She sat up in bed and noticed that she was the only one awake. It was still dim in the dormitory but there was a slit of a window, high up on the far wall, and a thin sliver of pale dawn light had painted a single luminous stripe on the blank white floor. It must be early in the morning then—which explained why everyone else in the cots all around her was still asleep.
But was the early hour really the reason no one else was up? There seemed to be a hushed whispering sound coming from somewhere. Penny frowned, remembering her strange thought that her pillow was trying to tell her something. Something about the Glorious Leader and a giant chicken drumstick…
No, he was the chicken drumstick, Penny thought. And he was singing something but I couldn’t quite make it out…
She put her face back down to the pillow experimentally and the whispering sound got louder. But try as she might, Penny couldn’t make out more than one word in ten. Every once in awhile she caught, “Glorious Leader” or “Shining Star,” but nothing else made any sense.
Penny frowned. Was there something wrong with her translation bacteria? And why was her pillow whispering to her, anyway? Was she still asleep and only dreaming that she was awake?
As if in answer to her question, the overhead lights suddenly came on and the door opened.
“Rise and shine, my lovelies!” cooed the voice of Mother Toone. “It’s another beautiful day in the Compound.” She went to each of the beds and shook the women gently by the shoulder. Penny had quickly pretended to be asleep the moment the door opened, so the NeverBreeder attendant shook her too.
Penny yawned and stretched, pretending to wake up just like all the women around her.
“Wakey-wakey!” Mother Toone sang brightly. “Time to get up and have some tasty breakfast. Then off we pop for a quick exam and then some lovely activities and maybe even some time in the exercise yard if you’re all very good.”
She bustled out the door and Penny sent Shurla an excited look.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered, leaning close to her friend’s cot. “The exercise yard! That must be outside the building. And if we can get out of the building, we can escape!”
“Escape?” Shurla frowned at her as though she didn’t understand the meaning of the word. “Why ever would we want to escape from the Compound?” she asked Penny, looking confused.
“What?” Penny stared at her blankly. “We want to escape because we don’t want to stay here with this crazy cult! We want to get back to Hell’s Gate Station so you can go back to your life as a, uh, joy-girl and I can call my friends and have them come get me.”
Shurla looked shocked.
“I don’t want to go back to that awful place!” she exclaimed. “It was dark and dirty—not nice and clean like the Compound.” She smoothed the bright white pillowcase beside her lovingly, as though admiring the cleanliness all around her.
“What’s wrong with you?” Penny hissed. “Last night you couldn’t wait to escape! In fact, you were the one who came up with the plan!”
Shurla opened her eyes wide and stared at Penny as though she was crazy.
“Why would I make a plan to escape paradise?” she asked, sounding honestly bewildered. “I must stay here and fulfill the Glorious Leader’s will for my life. Soon I will be united with my Forever Mate and after that, I shall breed for his glory—for the glory of the Shining Star…”
She clasped her hands to her triple bosom, a beatific smile wreathing her face. She looked like a saint who had caught a glimpse of Heaven, Penny thought. There was nothing forced or fake about her expression—she seemed to honestly believe everything she had been saying.
“I don’t understand this.” Penny shook her head. “What happened to you, Shurla? Why are you acting like this?”
“She’s just responding to the hypno-whispers and if you don’t want to be recycled, you’ll pretend you are too,” murmured a voice behind Penny.
Penny gasped and jerked around to see the woman with the straight black hair who had brought their protein shakes yesterday. She had a hover-cart filled with trays and more frosty glasses of the same milk-shake-like liquid which she was handing out to the other prisoners.
“What do you mean?” Penny asked her. “What whispers?” Then she remembered the way her pillow had seemed to be whispering to her when she woke up, though she couldn’t understand very much of it.
“You must have heard them,” the woman murmured, as she served Penny a tray which had a covered plate, a glass of the frosty white stuff, and a flavor stick and a few utensils on a napkin.
“Well, yeah.” Penny nodded. “But I only understood about one word in ten.”
The woman looked at her shrewdly.
“Either you’ve got a language implant or some other kind of translation device on you. Standard isn’t your first language and you didn’t learn it naturally, did you?”
“Uh, no.” Penny shook her head. “English—English is my first language.”
“Never heard of English, but it’s a damn good thing for your sake that you don’t know Standard. Else you’d have been hypnotized too.” The woman shook her head.
“But—” Penny began.
The woman shook her head.
“Not here. Out in the exercise yard I’ll tell you more if I can. In the meantime, act like all the others and when Mother Toone asks if anyone wants to leave the Compound, don’t say a word. Understand?”
She gave Penny such an intense look that she felt her stomach fist in fear.
“All right,” she murmured. “I won’t.’
“Good.” The woman nodded. “Now here’s your breakfast. Whatever you do, don’t eat the flesh.”
“The flesh?” Penny asked, bewildered. But the woman had already passed on and was giving out breakfast trays to the other prisoners.
Penny looked down at her own tray and saw something that looked like blue scrambled eggs and a piece of pale purple toast. There was also a bowl full of pink chunks in some kind of white custard and a few strips of crispy brown meat.
The meat looked like the best of the lot but Penny remembered the woman’s words and didn’t touch it. The way she’d called it “flesh” instead of meat seemed significant—Penny was afraid to ask where it had come from.
Instead, she tasted the other things on her tray but found them all extremely bland. Her eye fell on the flavor stick, though, and she had an idea. Picking it up, she placed it against her tongue and thought about scrambled eggs. Then she swirled it through the fluffy blue chunks on her plate and tried them again. This time they tasted exactly like perfectly cooked scrambled eggs with just a hint of cheese and salt and pepper.
“Mmm, perfect!” Penny murmured to herself. She did the same thing to the purple bread—thinking of hot buttered toast with homemade strawberry preserves and then transformed her bland protein shake into a frozen mochaccino. The pink chunks in white custard was a little bit more difficult, but after a moment, Penny thought to transform them into pineapple in a kind of custard cream sauce. To be honest, this last transformed food wasn’t very good but she was still hungry, so she ate it anyway.
All around her, the other prisoners were cleaning their plates and drinking their shakes with no questions. Penny wondered if all of them were hypnotized as Shurla apparently was. The looks of quiet contentment and peaceful happiness on their formerly worried faces seemed to answer her question—every one of them had gone straight down the rabbit hole—presumably from listening to what the woman had called “hypno-whispers” the night before.
She also wondered if she ought to try and escape by herself. But she’d been depending on Shurla to go with her. And besides, the woman with short black hair who had served them breakfast had promised to tell her more during their time in the exercise yard—maybe she ought to wait and hear what she had to say before making a break for it…
“Now then, my lovelies.” Mother Toone was suddenly there, standing in the front of the dormitory. “Did everyone enjoy their
yummy-yummy breakfasts?” she asked brightly.
“Oh, yes—it was delicious,” Shurla said, smiling at her. “I’ve never had anything so tasty in my life! They certainly don’t have anything nearly this good back at Hell’s Gate Station,” she added.
The other women nodded and murmured, agreeing with her. In order to avoid being found out, Penny nodded along with the rest.
“Good, good!” Mother Toone cooed. “Now…” She cocked her bald orange head to one side inquiringly. “I notice that you mentioned your old home, my dear,” she said to Shurla. “And I want you to know, you can go back there if you want. That is, you can get up and leave the Compound right this minute. In fact, everyone can.” She paused theatrically, her yellow eyes flickering over all of them. “This is your first, last, and only chance. Speak now if you want to leave our lovely Compound.”
It was on the tip of Penny’s tongue to shout that she wanted to go! That she wanted to get out of this crazy place right now. But she remembered the other woman’s words and the sharp look she’d given Penny when she told her not to say a word when she was asked if she wanted to leave. So she bit her tongue and waited, hoping she wasn’t blowing her only chance to get out of here.
After a moment, Mother Toone nodded in apparent satisfaction.
“That’s good,” she said, smiling widely. “Very good. So you’re all happy here?”
Shurla answered for everyone.
“The Compound is our true home,” she said, smiling beatifically. “Why would we ever want to leave it?”
All the women murmured agreement and Penny pasted a smile on her face and murmured right along with them. But inside her stomach was knotted into a fist. What in the hell was going on around here and how was she ever going to get away now that her only friend had deserted her?
Penny could only hope the woman—whose name she didn’t know—was telling her the truth and that she could give her some hints on how to escape.
Because there was no way she could stay in this creepy place—no way in hell.
Twenty-Six
There was another physical where they all stripped and lined up against the wall while a NeverBreeder doctor checked their vitals. After that came the horrible internal exam on the cold metal tables where Penny’s womb was pronounced “healthy and ripening, though not yet ready to conceive.”
After the exam, their robes were taken away and they were all given shapeless pajama-like clothing to wear which looked a little like white scrubs. Then, as promised, they were herded out to the exercise yard, which was just a big, walled-off area of neatly clipped turquoise grass with a few flowering bushes around the edges.
“Now then, my sweeties,” Mother Toone sang out as the prisoners wandered around the manicured lawn and looked at the sky, which could just be seen over the high wall. “You all have a lovely time exercising and then I’ll come get you for lunch. All righty?”
She left without waiting for an answer, locking them into the yard the same way she had locked them into the dorm the night before. Presumably, they were on their own for a while.
Penny thought about trying to speak to Shurla, but her friend had an expression of blank bliss on her face. She was wandering about the exercise yard with a vacant smile, staring up at the sunlight filtering down through the shimmering atmosphere bubble and humming contentedly to herself.
So talking to Shurla was out. Penny’s other thought was to wonder if now was a good time to try and escape. But the wall around the yard was at least thirty feet high and made of a solid block of some smooth, glassy gray stone like polished marble, which provided no hand or footholds at all.
She was just beginning to despair about ever getting out or finding out what was going on around here, when the single door to the yard opened again and the woman with short, straight black hair slipped out. Carefully, she locked the door behind her and then went to tend the flowers on the bushes that ringed the perimeter of the yard.
Penny watched her for a moment, and then wandered over as though curious about the bushes.
“Hi,” she murmured to the woman, trying to keep a happy smile on her face as she spoke.
“Hello.” The woman didn’t look up from her pruning. She had a tiny, blunt pair of scissors she was using to carefully shape the leaves and buds of each bush into perfectly symmetrical shapes. “It’s a beautiful day in the Compound,” she added loudly.
“Oh, uh, yes. Yes, it is,” Penny agreed quickly. Then she murmured, “You promised me some answers. What in the hell is going on around here, anyway?”
The woman sighed and nodded.
“Fine. I’ll tell you what I can but you’ve got to be careful. If you give me away, I’ll pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She looked up, giving Penny that intense, hopeless gaze again. “I’ve been here fifteen cycles so I’m very good at pretending.”
Fifteen cycles? Does she mean fifteen years? Penny felt her breath catch in her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “And I’m Penny, by the way. Penny from Earth.”
“Never heard of it,” the woman said dismissively. She clipped another bud. “My name is Claudette. I used to be from Tenga Four, but I’ll never get back there now.” She shook her head with a sad kind of resignation.
“What? Why do you say that? Haven’t you ever even thought about trying to escape?” Penny asked.
Claudette’s face hardened.
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d been here as long as I have and you knew how this place works. You know what happens to anyone who tries to escape or who loses their fertility? They get recycled.”
“What does that mean?” Penny shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
Claudette gave her a direct look.
“I heard that one of your number didn’t make the grade during her fertility inspection yesterday.”
Penny remembered the woman with purple skin and gills the guards had dragged screaming out of the exam room.
“Yes, they said they were taking her for recycling,” she said. “But I don’t understand what that is.”
“It’s exactly what it sounds like—no part of anyone or anything is ever allowed to go to waste here in the Compound. Remember how I told you not to eat the flesh on your breakfast tray this morning?” Claudette asked. “That was your friend—the one who failed her fertility test.”
“Oh! Oh, no,” Penny whispered, as the other woman’s words sank in. “That’s terrible,” she whispered, feeling sick.
“No, that’s the Compound,” Claudette said grimly. “It’s just the way things are here. So be careful what you eat.”
“What else is going on here?” Penny asked. “Why did they kidnap us in the first place?”
“Why do you think? They call us all breeders, don’t they?” Claudette’s voice was harsh. “You’re here to bear babies for the Glorious Cause. Only you’ll never get to see any of them—not as they ought to be, anyway.”
“What? Why not?” Penny demanded. “And if this is some kind of a…a breeding farm, how come none of the women I saw in the town was pregnant?”
“They take the baby out of you after the first trimester, that’s why,” Claudette told her. “That way you can keep bearing more and more babies—at least four a year is what they like. Or more if you’re fertile enough to have twins.”
“Four babies a year?” Penny was aghast. “But you never get to carry any of them to term? Why not?”
“They have to take them out so they can treat the fetuses in the chemical baths until it changes them into what they want,” Claudette said darkly.
“What they want?” Penny looked at her blankly. “What do you mean? What do they change the babies into?”
Claudette gave her a dark look.
“Where do you think the NeverBreeders come from?”
“What?” Penny shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, that can’t be right. I…I don’t believe you!”
“Believe what you want.”
Claudette shrugged, as though it didn’t matter what Penny thought. “But ask yourself this—how else could they reproduce? Have you seen between their legs? They’re bare down there—completely smooth.”
Feeling sick, Penny remembered thinking how strange the smooth orange patch of skin between the NeverBreeder guards’ legs were when she’d seen them in the showers the day before.
“You’ve seen them.” Claudette nodded. “I can see it in your eyes—you know I’m telling the truth.”
“But…why?” Penny shook her head. “Why keep a whole Compound full of people who are fertile just to have babies and make them into people who are infertile and incapable of reproducing themselves?”
“For the ‘Glorious Cause,’ of course,” Claudette said sourly. “Someday our Glorious Leader will lead an army of NeverBreeders out into the universe and conquer the whole thing—starting with Hell’s Gate Station, of course—because it is the most sinful place in all creation. Of course, he doesn’t want to conquer it now because it’s his main resource for kidnapping breeders.”
“This is crazy…” Penny felt dizzy with the information being dumped on her. “I just…I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “So I’m stuck here and I’m going to be artificially inseminated for the rest of my life so I can keep having baby after baby that they’ll turn into those little orange monsters?”
“Oh no—not artificially inseminated.” Claudette shook her head. “No, the chemical conversion process won’t work on a baby unless it’s been made the old- fashioned way and incubated in a real womb the first three months. So as soon as your womb is ripe for conception, you’ll be paired with your Forever Mate in a Unification Ceremony.”
“My who in a what?” Penny’s head was spinning.
“Your Forever Mate—whoever the Glorious Leader chooses for you to be with. I’ve been with mine for fifteen cycles—the big idiot,” Claudette said bitterly. “Look.” She pulled down the front of her pale blue toga dress and showed Penny a looping scar just above her left breast. “That’s his mark.”
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