Finally, though, it finishes, I hit forty-five minutes of painful sprinting, and I collapse against the joining wall.
I allow the sounds of the Loop to come back to me: the background chatter of the inmates, the beautiful singing voice of Pander, the continuing game between Igby and Pod, and the droning cries of Tyco Roth as he relentlessly promises to end my life, but over that I hear that some of the nastier inmates have realized that there’s a new prisoner in the Loop and they’ve turned on them, as they do with all newcomers.
“Welcome to the Loop; you’re going to die here,” one calls out.
“Stop crying; there’ll be nothing left for the energy harvest,” another yells over the laughter.
And finally, I hear the quiet sobs from the cell next to mine again. I can tell by the tone that the new inmate is almost certainly a girl.
I know what she’s feeling. Right now, sitting in her cell or out in the gray concrete yard, she’s never felt so alone and so hopeless. I felt it too, and the words from the heartless inmates feel like fists raining down on you.
There’s a unique cruelty to this place; they take your life away from you without a second thought. It all happens so fast; the televised trial is over in seconds, you’re not allowed to say goodbye to anyone, you’re dragged to the platform where you wait for as long as it takes for the train to come, and then the first surgery to ensure you can never escape, then imprisonment. Surrounded by a silence that begins eating away at your sanity immediately.
It takes some time for my breathing to return to normal, and I try to think of the right words to say, and the right way to say them, so that I can help the new inmate in some small way.
“Hi,” I say finally, and wait for a reply. Nothing comes, not even a break in the tears. “Hey, it gets better, you know? Not great, but … better.”
I turn and lean against the wall; I can feel every minute of the girl’s pain and anger.
“Umm,” I say, fumbling for more words, “I know what you’re feeling, we all felt it, well, almost all of us, some of these guys are just psychos, you know? And, uhhh …”
My thoughts are interrupted by a siren and the one-minute warning.
“All inmates must return to their rooms within one minute. All inmates must return to their rooms within one minute.”
I look up at the blue sky and try to take in as much of the fresh air and warmth as I can before I’m locked away again. I can’t enjoy it, though, not while the girl on the other side of the wall is in so much pain. I wish there was something I could do.
There is, I think, remembering the enormous pile of books in my room.
I run into my cell, crossing the threshold and activating the sliding door early. I move quickly to the foot of my bed and search for a book. A very specific book: The Call of the Wild, the first one that Wren ever gave me. I find it and run back outside, ducking under the half-closed door. I’m all too aware that if the door closes with me on the yard side, the drones will shoot me, not with bullets—that would be too kind—but with a tranquilizer agent that induces horrific hallucinations followed by a terrible sickness that lasts days.
I know this because an inmate named Rook Ford once tried to commit suicide by drone. Rook had lost his mind after five years inside—he’d been incarcerated at age twelve, and day after day his sanity had faded. He made a loud declaration about how he was taking control back from a broken system, and he refused to reenter his cell after the one-minute warning. When he recovered, five days later, he wasn’t the same person, something had changed in him, and he quietly told anyone close enough to hear that whatever they shot him with was far, far worse than death. He was convinced that he had been in a nightmare world for hundreds of years. He refused his next Delay, accepted his Deletion, and they say he boarded the Dark Train with a smile on his face, although this is probably just a made-up rumor, seeing as no one could have seen him getting on the train.
The thought of the poisonous darts loaded into the insectile flying robots makes my heart race, and I sprint to the wall.
“Hey, new girl,” I call out as I throw the book in a high arc. I see the nearest drone spin in the direction of the soaring paperback, and for one horrible moment I’m sure it’s going to shoot it out of the air, but its sensors must take it for a bird or a floating leaf, and it leaves it alone.
The book dips over the metal barricade. I turn and run back to the door, which is now almost all the way closed.
I take two long strides and dive, turning in midair so that I land on my hip and roll under. I feel the hard, cold door press against me as I squeeze through, and just before it slams shut I hear my new neighbor’s voice call out in a surprised and grateful tone, “Thank you.”
“Who’s the new girl?” I ask Wren, nodding my head in the direction of the cell beside mine.
Three more yard sessions have passed since the two words my new neighbor spoke to me, and I haven’t managed to get anything out of her, other than another thank-you when I threw her a second book.
Wren doesn’t reply—she doesn’t appear to have heard me. A deep line divides her eyebrows as she stares anxiously at nothing.
“Wren?” I say, getting the warden’s attention.
“What? Oh, I’m sorry, Luka, it’s just … nothing, it’s nothing.”
“Are you okay?” I ask. “You’ve been distracted since you got here.”
Wren smiles, she’s good at faking it, but I can tell she had to force it onto her face. “Really, Luka, I’m okay. What were you asking?”
“The new girl,” I repeat. “Who is she?”
“Kina Campbell,” Wren says, taking a bite of her sandwich. “Nice girl, a Regular, like you.”
Wren bites her lip and looks guiltily at me as though she’s misspoken. I ignore the comment.
“I gave her a few books—I hope you don’t mind?”
“They’re your books,” she replies, smiling.
Wren’s eyes drift off to the left, checking the time in her Lens display. “Better get moving,” she says. “See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah, see you tomorrow.”
And she’s gone again.
* * *
That night, when I watch the rain, I can’t help my mind drifting off to that made-up world. I imagine Wren and me sitting on a hillside somewhere, talking about the future, our future. It’s a stupid fantasy, a stupid teenage boy’s dream that can’t ever come true. Even if I wasn’t serving a death sentence, even if I wasn’t destined to die from a botched Delay, Wren is a nineteen-year-old Alt and I’m a sixteen-year-old Regular. Outside the Loop, she’d never even look at me.
I truly hate this place. Sometimes it becomes unbearable, and I understand exactly why Rook Ford tried to have the drones kill him.
As the back wall opens up for exercise the next day, I find myself not running. Instead, I walk to the dividing wall and press my hand against it.
I’m trying to think of something to say, when my neighbor speaks.
“Hello.”
Her voice is hoarse and quiet, and I’m sure that today is the first day she’s managed to stop crying.
“Hi,” I say.