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“Oh, yes, this is a fairy-tale wonderland filled with candy floss joy,” I deadpanned.

Jill turned to flash me a quick, self-satisfied smile. “I think you're closer to the truth than you realize,” she said, and stopped, and opened the nearest door.

The room on the other side was small, lit by the stark electric glow that had become the norm, with no windows. The shelves were virtually empty, holding nothing but a few boxes of surgical gloves and tongue depressors. Either this wasn't a place they used very often, or the medical staff was on tight rationing, forced to justify everything they requested from supplies. The truth was probably somewhere between those two disparate solutions, and the truth didn't
matter
, none of this
mattered
, because Audrey,
my
Audrey, was in the middle of the room.

She was wearing a stained lab coat, much like Jill's, over ill-fitting hospital scrubs. Her hair was loose and her eye was blackened and she was crying, and I noticed all those things later, after I'd gone to her—crossing the space between us in three long steps, each faster than the last, until I was virtually running—and put my hands to either side of her face, and pulled her close, and kissed her for all that I was worth. She returned the kiss with equal urgency, her tears increasing in both volume and speed. Her lips were chapped. That seemed like such a small detail to fix on, but something about it bothered me. I kept kissing her. There would be time to talk about such things later. Or there wouldn't be, and either way, I didn't want to be the one who had pulled away first.

There was a click from behind me as Jill closed the door. “Sorry, but you're going to need to rein your hormones in,” she said, sounding utterly non-apologetic. “I know it's hard, and I wish I could let you keep going, but we have very little time, and we have a lot we need to talk about.”

I pulled away from Audrey. I still didn't turn to face Jill. Instead, I put my hands on Audrey's shoulders, and said, “You're alive. I was afraid I was never going to see you. I'm so sorry. I missed you so much. I love you.” That last part seemed like the important one, and so I repeated it: “I love you. Never scare me like that again. What happened to your eye?”

“Clive,” she said. “He wanted to test me on what I knew. I got an answer wrong. He said if it had been two, he'd have blackened them both. Three, and I would have lost one.”

“Well, I'll just have to kill him, then,” I said, keeping my voice soft to quiet the roaring fury in my gut. “Have you seen Ben? Is he all right?”

Audrey laughed, voice thick with tears and snot. “My violent girl,” she said. “I saw him once at a distance, while we were on our way to do a count in the drug room. He looked okay. No casts or visible stitches. I don't think they've hurt him.”

“They haven't,” said Jill. I finally turned to look at her. She looked amused, like she'd been expecting to be ignored for a while when she got me to the room. “Audrey is a special case; Clive thought she was a liar. He doesn't torture his workers, not even the new ones whose loyalty hasn't been proven yet. That would be counterproductive. He keeps them or he kills them, full stop. Your friend is still alive, so that means he's been toeing the line, at least thus far.”

“That's not going to last,” I said. “Ben's one of the most stubborn people I know.”

“Then we need to move up the timetable.” Jill glanced past me to Audrey, then back to me. “She was telling the truth about being a doctor.”

“I told you,” I said. “Bit odd that she's already monitoring your drug usage, what with her being new and all. Nothing in this place makes a lick of sense.”

“It all makes perfect sense, once you consider the name,” said Audrey. She sounded tired. I turned back to her. “He called it the ‘Maze.' Why would he do that, when there were so many other names he could have chosen? Hell, he could have called it the Free Nation of Clive, and no one would have been able to stop him.”

“When you put it that way, I'm surprised he didn't,” said Jill. “His ego would really appreciate having a country named after him.”

“Mazes are where you keep rats when you're trying to condition them,” continued Audrey. “It's where you train them. Teach them to go for the cheese and not the floor with the electric shocks. Clive doesn't expect me to be loyal, not now, and maybe not ever. But he does expect me to follow directions and do as I'm told, and part of how he can make sure that happens is by putting me in the path of temptation. So I get to count the drugs that someone else has already counted, and then he checks my math, or has it checked, and if I'm wrong…”

“Is that why he had me filling ludicrous alcohol combinations today?” I asked, looking at Jill. “To see whether I'd really give someone good Scotch and bad beer?”

“You're Irish,” she said.

I wrinkled my nose. “That's a foul stereotype. Really, if anything, it would be the fact that I have
taste
that kept me from filling out some of those combinations.”

“It doesn't matter whether you're stealing or deciding that you know better than the person giving the orders: Intentionally breaking the rules will get you punished,” said Jill. She hesitated before asking, “You didn't, did you?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I
wanted
to, but I used to date a girl who thought pouring that powdered candy sugar you get at amusement galleries into her vodka was a good idea. There's someone who likes everything, and I wasn't going to be the one to interfere with somebody's favorite drink.”

“That's good,” said Jill. “Drugs, alcohol, chocolate, sanitary supplies, and meat are the big trade goods here. They can be used like cash, if you can get your hands on them. So the newbies are put in contact with the supplies as quickly as possible, to weed out the ones who can't be trusted.”

It seemed like an underhanded method of testing loyalty, especially since “newbies,” as she so charmingly termed us, were motivated by fear and the hope of someday escaping from their new prison. Still, I couldn't deny its efficacy. Someone who would steal eventually would probably steal at the first opportunity they got, because some things didn't change with time. “Then I'm glad I didn't start correcting the horrors before me,” I said. “Thank you, for bringing us here. I needed to know that she was still alive. That both of them were. Now what do you want?”

“Well, I tried asking Dr. Sung for a letter of recommendation to the CDC, but she said they weren't likely to give it much credence, what with her being legally dead and all,” said Jill. “Then I suggested she team up with me to gather data on this place, and she said she wouldn't do it unless I was willing to approach you as well. All of which brings us here.”

“Here being…?”

“A small, rarely used examining room. Mostly, this is where we take the really bad cases of gangrene, so no one else has to deal with the smell.” Jill said the words with a certain amount of relish. I tried not to turn green. “It's amazing how long people will let wounds fester if it means they can minimize the potential for bleeding. Too bad they don't realize that pus is an infection risk as much as blood is. Anyway, we're unlikely to be disturbed here, at least for a while, which lets me make my recruitment pitch.”

“Recruitment pitch?” I was starting, slowly, to become annoyed. “If you have a recruitment pitch, why didn't you give it to me before?”

“Because I didn't know whether I was going to have anything to hold over you,” she said, with a bald honesty that I couldn't help respecting, even as it made me want to introduce my fist to her nose. “You said she”—she nodded toward Audrey—“was really a doctor, but of course you'd say that, you were trying to save her skin as well as your own. You'd already managed to catch Clive's eye, which meant I needed you to act as normally as possible for the first few weeks, if only so he didn't catch on to the fact that I don't really work for him. Once I knew Audrey was actually Dr. Margaret Sung from the EIS, and fully qualified to help us vaccinate pig farmers against their own fuck-ups, I knew I had something I could use. I just needed to wait before I approached you so that my separating you out from the others wouldn't look so suspicious.”

“Please tell me you're not working for the CDC,” I said wearily. “I'm getting a trifle tired of them jabbing their noses in all the damn time. It's like being in an American spy movie, only somehow the doctors have taken the jobs that should have belonged to the CIA.”

“No,” she said. “I went through their base level recruitment program, but they refused to give me a field position because of my leg. I wouldn't have expected the largest medical research organization in the world to be a bunch of ableist assholes, but there you are. Sometimes the world doesn't live up to your expectations.”

“That's the truth,” I said. “Who
do
you work for, then?”

“Someone I don't feel like identifying by name while we're still in here, and there's a chance you could flip on me,” she said, with perfect calm. “I have access to your girl. I can get her out when I go. I can't promise the same about your friend.”

“He's my husband, actually,” I said.

Jill raised an eyebrow. “What happened to your whole ‘I'm a lesbian' routine? Clive is not going to be happy if he finds out another man has a claim on you. And when Clive is unhappy, nobody around him gets to stay happy for very long.”

“I
am
a lesbian, and Audrey is the one I love, but Ben is the one I married when I needed a way out of Ireland,” I said. “I can't go anywhere without him. I owe him too much. I wouldn't be here if not for him.” I reached out and took Audrey's hand, like I was trying to reassure her—or maybe reassure myself—that “here” was where I wanted to be. Oh, I could have done with a little less in the postapocalyptic warlord department, but we never get everything we dream of in this life. That would make things dull.

“You said your real employer would be very excited to meet me,” said Audrey. “I warned you Ash wasn't going to go for leaving Ben behind. And I told you I'm not going anywhere without her.”

“This isn't a choose-your-own-adventure salvation, all right?” said Jill. “This is a short-term, onetime offer that I am risking my own neck to make. I can get you out of here at the end of my assignment. I only have another two weeks to go, and then I'm a memory, and this place is just a bad dream.”

“So wait,” I said. “You're offering to get me out, even though I seem like way too much trouble—especially given Clive's interest in the contents of my pants—because Audrey won't go without me, and you want Audrey. Probably due to her EIS connections, I'm guessing. You're a real doctor. Whoever you work for must be one too, or they wouldn't have been able to risk losing you. You're looking for more data. Audrey represents data. Am I warm?”

“I told you Ash was proof that ‘Irwin' wasn't a synonym for ‘stupid,'” said Audrey mildly. She squeezed my hand. “We go together or we don't go at all.”

“I swear, loyalty is going to get us all killed,” said Jill. She shook her head. “I don't control where the work groups are assigned. I
can't
set things up so you can talk to your friend. But I'll try to pull him aside for an exam, and see whether he's willing to risk it. Is there anything I can say that he'll believe came from you? Any password or pointless in-joke that will buy me his attention?”

“Tell him the sunrise is beautiful over Newgrange this time of year,” I said. “It's the truth, so there's that going for it, and he'll know it came from me.” Better still, he'd know it had come from me without my needing to be tortured. There were lots of things I might say while people were hurting me. None of them would be about the ancient monuments of Ireland—not unless it was in the context of where I was going to hide the bodies.

“All right,” said Jill. “I'll do my best, but you may have to make a call as to whether your friendship is worth your freedom. Clive hasn't lost many people from the Maze. It took us a year to plant me here, and I promise you that when I run, he's going to tighten security to the point where you will never see the sun again.”

“Then we'd better act fast,” I said blithely.

Audrey and Jill exchanged a look before Audrey leaned up onto her toes and kissed my cheek, leaving her lips pressed there for a long moment. Finally, she dropped down onto the flats of her feet, and said, “I love you. Don't be a hero out there. I want to get out of here together, all three of us. I'm tired of burying the people I care about.”

“You and me both,” I said. I tried not to think about Mat and Amber most of the time: Thinking about them meant remembering they were gone, and that we were never going to get them back, no matter what. I'd seen death before. I didn't know anyone who had lived past the age of eighteen who hadn't. But I had never lost people I cared about so deeply, and it still hurt. I was starting to suspect it always would.

“Audrey, you wait here,” said Jill. “I'm going to get Ash back to her work group. If anyone comes in while I'm gone, tell them I have you monitoring my vitamin D stores, due to recent pilferage. Try not to sound accusatory. They'll fill that in themselves.”

“Got it,” said Audrey. She leaned up and kissed me one last time, this time full on the mouth, before pulling reluctantly away. She was only doing it so I would be willing to leave. I knew that, and yet my heart ached anyway, even as I had to fight not to reach out and hold her.

Watching the door swing shut and block her face from view was one of the hardest things I had ever done.

Jill and I walked silently back down the halls, this time moving from isolation into greater population density. I would have needed to be blind or oblivious to miss the tension in her shoulders, or the way her eyes darted from side to side, taking in every aspect of the space around us. She was waiting for something to go wrong, that much was clear. I'd seen that posture before, on Irwins who knew things had gotten too quiet while they were distracted. I just wasn't sure what she thought was going to happen.