I lay out most of the clothes on my bed but put on the extra pair of shorts I requested and was granted as part of my uniform. I begin my workout: push-ups, sit-ups, squats, pull-ups on the doorframe, and half a dozen variations of the same exercises until I’m dripping sweat and exhausted. Normally, I would stop after an hour, but today I want to keep going, I want to keep working, I want to outrun the pain that is trying to catch up to me. I go again: push-ups, sit-ups, squats, pull-ups. I go until I can force nothing more from my burning limbs.
I lie, exhausted, on the floor. And then let the pain level me.
Maddox is gone.
I accept this fact. I let it roll over me, let it settle.
I wash, using the water from my tiny sink, and then dry myself off with my towel before getting into my fresh prison uniform.
“Inmate 9-70-981,” Happy says, “prepare for the daily address from the Region 86 Overseer, Galen Rye.”
“Wonderful,” I mutter, sitting down on my bed and facing the screen.
Across the city and in the villages on the outskirts, the Barker Projectors will cease spewing out their holographic advertisements; Lenses will halt all gameplay, augmented reality, and social functions; every TV, VR module, and screen will be forced to show Galen’s daily message.
His face appears on my little prison screen. Friendly, warm, and confident.
“Good morning, citizens,” Galen starts, that sly smile spreading across his lips. “I know you are all busy people, so I’ll keep it brief.”
I have no interest in these daily political broadcasts, but broken eye contact makes the footage pause until the viewer is watching once again. Better just to get it over with.
“My pledge to increase engineering roles is coming to fruition, and I’d like to personally guarantee that 50 percent of those non-robot jobs will be reserved for Regulars. We are not the divided nation that the media would have you believe we are. I won’t let that happen, not on my watch, not during my term as Overseer.”
I roll my eyes, and for the second I’m not focused on the screen, Galen freezes in place, one finger raised in the air, until I’m watching once again and he continues, talking about his policies and how Region 86 is the most successful it’s been in fifty years, which is debatable at best.
His address ends with his usual sign off—As One—and my next two hours are spent reading. I’m lucky; I made friends with the one human employee of the Loop—Wren Salter, the warden—about a year into my incarceration. She collects antique books—not the electronic kind, not the kind that can be displayed on a Lens, the original paper books. In the Loop, the rooms are scanned every three seconds to ensure that the inmate has not escaped and to check for contraband electronics, so old-fashioned paper books are the only versions that can be successfully smuggled inside. I have 189 books piled up at the foot of my bed, everything from damp-smelling Westerns from 300 years ago, the pages yellowed with time and the text fading in the corners, to the last of the mass-printed paper books from around the time I was born.
I can read a book in a day if it’s really good. There are a few I keep going back to: stories so good, characters so well written that they don’t go away and I wonder if they were popular when they were printed. Kindred, Harry Potter, Life of Pi, and The Left Hand of Darkness, for example.
Right now, I’m halfway through a book about a family trapped in a haunted hotel. It’s by an author I like—I’ve read at least five of his other books, and this one might be the best so far.
What I like about books is the way I can disappear for a while into a place that someone else created; I don’t have to be who I am or where I am for as long as I’m in that other world, and I need that sometimes. In that way, I suppose, I’m not much different from the drug addicts who populate the tower blocks and slums on the edge of the city.
At 11:30 the back wall to my room begins to slide slowly up. It moves silently, but I hear the birds and I can feel the wind and the warmth of the sun. I put the book down and stand at the wall as it rises.
We get an hour of outdoor exercise every day. I spend forty-five minutes of it sprinting laps of my walled-up triangle of yard.
It’s only when the door is open fully that you ever truly get a sense of the shape of the prison. Unsurprisingly, it’s one big loop, hence the name. The Loop is a half mile in circumference with 155 cells and a gap at the entrance that leads directly to the only way in or out—the Dark Train, which is connected to the Loop by a system of tunnels. Each inmate’s room is nine feet at its widest point and just over eight and a half at the wall that opens up to the yard. There is four feet of concrete on either side and three feet above; this makes the rooms soundproof, escape proof, and virtually bombproof. Each inmate gets a strip of yard, a continuation of the tapering shape of their room that stretches for almost two hundred feet to the enormous concrete pillar in the center, on top of which the drones reside.
Exercise hour is the only time inmates are allowed to interact with one another. We can’t see one another due to the fifty-foot-high walls that separate us, but we can talk, and before the back wall is even halfway up, I can hear the shouts and screams of all the other inmates. I hear Pander Banks singing one of the seven songs that she remembers from the outside world. When she finishes all seven, she’ll start again at the first.
I can hear the drones on the other side of the yard whirring to life and issuing threats to Malachai Bannister, who likes to climb the walls and wait until the robotic security guards reach one on their three-second countdown before he drops down and laughs. Four and five cells to my right, I hear Pod and Igby, two of the quieter inmates, who are continuing their strange adventure games played with five dice each that Wren snuck into their cells. They must be extremely honest or incredibly gullible, because neither can see over the wall to confirm what the other has rolled.
On both sides I hear the planners; a group of four inmates—Adam Casswell, Fulton Conway, and Winchester Shore on my left, and Woods Rafka on my right—who discuss ways to escape, their ideas ranging from the absurd (using the flight technology of the drones to fly over the walls) to the ingenious (a coordinated attack, utilizing the Delays and hijacking the Dark Train). They know as well as anyone else that escaping the Loop is impossible, and they also know that everything we say is recorded, and—although it’s against the law—the government could access the pinhole cameras surgically implanted in the middle of our foreheads, yet it doesn’t stop them.
But over all the disorder, I hear a gravelly voice screaming over and over again about how he wants to kill me. He chants my name constantly, from the minute the back wall opens to the minute it closes. Every. Single. Day.
“Luka Kane,” he screeches, “Luka Kane, I’m going to kill you. Luka Kane, I’m going to kill you.”
The screaming boy arrived in the Loop the day after me and has been making declarations of murder for 736 days. I admit that it scared me for the first few days; I didn’t even leave my room for more than a second. I would step out into the yard and then reenter my cell. This action would tell Happy that I no longer wanted to be outside, and the back wall would close, leaving me in silence once again. I soon realized how foolish I was being, that there was no way he could get to me, no way that he could make it over the enormous walls that separated us—they were too high, and the drones would shoot him full of poison if he tried.