust it forward much harder than normal. The ball hit the wall with a big thud before bouncing off behind him and into the toilet bowl.

  “Shit,” he said, not intending to be ironic.

  Tracey pushed himself off the floor and walked over to the metal toilet behind him. Everything here was metal. It was kind of ridiculous. If the prison wanted to be efficient with their money they could have just made everything plastic, but the metal was scary, cold and intimidating. It must have been part of some sort of psychological intimidation tactic or something.

  As he pulled the ball from the toilet water, Tracey noticed something he had not seen before. There was a lone screw on the floor just next to the bowl. He picked it up and examined it closely, then searched for where it might have come from. It did not take long for him to notice that the toilet tank cover had two screw sockets on it, one on the left and one on the right. This screw had fallen out of the socket on the left.

  It must be an accident, Tracey thought to himself. Clearly the tank cover was intended to stay on. He looked around the room and listened carefully, wondering if anyone was nearby.

  Pulling a metal cover off like this would have been harder if it were screwed in at both ends, but with just one side screwed in, it came off easily. All he had to do was break other side. Tracey quietly pulled it up, placed the tank lid onto the floor and peered inside.

  The tank looked like any other. All the regular pieces were there. Tracey’s eyes stopped for a moment on the metal stick connected to the float. That was when instinct took over. He unscrewed the stick from the float and pulled the other end off from the tower. As he pulled it, the stick snapped at the very end, producing a pointed edge.

  Tracey smiled. A screw was not long enough to be effective for anything, but this rod sure was.

  Here’s my way out.

  He quickly put the lid back on and placed the loose screw where it was supposed to go. Since he had snapped off the other side of the lid from the tank, he simply placed it on and hoped nobody would notice.

  Tracey had not considered escape until this point, but now the tool was literally in his hands. He gazed down at the metal spike and thought about what he had to lose. There’s no telling when I’ll be let out, he thought. My life has been taken from me. I’ve already lost my daughter, what else could they take from me?

  He had three options: he could remain a prisoner in this cell, waiting for his days to come to an end; he could die trying to escape; or he could escape successfully with his life and remain a fugitive forever. None of the end results were good, but only one gave him a chance to get to his daughter again.

  It was worth the risk. He had nothing to lose, he realized.

  It’s settled; I’m going to escape or die trying.

  Tracey put the shiv into his pants and let the elastic band of his underwear hold it in place. He slid back over to his now damp ball, shook off some of the water and started tossing it against the wall again. He hoped no one had seen or heard anything. There were always eyes on him, but whether or not they were watching was a different story.

  As time went on, nobody came. Tracey began to feel more and more confident that no one saw or heard anything, even with the camera system set up in his cell. As he sat there, he tried to remember anything he could about the prison’s layout. It had been about a month since he had seen anything outside so his memory was hazy. Still, he tried to piece together as much of it as he could.

  Tracey remembered a long hallway with cells on either side. At one point they had descended down a staircase. That was after getting his prison uniform. On top of the stairs was difficult. He had made several turns and paying attention to his surroundings was not exactly on his priority list at the time, though in hindsight it should have been.

  Getting out of here is going to involve a whole lot of improvisation, Tracey realized. He did not know the layout well enough to formulate a plan here in his cell. A long hallway and stairs was not enough to go on. Once he was out there, he would have to make it up as he went along.

  The next several hours felt longer than normal. Time already passed by at a crawling speed, but now, excited with anticipation, time was almost at a standstill. He decided to let the ball go and sit in his bed for a moment so he would not tire out his wrist when he really needed it.

  Finally the moment came.

  Tracey could hear footsteps in the hall outside the cell. He turned to face the door as it slowly came open. He put his feet on the floor and stuck his right hand down his pants, ready to grab the shiv at any point.

  “Dinner,” the guard said as he entered. The guard wore the regular suit, a thick black uniform with a club strapped to one leg. He was a young man with dark skin and long hair pulled back in a bun.

  Tracey recognized this guard. It was the same man who had given him the ball. Shit, he thought, why did it have to be this guy?

  “What’s on the menu today?” Tracey asked, trying not to appear suspicious, though he realized he still had his hand down his pants.

  The man did not answer. He simply placed the tray on the floor.

  Shit, shit, shit, Tracey thought. He was hesitant. This man did not deserve what was coming. Why couldn’t it have been anyone else?

  The guard leaned back up and turned towards the door. As he started walking away, Tracey jumped off the bed. It was now or never. Whether this man had been nice to him or not, Tracey knew this would be his only way out and he did not want to spend another minute in this
cold dark cell.

  He pulled out the shiv and grabbed onto the guard, who immediately reached for his club. Tracey placed the pointy end of the rod up against the man’s neck and the guard suddenly froze.

  “Stop,” Tracey said quietly, trying not to cause alarm, “listen to what I say.”

  The man nodded, not saying a word. He was clearly petrified.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. Do you understand?” Tracey was still trying to keep his voice low.

  The man nodded again.

  “I want you to walk me out of here. On three, start walking. Okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. One. Two. Three.”

  The guard slowly began moving forward with Tracey standing next to him, pressing the point against his weak, vulnerable neck. They exited the cell and were soon out in the hallway. As the space opened up in the hall, Tracey moved around to the back of the man, keeping the point against his neck at all times.

  He could hear loud footsteps pounding against the metal floors from somewhere nearby. Clearly this time the prison security was paying attention. Soon this area would be full of guards, armed ones too. Tracey would have to get creative fast.

  “Which way is the way out?” Tracey asked. The man had no reply. “Speak!”

  “It’s… it’s up the stairs, but you’ll never make it,” the guard said nervously.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The stairs, it’s meant to be a trap. A bottleneck. Once you’re on the staircase, they’ll surround you. It’s designed that way on purpose.”

  Shit, Tracey thought. Even with a hostage, he could not fend off attackers from two sides.

  “How do I get around them then? Huh? There’s got to be a back way,” he said.

  The guard nodded.

  “There is. I can lead you to it. We’re going the right way. All we have to do is take the next left and there will be an elevator that can take us out of here.”

  Tracey was not so eager to board an elevator either. An elevator was just another box, another cell. He would be just as trapped in there as he would in a staircase.