A single drop of luminescent silver liquid formed in midair, then dropped into the bowl.
The woman went boneless in her restraints. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her fists uncurled as unconsciousness claimed her.
All that for one drop. One drop that cost a fortune.
The Ofarian guard unstrapped her and roughly lifted her away from the contraption. Like a doll, he dropped her into a wheelchair.
As the guard finagled the wheelchair out into the hall, the poor, spent woman’s chin dropped to her chest. Gwen wanted to go to her, grab her arms, and shake her and ask why, why would any Ofarian agree to do this to themselves once they knew the price.
Then, as the wheelchair rolled by and she caught the distinct Secondary signature, it hit her.
That woman wasn’t Ofarian. She was Tedran.
FIFTEEN
Xavier hadn’t been inside the Plant in a year and a half.
The monotonous, ashy walls stretched for him, tried to steal his energy, but they wouldn’t win. Not this time.
As the wheelchair carrying 075B squeaked past, Gwen’s shackled hands flew to her mouth. A long, low moan leaked from her throat. So she’d figured it out. She wasn’t as stupid or arrogant as Xavier had thought.
Two years ago Nora had appeared out of a cloud of glamour in his cell. She’d told him she’d been observing him, that he was the strongest Tedran she’d seen. That she’d chosen him for a hero’s task. It took her two months to convince him she was real, another month to prove a whole world existed outside the gray Plant walls, and three more months to coordinate his escape.
She needed an inside man, one who could help her free their people. One who wanted to make his captors suffer. Now here he was, in the moment he hadn’t known he’d been living for: showing Miss Ofarian Princess what her people were really capable of.
Gwen’s whole body heaved. The guard with the wheelchair spun to turn a corner. Another guard appeared wheeling 003AC toward the draining room. The last time Xavier had seen 003AC, the younger man had just barely gotten hair on his face. Now he looked good and used. The man in the chair might be only eighteen Earth years old, but his skin sagged off his face. Black half-moons pulled down the lower lids of his dull, lifeless eyes. His thin, frail shoulders curved with severe defeat and resignation.
Xavier used to look exactly like that.
The two Ofarians paused to briefly exchange idle talk. Just a normal day to them, punch in, punch out. The 49ers, the traffic on Highway 50…Once those things had been foreign words to Xavier. Still were, to an extent. He remembered lolling in those chairs, listening to the drone of the guards’ voices. Not caring about anything, not even living.
Gwen spun back to him, her gold hair as wild as the look in her glassy eyes. Xavier drew himself up to his full height. Challenged her.
003AC’s wheelchair headed for the room 075B had just left.
Though Xavier didn’t watch, he listened to the clank of the restraints as the guard looped them around the young man’s extremities. Xavier heard his faint protestations, then the whimpers, then nothing. Yes, the room was soundproof, but the sounds rang as loud as sirens in his memory.
“Enough,” Gwen said. “I understand.”
From just this little room? Xavier almost laughed. “Oh, no.” He backed away from her heat and scent. She disgusted and frightened him, but he’d show her everything Nora wanted him to, even if it destroyed him.
“No. You don’t know the half of it.” He thrust an arm over her head, pointing in the direction 075B had gone. “Walk.”
But when they reached a T intersection, he was the one who came to a halt. 075B had disappeared somewhere into the maze of corridors. Here the Plant branched off into various levels of hell. He’d learned all about hell after he’d gotten out. He’d learned an awful lot about an endless number of awful things. This place still topped the list.
Even though he resisted going forward, he looked into Gwen’s pale face and knew he had to. Not for her. Fuck no, not for her. Because of her. She would be the one to make all this go away, to erase hell and turn it into some version of heaven.
The corridor to the right loomed dark, save for the intermittent circles of white light falling from the wall sconces onto the floor. Yellow-and-black tape striped across the double door at the far end. Wall spray paint declared it: CELL BLOCK 1.
A jagged rock lodged in his throat. “Through there.”
She watched him too intently, too many questions hiding behind her lips. His skin itched under her scrutiny. The wonder and horror in her eyes pissed him off. And he hated Nora a little bit for making him come here again.
They stopped in front of the closed doors.
“What now?” she whispered.
He turned to wait for 003AC to come back from the draining room. After a few minutes, the wheelchair swerved around the corner. As the guard pushed 003AC through the security doors, Xavier followed, forcing Gwen with him.
Inside the cell block, the dim green lights overhead made his stomach churn and his head swim with their insistent buzz. Even Gwen looked horrible in that light.
The long rows of iron bars stretched seemingly into infinity. When he was younger, the end of the block had seemed a world away. Now he could run it in a few seconds. And a year and a half ago, he had.
Though he hated to touch her, he reached back and pulled Gwen to his side against the bars to 003AC’s cell. Gwen inched back. He shoved her nose into the iron, and she watched like she was supposed to. It was almost like when Adine had first shown him a horror movie and he’d covered his eyes and she’d laughed at him. That awful humiliation, knowing he’d been scared by something so fake.
This wasn’t fake. Not remotely. And Gwen had to see it without childish hands over her eyes.
Inside the cell, the guard tilted the wheelchair and 003AC slid from the cushioned seat. He collapsed in a shapeless pile of skin and bone on a mattress shoved in the corner. The guard kicked the chair around and left, yawning. The cell lock clicked behind him.
Gwen didn’t follow her kinsman. She remained locked on 003AC. The boy’s eyes opened a bit, showing nothing but white. His body flattened on the mattress and his back expanded and contracted with deep, even breaths.
“Will…” She cleared her throat. “Will he live?”
“If you call this living.”
Someone rustled, unseen, in a cell down toward the end. For a second he hoped he’d been heard, that his people knew he was coming for them. But that was impossible. Neither he nor Nora had made first contact yet; they’d been waiting to snag Gwen. Besides, Nora had apparently been sneaking into the Plant for decades—observing, planning, waiting—and never once in his life had he sensed a thing.
Gwen’s voice tightened. Snapped. “Will he be all right?”
“Eventually.” He swallowed, and it hurt. “In twelve hours or so, when he finally comes around, they’ll feed him. When his strength returns in a day or two, they’ll send him back to that room. And so it goes. On and on. Until it kills him.” When he turned to her, she was doing this thing with her throat—holding it tightly within her hands, as though choking herself.
“There’s more.”
She sucked in a breath. “How many of them are kept here?”
“Three hundred. Maybe more. That’s not what I meant, though.”
He tried to lead her to the end of the cell block, desperately needing to get out of there, but she paused before each cell. Most caged Tedrans had collapsed like 003AC. One, awake now, sat with his hands tucked into the hollow behind his knees. He stared at nothing, awaiting the appearance of a uniformed Ofarian.
Gwen’s hands had moved from her throat to the long zipper of her sweater, where she clutched it with white knuckles. “Why can’t they use their glamour to get out, the way you got us in?”
He pointed to the boxes strung up on the ceiling that filled the cell block with pulsing green light. “Inhibitors. They neutralize glamour befor
e we can touch it.”
“Like nelicoda.”
“Yes, but if you take nelicoda while working with water, it’ll kill the magic right away. The Tedran neutralizers only keep you from starting glamour. I started my illusion outside. Those things have no effect on us right now.”
“That’s why there were no green lights back there, in the…” She couldn’t even say it.
A new Ofarian guard veered around the corner, stalking into the cell block.
“Oh, God,” Gwen breathed, her fingers touching her lips. “I recognize her.”
“A friend?” he asked bitterly.
“No. I don’t know her personally. She applied for Plant duty a few years ago. I was there when the Board approved her appointment.”
Xavier had hoped for that, that she’d know someone here. “So how does she like her job?”
Gwen’s head whipped around. Ah, there it was, back again: the corporate slut programmed to defend her people. “The Plant is its own entity. Once people are accepted, they give up their former lives…” Her voice petered out.
He tugged her past Cell Blocks 2 through 5. The concrete floor gave way to wiry, industrial carpet. A few more Ofarians moved about the open spaces, some in doctor’s scrubs, most in uniforms. They tapped at tablet computers and pointed into cells, mumbling to one another.
Xavier gestured to the row of barred cells lining one side of the wide, quiet corridor.
Her hands rose again, this time to her face. She advanced slowly to the bars, her mouth falling open. He joined her, hands in his pockets.
This cell, three times as large as the others, contained four young women.
111J was pregnant again. In Earth years she might be in her early twenties, not too much younger than Xavier. This would be her third or fourth child, he guessed. She lay on her side on a yellow couch, her head covered in thick, black hair resting on her outstretched arm. Her face was perfectly blank, her Tedran gray eyes dead.
The others were barely out of girlhood, their swollen bellies a contrast to their thin arms and legs. They sat in a circle, playing some sort of hand-slapping game and singing in Tedranish. On the outside, girls their age were just starting to learn to drive. Or getting their first after-school jobs. Or learning how to kiss.
These girls had never even heard of those things.
Only when Xavier had gotten out did he come to know why the Ofarians allowed the slaves to continue to speak their own language. Tedran words were needed to power the glamour. When a bottle of Mendacia went out, one of the slaves was forced to provide the client’s specific glamour needs in Tedranish.
A glowing screen on the wall next to the cell listed each woman’s classification code paired with a man’s code.
Gwen’s eyes swept over the soft rugs, the plush beds and cushioned chairs, the shelves stacked with games and cards, and food and drink. The cinder block walls here were painted pleasant colors, and decorated with framed prints of mountains and flowers. Things the women would never actually see.
“There’s incentive to get pregnant,” Xavier said. “At least, the Ofarians think it’s incentive. They impregnate the young girls before they know better, lure them with better rooms and food. And pregnancy puts glamour into dormancy, so they don’t have to go to the draining rooms.” He waved a hand at the ceiling, free of neutralizers. “That woman you saw when we first came in, she’s probably sterile. Her only use is draining. She doesn’t have much longer to live.”
“Why not?”
“Glamour isn’t meant to be squeezed out day after day, forcing it out of your body like a poison. The men”—he shook his head, feeling the bits of his own life stolen from him, the holes left behind—“we never live long.”
He coughed, looked away. “Soon enough the women’ll realize what it is they’re continuing. They want to live more comfortably but they don’t want to keep having kids, knowing what the little ones will have to go through.”
Gwen’s mouth twisted like she was about to spit out rotten meat. “Do they have a choice whether or not to get pregnant?”
Xavier looked back toward 111J. “What do you think?”
Gwen shrank away, mumbling, “I don’t want to know anymore. I don’t…we can go now. Get me out of here.”
“Tough shit.” One of the choicest phrases he’d learned on the outside.
On cue, from down a softly lit hall, drifted the sounds of children’s giggles and the shrieks of new babies. There were pieces of him in there. For a moment he thought Gwen might dash for the nursery, and he was grateful when Gwen pinched her eyes shut and turned her head away from the kids’ noises. If she’d gone down there, he didn’t think he’d be able to stop himself from scooping up what he guessed was his and try to make a run for it.
If he did that, everything would end. All of Nora’s work. The Tedrans’ only chance at freedom. Revenge on the Ofarians. Everything.
There was one place left for Gwen to see.
Though it killed him, he dragged his heavy legs to the left. The new corridor curved sharply around, and the sight of it almost brought him to his knees. Damn Nora for making him come back. Damn Gwen.
He sagged against the wall, feeling the glamour flicker around them. He snatched it back under his control before it slipped away. The wall supported him. Breath labored in his chest.
“Xavier?” Gwen stood way too close, considering where they were about to head.
“Get away from me.” He shoved away from the wall and marched around her. Into the Circle. She thought she’d seen the worst of this place? She thought she understood what Tedran lives had been reduced to?
She had to jog to keep up with his long strides. He didn’t slow down.
The cells in the Circle were like pieces of a pie. The first time Adine had made him a real pie, it had been apple, and when she’d cut into it, making triangular shapes, he’d instantly flashed back to this place. With a growl and a sweep of his arm, he’d sent the whole pie against the wall. He still had yet to eat a bite of one.
The main corridor swept around the cells at ceiling height, looking down into the triangular-shaped rooms. Carpet here, too, but no shelves of food or games. Just a single mattress lying beneath bright, glaring lights and the pallor of green neutralizers.
The first occupied cell held a naked Tedran man and woman. They lay on the bed, curled into one another. The sight of skin on skin burned a bullet through his chest.
Gwen’s voice went completely flat. “What is this.”
Xavier looked at the floor. Safer that way. But the buzz in his brain and body and blood had already begun.
“No baby yet.” He fixated on the tight nap of the beige carpet. “Poor couple combination. Bad timing. Fertility issues. Who knows? They haven’t figured it out yet. But they will. They’ll test each of them. Over and over and over. When they find a good stud, they’ll just keep bringing the women.”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I thought…”
He wanted to bite something. Rip something apart. Stomp something into pebbles. “Just say it.”
“I thought they’d do it scientifically. With needles. And petri dishes.”
“Is that how you’d do it?”
“No!”
“The Ofarians think it’s some kind of reward.” He slashed at the air with a hand. “Like an orgasm will take all this away.”
He’d never known the word orgasm either, only that they demanded he have one inside a woman.
She staggered to the next cell in the Circle. A naked Tedran man sat on the edge of the mattress, heels tapping incessantly, fingers rubbing together. Xavier didn’t have to see proof. The Tedran man was hard. Hopped up. Waiting.
A door opened at the wide end of the pie piece, just below Gwen and Xavier’s feet. The waiting man’s prize entered: a naked Tedran woman. Head down, she shuffled forward. The man rose, visibly trying to calm himself, and slowly approached her. He took her hand. There was a gentleness to his touch, but it didn’t soften what
he was about to do.
The mattress creaked as the Tedran man climbed upon it. The woman reclined back and opened her thighs.
Don’t look. Don’t look. But not only did Xavier look, he stared. He felt. He wanted.
Gwen’s chin touched her chest and she shuddered.
“Don’t,” he snapped. “Don’t you dare look away. They don’t.” He jabbed a finger toward the narrowed tip of the cell where floor-to-ceiling windows revealed the central observation room. An Ofarian man and woman stood on the other side of the glass, watching as the Tedran man started to thrust into the prone Tedran woman.
The Tedran woman’s arms draped out to the sides, not reaching for her partner. They rarely did. Her head lolled and her expressionless eyes drifted up to the walkway. She couldn’t see Xavier, but it felt like she did.
The man pounded harder into her, the thin muscles on his arms straining as he held himself above her. The only way Xavier knew the man came was from the stiffening of his body, the silent grimace on his face.
Xavier remembered this part. It felt good for about half a second. Then the guilt and horror rushed in.
On the mattress the man did what Xavier always had: he touched the woman’s face, brought her eyes to his, and said in Tedranish, “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”
Xavier swiveled away, angry, pounding blood gathering in his penis. Fuck fuck fuck. Not here. Not now. He punched his fists against his thighs and squeezed his eyes shut so tightly he saw stars.
“Xavier.” Gwen came up behind him. “You were in here. Weren’t you.”
He shook his head, but not in denial. 267X. That was him.
“Xavier, look at me.”
If he turned around, she’d see. Fuck it. There was no hiding it. One foot first, then the other, he slowly pivoted until he faced Gwen. She stared into his eyes, got the confirmation she wanted, then her eyes flickered down to his shame.
The erection pressed against his jeans’ zipper. Aching. Immediate. A trained tool. “Don’t worry. It’s not for you. I’m a goddamn Pavlov’s dog.”
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