“Thank you for the books. I think I might have gone crazy without them.”
“That’s okay.”
“My name’s Kina,” she says.
“Luka,” I reply.
“Luka?” she repeats. “The same Luka that guy keeps yelling about killing every day?”
“The same one.”
“Why does he hate you so much?”
I think about this for a second. I have my theories, but I don’t know for sure. For a moment, the image of the boy falling off the roof of the Black Road Vertical flashes in my mind. “Honestly, I wish I knew,” I tell her. “I guess he knew someone I knew on the outside.”
“Well,” Kina says with a new brightness in her voice, “thanks again for the books, Luka.”
“I’ve got plenty more,” I say, feeling the conversation coming to an end and not wanting it to. “Books, I mean, hundreds of them, and I’ve read them all, so you can borrow them whenever you want.”
“Luka the librarian,” she says, and laughs. “How did you get them?”
“I’m friends with the warden, Wren. She’s nice; you’ll like her.”
“Wren?” she says. “Oh, yeah, she seems nice.”
“She is; she’s really great,” I tell her, and I can’t help but smile.
“So, Luka, how long have you been in this fine establishment?” she asks.
“Two years, two weeks, and four days,” I reply.
“God, that’s … a long time,” she says in a low voice.
“Ah, the time flies when you’re … trapped in crushing silence.”
Kina laughs, and the sound makes me smile again. “Well,” I say, stepping back from the wall, “better get on with my sprints.”
“Sprints?” Kina asks.
“Yeah, I like to run.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it keeps me fit and leaves them with no energy to take at the harvest.”
Kina laughs at this. “I like that. A little act of rebellion.”
I smile. “Exactly. Speak tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” she replies.
The run doesn’t feel as hard as it usually does. And that night, after dinner, even the harvest is bearable.
As midnight approaches, I drag myself from the floor, my legs so weak that they shake uncontrollably as I stumble to the back wall and look to the sky through the window.
I stare at the clear black night and wait, and wait. Midnight comes, and I turn my eyes skyward, but the explosions don’t appear.
Impossible. Happy is not late, not ever, not even by one second—the system is flawless; it runs everything. I look at the time on my screen and see that thirty seconds have already passed since the scheduled rainfall.
“Happy?” I say, not tearing my eyes away from the sky. But no reply comes from my screen. “Happy!”
My screen flickers and then comes back to life.
“How can I help?” the screen asks in that familiar voice.
“The rain—” I start.
My panic is interrupted by the first flash in the sky, followed by a second and third spreading out into the distance in a long net of lights, and the clouds spiral out and join together.
“What just happened?” I ask.
“Everything is as it should be, Inmate 9-70-981,” Happy tells me.
“The rain,” I say, finally looking away as the first drops slam into the yard. “It was late.”
“Everything is as it should be.”
I look from the screen back to the falling rain.
I’m so relieved at the sight of the thick drops beating against the ground, running down the walls, drenching the waiting drones atop the column, that I ignore the error for a moment and just watch, pretending it never happened.
But it did, and I don’t know what it means.
There is talk among the inmates of the late rain.
It surprises me. I guess I always assumed that I was the only one who watches the rain each night.
I hear their voices in the yard, asking questions: Why? What does it mean? What’s going on out there?
I finish my final sprint toward my cell and then lean against Kina’s wall. It takes a while to catch my breath.
“How was your run?” she asks.
“Good, thanks.”
“Luka, the rain …”
“It was late,” I finish. “I know. What do you think it means?”
“Probably nothing.”
“Yeah, probably nothing,” I agree, but I can’t seem to shake off this uneasy feeling.
I sit in silence for a while, listening to the sounds of the inmates chatting, Malachai Bannister taunting the drones, Pander singing, Chirrak and Catherine talking tentatively, and two out of the four planners planning. Winchester still hasn’t returned from his last Delay, and Woods knows what that means—he died on the operating table when whichever piece of trendy technology they were trying to attach and perfect killed him. Woods hasn’t said a word since last Wednesday.
“How are you recovering from your heart implant?” I ask Kina, my hand instinctively going to the small scar on my own chest.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she says. “It’s just a bit uncomfortable.”
“That goes away.”
I feel my body jerk at the memory of my initial surgery. The kind of trauma that you never truly get over, but here in the Loop, we don’t talk about it. I try to fight against the memory, but it comes on fast and unyielding.
The Marshals kick my front door in, splinters of wood and militaristic yells. My sister is screaming as my dad stares solemnly out the window at the black speck that is growing smaller and smaller, carried toward the horizon by a large drone.
The Marshals dragged me, currents of electricity forcing my limbs rigid, out the door and down 177 flights of stairs.
There was darkness after that. The rumbling of an engine, the vibrations as I was transported to the Facility.
And then the paralysis needle.
The first time it happens, you’re sure that it’s forever, that this is your life now, that this is what they do with criminals—immobilize them and stack them into cells to be forgotten about.
Then came the surgery.
Her face, half covered by a pristine white mask, appeared in my field of vision, a horrible glee in her eyes as she talked me through the things they were doing to my body.
She held aloft the thick cobalt cables and told me that they were cutting deep into my wrists and embedding the magnetic cuffs.
My body shifted as the blade tugged open my skin, then I heard the sound of bolts being fired into bone.
The surgeon appeared again, and as she spoke, I could hear the smile in her voice.
“This,” she said, holding up a small metal wire clasped in her tweezers, “this is what we do to felons.” The wire weaved around into an infinity symbol. It was made of silver metal, and white lights—evenly spaced throughout the figure eight—blinked rapidly. The surgeon turned the device around so that my locked eyes could see it clearly.
“This will pierce a hole through the right atrium of your heart. It will weave out and then into your pulmonary artery. It will track your movements, it will connect you to the Loop, and, most importantly, it will detonate and kill you if you step out of line.”