Half an hour later the rain ends, and I can sleep.
I lie in my bed, the moon casting shadows of my hands on the wall as I practice the sign language my mother taught me when I was a kid. I spell out my sister’s name—Molly; I spell out my old address—Door 44. 177th Floor. Black Road Vertical; I spell out Wren’s name; I run through the alphabet.
Tomorrow I will do all this again, and the next day and the next day and on and on until I turn eighteen and I’m taken to the Block, or I get unlucky with a Delay, or I drop dead of some new kind of sickness out of the Red Zones.
And this is how it goes. This is life in the Loop.
I wake up before my alarm, eat my breakfast, and begin my workout.
At 9 a.m., Galen’s address comes on.
I read until 11:30 a.m., when the back wall of my cell silently opens for exercise hour.
I run from my cell to the pillar and back, over and over again, pushing myself as hard as I can for forty-five minutes, then rest, enjoying the warm sun, listening to Pander sing and Tyco threaten me for fifteen minutes before I return to my cell.
I read again, almost finishing my book, until Wren arrives.
We talk for ten minutes. Today my lunch is a salad bowl. Wren leaves, and I’m left in the silence and sadness for over three hours until the energy harvest begins.
For six hours, I suffer the fear and the pain of the harvest.
Finally, it ends, and I crawl to the window to watch the rain before collapsing into bed and falling into a restless sleep.
I wake before my alarm.
Choose cereal for breakfast.
Work out.
Watch Galen’s address.
Read.
Run.
Wren brings me lunch, a vegetable wrap.
I sit in silence.
I choose dinner.
The energy harvest comes.
I watch the rain.
I sleep.
The same routine …
Day after day …
It never ends.
I wake up before my alarm and smile.
Today is Wednesday, and on Wednesday the routine is broken.
The day is the same as always—the only difference is that it seems to take forever. Each minute feels like an hour, and the hours feel like days.
After exercise I can’t help but glance at the clock over and over again, hoping each time that a great chunk of this endless day will have magically disappeared, but the numbers are stubborn and refuse to change.
Wren comes at her usual time, and we chat, only this time it’s more muted, more cautious. There’s a secret between us, something that we know but can’t talk about, not yet, not until 2 a.m.
She says goodbye and winks at me before closing the hatch. I smile back and feel a burst of excitement in my stomach.
I face the energy harvest with a smile. The smile quickly disappears as the harvest begins, but I can handle it tonight, I can get through it.
The rain comes and goes, and I lie on my bed, feeling my energy levels beginning to replenish bit by bit. Tonight I don’t sleep, though; tonight I wait.
I watch the numbers switch from 1:59 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., and for the briefest of moments the screen flickers.
I reach under my pillow for my hat and pull the black knit material low over my Panoptic camera. This is just a precaution—the footage from the Panoptic cameras can only be accessed by the government if they are given permission by the citizen or if the person is suspected to be actively involved in a crime or missing-persons case.
I sit up on my bed, stare fervently at the thick steel door, and wait.
I hear the snap of the lock followed by a rolling, metal-on-metal sound as the spin handle is loosened from the outside. The door swings open.
“Ready?” Wren asks, smiling and beautiful in the frame of my cell’s doorway.
I nod and get to my feet, stopping at the threshold and taking a deep breath before stepping out into the expanse of the Loop’s corridor.
I can hear Wren moving from cell to cell, unlocking the doors of a few selected inmates for three hours of freedom, or, the closest we can ever get to freedom.
I follow the curvature of the corridor until I can see Wren. I watch her unlocking Juno’s cell, and I can’t help but marvel at her bravery, her selflessness. To risk her job, her freedom, her life to exploit the only flaw in the Loop’s security: a three-hour system diagnostic-and-analysis period when the in-cell scanners are down. There is not another Alt in this world who would do something so amazing for lowly Regulars, let alone convicted Regulars.
“Keep staring,” Woods says, appearing beside me, grinning his gap-toothed grin, his broad shoulders brushing past me. “That ain’t creepy at all.”
“I was just …” I stutter. “I wasn’t staring.”
“Sure,” Woods replies, his stocky frame shaking as he laughs. He makes his way around the corridor toward the cell of his boyfriend and fellow planner, Winchester.
The corridor begins to fill up with freed inmates—they dance and sing and skip along the wide corridor, meeting in groups of twos and threes and fours to talk and to hold one another and to be human for three short hours.
There is no gift in the world, no experience or feeling, that can compare to these hours where we can look into one another’s eyes and talk without walls between us, or microphones listening to us.
Wren frees the last of the lucky few: those of us who are deemed trustworthy, level-headed, and resolute enough both to pose no threat to the lives of the others and keep the secret that would result in Wren’s incarceration if it was ever found out.
I watch as Malachai swaggers out of his cell. Malachai is a Regular who just happened to be born tall and handsome. To be honest, he’s beautiful. Alts refer to this kind of Regular as a Natural. He’s not perfect like the Alts, but somehow that just makes him more attractive; his slightly crooked nose and almost-beady eyes do nothing to detract from his stupid Natural allure. I can’t help but look away as his charming grin is reciprocated by Wren. I try to focus on anything else, and my eyes fall on a small crack in the wall. I stare at it, attempting to counter the tremors of jealousy that wrench at my heart.
Wren laughs, the sound breaks my resolve, and then she turns to the group, holding two hands above her head. She, like everyone else in the 2 a.m. club, wears a hat to cover the camera in her head.
“Guys, listen, please,” she calls, and the corridor falls silent. “Just a quick reminder of the rules: You are all back in your cells by 4:59, no later or we’re all caught. You do not cross the detonation threshold … for obvious reasons.”
This gets a laugh. My eyes dart toward the exit from this prison, an opening between two cells that leads to the Dark Train platform.
Wren continues, “If you have requests for items you want brought in, nonelectronic, of course, then please talk to me. I can’t make contact with anyone in the outside world, the risks are too high, I’m sorry. If you have—”
“Winchester? Hey, where is he? What’s going on? Where is he?”
Wren’s speech is interrupted by Woods’s voice booming along the hallway.
All heads turn in the direction of the commotion as Woods pushes past Pander, Akimi, and Juno and charges toward Wren.