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Well, if they were dead, I could burn this whole place down, and not worry overly much about whether or not I made it out. I wasn't the suicidal sort, but some things were worth risking for a good revenge.

“The man you came in with is in general holding. The woman has been removed for further study,” said Jill, her eyes darting to the side. “When you hit your head—”

“You mean when the people who pulled me out of the car slammed my head into the pavement, after shooting another of my friends dead,” I corrected gently.

“Um. Yes, that. When you got hurt, the woman started saying she was a doctor and trying to get to you. If she was telling the truth, she's valuable, and she won't be hurt. If she was lying to make them spare her, she's… she's in trouble.” Jill swallowed as she turned back to me. “Clive doesn't like liars. He says someone who lies once will lie again, no matter how good their reasons may have seemed in the beginning. So liars don't get to stay here for very long.”

“And I'm guessing, from the look on your face, that they don't get to walk away clean and easy,” I said, with a grimace. “Well, Audrey's a real doctor, so I suppose she'll be valuable to you lot. I'm still going to want her back before I go. Both of them. I'm attached to them, you see, and I can't really see walking off and leaving them behind.”

Jill laughed, taking a step backward. “I can't tell whether you're brave or just stupid, but it doesn't matter, because you're not going anywhere. What Clive wants, he takes, and what he takes, he keeps. This is home now. What kind of home it is, well, that's up to you. It can be a pretty nice one. It can also be hell on earth. It's your call either way.”

“No, see, that doesn't work for me.” The throbbing in my head seemed to be the whole of the pain: Nothing else had been damaged when I was taken. Maybe there was something to be said for concussions. “We're on our way somewhere, and while this is a fascinating pit stop for our memoirs, it's not the sort of place that winds up holding our bones. We've escaped from bigger men than your boss. It's in everybody's best interests if we're just allowed to go on our merry way, and we won't make any trouble for those of you who choose to stay here.”

Jill gaped at me, openmouthed and disbelieving, before she began slowly shaking her head. “I can't tell if you're thick or just stubborn, but the end result is going to be the same: your head on a pike.”

“My issue is that you can utter that sentence without seeing how bloody idiotic you sound,” I shot back. “Where
are
we? How did we get here? Where are my people, and how do I get us out of here?”

“God forbid you listen for two seconds.” She turned and began rummaging through a black bag on the nearest counter. “What's your vaccination status? Any recent infections or illnesses? Are you on a contraception implant, and if so, which one?”

“To answer your last question first, I'm a lesbian, so contraception has never been high on my list of things to do.” I tried to make my answer sound airy and unconcerned, but she was rattling me. Usually, my steamroller approach to diplomacy is enough to gain me a little ground, even if it doesn't always get me what I actually want. Jill seemed to be shaking off every attempt I made at forward momentum, locked as she was in her own version of whatever all this was.

She turned and looked at me flatly. “You're an Irwin, aren't you? There was a license tag in your things when they brought you in, you've got a lot of minor scarring on your knees, fingers, and palms, and you have the skin tone of someone born pale and kept pale by high quantities of sunscreen, rather than indoor isolation like the rest of us. The bleach damage to your hair is too extensive to be explained by normal washing, which means you've gone through a lot of decontamination cycles. Either you're an Irwin or you're with a governmental group—and I assume that if your group was here to try infiltrating us, we'd be meant to keep the Chinese woman. That would make you the expendable brute force. You're a
terrible
bruiser. Too short, too skinny, too wearing a floral dress when they pulled you off the road.”

“Her name is Audrey, she's my girlfriend, and we're not here to infiltrate you; we don't even know where ‘here' is,” I said. “We're heading for the Canadian border, as I've said. Repeatedly.”

“You
were
heading for the Canadian border,” said Jill. There was a hint of sympathy in her tone, like she wasn't happy to be the one hammering this point through my thick skull. “This is where you are now, and if you want to live long enough to see your friends again, you're going to start answering my questions. Do you have a contraceptive implant or not?”

“Yes,” I admitted, sullenly. “Five-year, standard issue from the nice folks at Immigration. It was supposed to keep me from giving birth to an American citizen before they'd finished processing my paperwork and decided they were going to let me stay.” It all smacked a bit of xenophobia and paranoia to me—even Ireland didn't insist on temporarily sterilizing their new citizens while things went through proper channels—but as I'd never intended to have a child with Ben, I hadn't protested as loudly as I could have. Besides, not having to suffer through my period anymore was a joy, especially for someone who spent as much time in the field as I did.

“How much time does it have left to run?”

It would run out in six months. There was something I hadn't considered: What was I going to do when it ran out? Not that I was suddenly going to turn heterosexual and start romping about with all the boys in Dublin, but I didn't know how long we were going to be trapped in Canada before we could find a plane to take us to Ireland, and menstruation was messy, difficult, and smelled of blood. Most normal humans couldn't detect it if the person doing the bleeding kept their trousers on. The infected, with their increased sensitivity toward both the living and the smell of blood, could. If we were still in Canada in six months, without a permanent residence with walls thick enough to keep the dead out, our lives were going to get a lot harder.

I opened my mouth to answer.

Jill cut me off.

“Wow, the full five years? That's rough. I mean, good thinking having your meds topped off before you went out into the field, but Clive's not going to be thrilled to hear that even if he sweet-talks his way into your panties, he won't be getting any little redheaded babies for a while.” She produced a capsule injector from her bag, and mouthed ‘Hold out your arm.'

My eyes widened as I put two and two together and came up with the potential that she was going to help me—help
us
—after all. I stuck my arm out, only tensing a little as I asked, “Is he the sort who takes what he wants, then?”

“Yes and no.” The barrel of the injector was cool against my skin. She knew her stuff: Without prodding, she chose an injection site several inches above the spot where the Immigration Authority had inserted my last implant. I was briefly worried about the effects of getting a double dose for the next six months, and then decided I had much, much better things to be worried about. “He wanted your group and so he took you. He wanted a lot of the things you had—you had some great medications, thank you for those—and so he took them. But if you're asking whether you need to be worried about him pushing the issue, no. That's the one area where he'll take no for an answer.”

There was a brief stinging sensation as she shot the contraceptive implant into my arm. She pulled the injector away, looked critically at the already-bruised circle of skin, and handed me a gauze pad.

“Put this on and tape it down,” she said brusquely. “If anyone asks what happened, it's one of your injuries from the road. If you point the finger at me, no one's going to believe you.”

“Why are you helping me?”

“In general, or with this?” Her expression hardened. “Clive won't force you. He won't slip anything into your drink or put his hand up your skirt to see what kind of underpants you're wearing. His ego won't let him resort to that. But he'll pursue, and he'll do it a lot more energetically if he thinks you're fertile. He's an empire builder, is Clive. He wants an army of little Clives to be running around long after he's gone. A woman who might be able to bear his children, it doesn't matter how beautiful she is, she'll be essentially off-limits to everyone—and I do mean
everyone
—until he's sure it's never going to happen. Or, in your case, until her implant wears off. He'll want to know that you're healthy and STI-free when that day finally comes.”

“Won't he just dig the implant out of my arm?” I'd heard of that happening when good Catholic girls visited countries with less restrictive rules about birth control and came home ready to have sex for reasons other than procreation. Some people thought it was a hoax, but I'd seen the scars.

“No,” said Jill. “We don't believe in unnecessary medical procedures here. Infection is enough of a risk that we try not to cut people open when we don't have to. I really do hope your friend is an actual doctor, and not just telling stories. We need all the help that we can get.”

“She's a doctor,” I said. “A good one.” Or she had been, to have been recruited by the EIS. The fact that she hadn't practiced in years was beside the point.
Please, let her remember how to do the things they're going to ask her to do.

“Then she'll probably be all right.” Jill thrust a piece of paper at me. “Write down all your vaccinations, and when you had them. Try to be as precise as you can. We'll get them updated, and then we'll follow up with a full physical exam. Once that's done, we can talk about what your life here is going to be like.”

I took the paper and began writing. Protests seemed useless. What I needed now was a plan, a means of getting the hell out of here while we were all still breathing.

When I was done, Jill plucked the paper from my hand, scanned it, and offered me a tight smile. “Excellent. I'll prepare the injections. In the meantime, welcome to the Maze. It can be a bit of an adjustment, but I think you're going to learn to like it here.”

“And if I don't?” I asked.

She looked at me with tired eyes. “Then your life just got a hell of a lot harder, because you're not going anywhere.”

I
t was surprisingly easy to fall into the habit of captivity. A guard unlocked my bedroom door every morning at six o'clock. As one of Clive's fancy-to girls—as in, the girls he'd taken enough of a fancy to that he wanted us kept safe, secure, and locked away from other blokes—I got my own bed, crammed into a narrow space that probably started as a supply closet. I also got a door that locked, keeping me in and keeping the rest of the population out. I'd felt trapped at first, but as the envy of the less favored girls in my working group became more and more apparent, I'd started to see that door as the blessing it was. When it was closed, I was safe. That was more than could be said during working hours.

Once the door was open, I was expected to wait while the guard finished letting the others out. About half of us had private supply-closet bedrooms. The others slept on pallets on the floor, and they always woke up looking exhausted, like they hadn't gotten a lick of sleep. There were dangers in the Maze at night, dangers I didn't have to know about as long as I was in favor.

I was torn, really, on whether it would have been better to know or not. Knowing would have meant restless nights spent on the floor in a room packed with other bodies; it would have meant exhaustion. It might also have made finding a way out easier, assuming I was awake enough to take it.

We would all gather by the door and proceed to the showers, where we'd each be given a towel, a bottle of all-purpose wash, and a blood testing kit. As soon as I was confirmed biologically clean, I was allowed to make myself physically clean, showering alongside ten to twenty other women ranging in age from their midteens to their late fifties. I wasn't sure whether there were any children here, and if so, where they were kept, but as none of the teenagers seemed to think there was anything strange about the way things were done, I had to assume they'd grown up inside the Maze. Twenty years since the Rising; at least ten years since Clive had set up camp in this abandoned rural hospital, spreading his resources and his recruits out until he owned most of the area. A sixteen-year-old girl could easily have been raised within this community, never knowing anything else, never recognizing how odd it would all seem to an outsider. In that regard, being here was a lot like being in a commune, or a cult.

There were female guards. Not many, but enough that they could watch us shower, keeping the men at a respectful distance. It was nice to have the privacy. It was also distressing, a reminder of why Clive kept so many pretty women around. Maybe he didn't force the issue, and maybe he didn't insist, but anyone who looked at us could tell that we were essentially his harem. We belonged to him, and he was keeping us as pristine as possible.

The one time I'd seen a male guard near the showers, I hadn't seen him again after that. Not in our space; not anywhere in the compound that I was allowed to go. He'd simply vanished, like mist, and the remaining guards had been on edge for days, making me believe that he hadn't just been reassigned. Breaking Clive's orders was not something to be done lightly, or at all.

After the showers, we'd return to our rooms—either solo or communal—to find our clothing for the day waiting on our beds, along with whatever toiletries we required. I got a hairbrush, and sometimes a hair tie or two, depending on Clive's mood. We didn't have uniforms, thankfully; our clothes were drawn from a communal wardrobe, assigned according to a chart that must have existed somewhere. I'd been given a day's use of several of my sundresses, and had seen others on girls I didn't know, catching glimpses of familiar fabric from across crowded rooms or down darkened hallways. Nothing was wasted here. At least a few of us wore patchwork blouses and twice-mended trousers every day, and no one complained. What good could it have done?

That was an attitude that was also surprisingly easy to fall into. What good could anything have done? We were trapped, and while we were together, we were each and every one of us alone.

Breakfast was surprisingly varied, mixing canned and dried goods with fresh fruits, vegetables, and fish, obviously harvested from the surrounding land. There were work crews that went outside, either to hunt or to farm, and while I had yet to be allowed to go with them—and might never be, considering my dual status as newcomer and woman Clive eventually wanted to fuck—it was clear they covered more ground than I would have thought possible. We ate salmon, catfish, and small, heavily stewed scrod that could have been from virtually any freshwater species. Blueberries, blackberries, and tart red huckleberries were a major part of every meal. At least scurvy wasn't going to become a concern any time soon. The amount of vitamin C we were getting, even before our supplement pills, was astonishing.

For the first week or so, I'd watched everything like a hawk, waiting for the opportunity to make a run for it. That opportunity had never come. Clive's people were well trained, methodical, and most of all, loyal. Whether that loyalty was born of contentment or fear didn't matter, because the end result was the same. And at the end of that week, I had been deemed sufficiently settled, and had been put to work.

My work crew was responsible for basic maintenance and light cleaning. We weren't janitorial, to be doing all the big muck-outs and major decontamination, and we weren't tasked with the small but constant repairs to everything in sight. We… dusted. We did dishes, and moved items from one place to another. It felt like make-work to justify Clive's airy claim that everyone contributed to the whole, and it was no surprise that every single person I worked with was an attractive female of childbearing age. People looked at us and snickered, or rolled their eyes and looked away. It made my palms itch, my hands aching to ball into fists and start breaking noses.

It didn't help that I still didn't know whether Ben and Audrey were alive or dead. I'd tried, several times, to convince my fellow workers to help me, and my pleas had fallen on deaf ears. It wasn't until the end of my second week that one of them took pity and turned on me while we were washing the mirrors in the communal bathroom, saying, “Look, we all know you're the new favorite, and we know it's not going to last. Half of us were the favorite once, when Clive liked blondes, or brunettes, or girls with pierced navels. That doesn't mean we're going to help you get things he doesn't want you to have. Maybe you're only going to be in the hot seat for a little while, and maybe that makes you greedy or maybe it makes you scared—it's hard to say, with you new girls—but either way, we're not going to attract attention to ourselves just because you feel like you deserve more than just the boss man's eyes on your ass.”

It was a reasonable, even rational response to my agitating for more information. That didn't mean it didn't sting, or keep me from viewing my interactions with the other girls in a new, more negative light. They'd never been nice to me, and that had always been fine, because I wasn't overly interested in being nice to
them
; civility was the best I had to offer, and the best I was hoping to receive. But if they were looking at me as temporary competition, destined to age out of my current status and join them in whatever the next step down on the ladder of local status was, then they had no reason to be even friendly. I was a rival, not a fellow prisoner.

We were all trapped here, even those of us who would never see the bars on the windows as anything more than protection.

Jill moved through the work crews like a ghost, rarely interacting with anyone unless it was to deliver a cup of pills or a sudden injection of some unidentified substance. There was never any warning before one of those “medical interventions” occurred: Three times, I saw girls in the middle of a shift stop, roll up a sleeve, and receive a needle to the arm. They never spoke to her more than they absolutely had to, which struck me as odd. Where I'd come from, a little jocular joking around with the company doctor would have made sense, and maybe taken some of the sting out of the injection itself.

Then she came for me.

I was working with the others, sorting crates of pre-Rising liquor according to some mysterious chart that didn't seem to be based off any known properties of alcohol. Scotch and vodka would have made sense—they didn't mix well outside of a Long Island Iced Tea, but they were powerful intoxicants, and anything that put people on the floor clearly had its uses here. But Scotch and grenadine? Tequila and white wine? It was like we were filling a dozen different orders, all made by people who should never have been allowed to mix their own drinks. I wanted to ask if anyone knew what the hell was going on, but I kept my mouth shut. Questions never got me answers here. They only got me rolled eyes and stifled scoffs, and honestly, I was going to put somebody's teeth out if that happened one more time.

“Aislinn?” There was nothing querulous or quiet about Jill's voice. I looked up. She was standing in the doorway, still in her stained lab coat, looking at a clipboard, like that would keep her from needing to look at any of the rest of us. “You need to come with me. It's time for your exam.”

Giggles and low “ooo”s broke out around me as I put down the bottle I'd been cataloging and pushed myself to my feet. Even a week ago, I would have swaggered, or at the least talked back. Now, I simply walked, head and shoulders down, to join Jill in the doorway. I had finally found the answer to what it took to break me: unrelenting, unforgiving exclusion, and nothing I could fight against. This was my hell, and I was trapped, like a rat in a cage.

“Excellent.” Jill lifted her head then, looking at the rest of the work crew. “Clive wanted me to inform you that Aislinn will be gone for an extended period, on his order, but the deadline hasn't been shifted. He has faith in you.”

There was some grumbling. To my deep relief, it wasn't directed at me. They were apparently used to Clive pulling one or the other of them off the crew according to his whim, and while they might wish to be in my position—and I would gladly have traded with any, or all, of them; let me sort the bottles alone, while they went off to fraternize with the boss—they weren't going to blame me for being the target of his affections. Thank the good Lord. The last thing I needed was for them to get even more unfriendly than they already were.

That, alone, showed how much my world had narrowed since my arrival. There was a time when I'd had much better things to worry about, and much more legitimately, than the hostility of a few women who wouldn't even speak to me. My life had been all about survival, and now it was all about trying not to alienate the people around me. Maybe it was those rose-colored glasses that people always slapped on their pasts, but I genuinely missed the adventure, and the companionship, even if it had come with the constant knowledge that we were all about to die.

Jill turned and left the sorting room, giving me no choice but to follow her. I was still looking down, and I realized that she walked with a slight stagger. It wasn't pronounced enough to be a limp, not quite, but there was a distinct catch in her stride.

“How long ago did you lose your leg?” I asked.

Jill glanced back at me, apparently startled. Then she smiled and said, “Years ago. I grew up on a community farm. Your food has to come from somewhere, you know. Only I got my foot caught in a wheat separator, and by the time my uncles were able to shut the machine down and extricate me, there was nothing that could be done to save anything below the knee. Ruined a whole crop of winter wheat, too.” She sighed. “We had to buy a new separator. Industrial accidents are the primary cause of dismemberment and loss of limbs in both the United States and Canada, now that we've removed cancer and car accidents from the equation.”

It took me a moment to realize we'd removed car accidents from the equation not because they didn't happen anymore—if anything, people get less safe behind the wheel every year, because fear motivates them to speed—but because getting medical intervention to someone who's been hurt in a wreck before they either bled out or amplified is virtually impossible. Even EMTs won't risk their own lives for nothing.

“Sorry,” I said, the word feeling mealy and inappropriate in my mouth.

“Don't be,” she said. “It was a long time ago, and I don't so much miss my original leg as wish there'd been a way to get me into the hands of decent doctors without cutting it off. I would never have gone into medicine if it hadn't been for that accident. I'd be a good farm wife by now, with four or five children of my own, and all this”—she waved her clipboard—“would be nothing but a bad dream.”

I didn't say anything. My brief associations with Jill had given me no reason to think she was on my side, apart from her update to my contraceptive implant, and even that could be self-serving as much as anything else. Maybe she wasn't entirely on Clive's side—it would be hard to think of anyone who'd known a world outside this compound as being entirely on his side—but she certainly wasn't on mine. Silence was my best defense.

Jill either agreed with my assessment or had nothing else to say. We walked through the halls of the old hospital, passing other work crews and people running hither and yon on whatever errands they'd been assigned. As always, I scanned the people around me, looking for familiar faces, and as always, I didn't find them. I did find three of my sundresses, two being worn by women reasonably close to my height and build, and one being worn by two little girls in the company of an older woman who was apparently their nanny. It had been cut in half and refashioned into cute pullovers for the children, and seeing it broke my heart a little. Not because the children weren't adorable—they were—but because if our things were already being recycled into the greater community, then it was finished. We were never getting out of here.

The people grew farther spaced as we walked, becoming less and less frequent, until we were the only ones walking along a dimly lit white hallway. “This used to be part of the oncology ward,” said Jill, sounding distracted. “It's not very well connected to the social areas, I suppose because people didn't really want to think about cancer when they had a choice. Kellis-Amberlee did us a lot of favors, if you stop and compare the world that was to the world where we're living now.”