S
EVEN
S
TEPS
Trina
[
Crylo, May 16, 2233
]
She expected someone to come and ask her questions or at least tell her what they wanted from her, but nobody came. She’d been locked up in this box for two days and nobody came to tell her anything. When she woke up the first morning after they brought her here, there was a small plastic tray with a cup and a small thermos of some dark brown liquid. It wasn’t tea, she could smell that much. She poured out a small sip and tasted it, spitting it out. It was thick and bitter. There was a silver box next to the strange liquid that she couldn’t open at first, couldn’t figure it out, and then finally she did. She didn’t know what she was looking at. Didn’t have names for any of it.
There was a round orange thing, cut up into four pieces. She liked the way it smelled, but after the stuff in the thermos, she was going to have to be more careful. She ran the tip of her index finger against one of the slices and licked it. It was the strangest thing she’d ever tasted. Sweet and tart and perfumy, the smell mingling with the taste. This she could eat, and she did, juice running down her chin and dripping onto the tray. The only other thing in the box was a white square bar. She tasted it first, in the same way she did with the round orange thing, and it tasted like sweetened milk and something else she couldn’t quite place, but it was decent enough, so she ate that too, and then walked over to the sink and washed her face and hands under cold water. She rinsed out the thermos and filled it up with water at the sink and drank that.
She slept again after that, thinking of Brody, making his face show up in her head, his eyes looking at her in a way that made her insides feel warm. She knew she did the right thing, sending him away like that, but it didn’t help her not miss him. She must have slept most of the day, because when she woke up, her old tray was gone and there was a new one on the floor next to her bed. This one was red. She was paying attention to all these clues now, as there was no way for her to see what time it was, not even if it was day or night. So this would be dinner. And she couldn’t eat any of it. She couldn’t even bring herself to smell it. She moved the tray away from her, not that it helped in this small space, and went back to her cot. She wasn’t that hungry yet anyway. At worst, she knew she wouldn’t starve if she just ate the stuff on the white trays from now on.
She needed something to do to occupy herself, something that would make the time stop moving so slowly. She got up and started taking mental notes of everything she saw through the walls and the floor of this box. It still made her feel a bit uneasy when she looked through the floor, but only when she was thinking about it. She didn’t notice feeling sick earlier walking on it, she remembered that. The people walking around below her looked impossibly small. She could barely tell men from women from so high up, and she only figured out that much because she could see women’s dresses or skirts dragging on the floor around their feet.
Men’s legs looked like black matchsticks, nothing flowing around them at all. There seemed to be about an equal number of both here, she noted. None of these little people below her seemed to be aware she was stuck in this box, dangling over them. They never seemed to look up. She could see where the door to the building was from here, as that seemed to generate the most people traffic, but she couldn’t see anything through that door. She would have liked to be able to see outside if only to know if it was day or night. It felt strange, not knowing something so basic. Through the sides, all she could see were empty hallways and an elevator shaft just to her right. That was it. Not much she could learn by looking at any of it, so she slept again, not knowing what else to do.
At least she could dream when she was sleeping, and she was getting pretty good at dreaming about Brody, and Waller, and all the things she loved there, and about her parents. She didn’t want to dream about them now. She pushed their faces away from behind her eyes and was looking at Brody’s head, bent in front of her. She was running her fingers through his hair, counting the gold streaks, comforting him. He ran to her without a jacket of any kind, just in his t-shirt in the middle of January, looking entirely out of sorts. Brody never looked like that. She dragged him inside, slamming the door at the cold that followed him, put a warm blanket on him, one of her mother’s, and ran into the kitchen to heat up some tea. He stood at the door, right where she left him when she came back out again. She had to take him by the hand and walk him into the kitchen as if he were a little kid, and make him sit down, hoping he would just spit it out, whatever this bad thing was, so that she didn’t have to pry. And finally he did, three words, “Andy is dying,” and there wasn’t anything she could do to make him feel any better then.
She made him his tea, without any sugar in it, and put the steaming mug in front of him, but he just put his head down, so many gold streaks spilling onto the table in front of her. She couldn’t tell if he was crying, couldn’t see his face at all, but she hoped he was, hoped he trusted her enough to do it in front of her if he needed to. Andy was all he had left of family, she knew that. And she knew how much he loved that man. She knew he went to that warehouse every day after dropping her off from school, running to that depressing place in the old part of town, even when it was really nice outside and he could have been doing anything else he wanted, like the rest of the kids. But Brody never was like the rest of the kids. He stuck to this routine for as long as they were together, only taking the occasional off day when she begged him to, for her, and she always felt a little guilty asking him not to go to Andy’s on those days.
He looked up at her finally, eyes without any suns in them, dark and sad, “They can’t fix it. The thing that’s killing him, nobody here can fix it, and he won’t try to get help anyplace else. I tried to make him do it, but he… He. Just. Won’t. Go,” and the head went back on the table again, and she was pretty sure he was crying now, so she walked around him and hugged him with all the weight she could put on him, letting him cry it all out without the embarrassment of looking at her. After too long of this, he stood up, slowly, looked at her for a long time and then kissed her softly on her forehead, “Riley doesn’t know. I don’t know how to tell him yet. I don’t know if I want him to know.” She nodded to him and he left. She knew he needed some time to be alone with this, however he needed to.
The white tray was exactly the same as the last time when she woke up, only this time she dumped the containers of the thermos into the sink without even looking and immediately regretted it. This liquid looked very much like tea, and smelled right, but it was too late now. Somebody must have been watching her for them to know that she didn’t drink the other thing. She ate the round orange thing and the milky bar, and paced around the box. Seven small steps in any direction. No wonder they called it a cage, she thought without humor, only if she were in the cage, she was supposed to have a bloody audience at the very least.
She must have paced for hours, just counting the same steps over and over again, and somehow she missed her white tray disappearing, replaced with the red one. This one didn’t smell bad at all. There was a bowl of some dark brown stuff with a plastic spoon stuck in it. She tasted it tentatively. Brothy and salty meat chunks swimming in not quite liquid. This wasn’t bad at all. She identified a few potatoes and carrots and some herbs and veggies she didn’t know, but all of it was decent enough. At least they weren’t going to starve her to death. She slept, or tried to. She was getting rather tired of sleeping, so she stared at the glass ceiling, the only thing she couldn’t really see anything through, nothing but untextured darkness.
And finally she did sleep, only she couldn’t recall any of her dreams when the sound of the swishing doors woke her up. She was staring at an immaculately white face of a woman whose age she couldn’t determine. She jumped up and stood against the far wall, afraid. The woman smiled at her, using only her mouth to do it, and said in a surprising pleasant voice that her name was Rindar, and she would be her keeper. She didn’t know what that meant, but didn’t want to ask her.
“I am going to take your slave band off, Trina. You won’t be needing it anymore,” and she walked up to her and put a finger on some spot on the band. It slid right off her hands, clanking loudly against the glass floor. She felt herself flinch at the sound, and hoped this woman, this Rindar, did not.
“Come with me. I’ll introduce you to everybody. Good to have you with us. I think you are the prettiest one yet. You should be proud,” and she walked ahead of her to the swishing doors.
She watched her glide across the floor in the overly long white dress, somehow not tripping on it. She could see the outlines of everything through it, the woman’s slim frame hugged as if this dress was made especially for her body. Somehow everything on her had that feel, of being made especially for her: the way her hair fell in straight sheets of white, not one of them moving as she walked, her face without any wrinkles or freckles anywhere on it. If she didn’t just talk to her the way she did, she’d think the woman was a droid.
They walked in silence for a long time, going through four long, empty hallways and then down a few floors in an also empty elevator, and another long hallway after that. She still hadn’t seen a single person or droid or whoever these people were. Finally the woman put her finger on a slot of a giant metal door in front of them and it slid open, soundlessly, and she heard human noise coming out from the inside.
“This will be your home for a little while, Trina. This is our best facility, truly,” and she pushed her gently through the doors. The room was enormous, the largest she’d ever seen or even imagined. She couldn’t see the far wall from where she was standing, couldn’t even tell if there was a far wall. All the human noises stopped. There seemed to be hundreds of people, all wearing white dresses, like this woman, and the men with white coats over something dark, and they were all staring at her. Rindar took a few steps in front of her and smiled at them, “Meet Trina. We are lucky to have found her. Make sure she wants for nothing while she is here.”
She looked at her, and handed her a small metal circle, that was moving slightly on her hand, “This is a comm. You just have to press your finger, any finger to it, and say anything you want to say to me, and I’ll hear it, but only I. It is my job to make sure you are taken care of here, Trina. I’ll be checking up on you at least once a day unless I hear from you through this device,” and she left her standing in the midst of all these people all staring at her like she was indeed some strange animal. They were smiling at her strangely, and suddenly the small cage they had her in before didn’t seem so bad.
T
HE
E
XCHANGE
Riley
[May 8, 2236, Woods Outside of Reston]
He saw Brody making the fire outside when he ran out to pee, the sun just starting to come up. It was far too early to be making breakfast, so he felt something was up, but he needed more sleep to process anything important, and this seemed important. He said good morning to his friend and raced back towards the cave.
“Riley, I know it’s early, but I have to tell you something, before the others wake up,” Brody’s voice caught him, sounding far too awake for how early it was. He needed some of that stuff they called coffee that Stan gave them. Tea just wasn’t going to cut it. He ran into the cave, found a pouch of the stuff by touch and went back to the fire, showing the pouch to Brody, letting him know he needed this before he could hear anything he had to tell him. It only took a few minutes for the little bit of water to boil in the small kettle, and he poured himself a steaming cup, and took a few tiny sips, still hating the taste of it. Brody let him do all of it, tending to the kettle of tea for the others, not saying a word.
“All right, I am up enough now, damn you. What is it?” Brody sat next to him then and told him what he did last night about Hassinger, and that he also got to his crew and he’d have a dozen of the best trained of them waiting for them when they get there, just in case. He was listening to him talk, getting more and more angry with every word, and finally he lunged at him and dropped him on the grass, throwing punches at him, not holding anything back either. His friend just put everyone here in danger without so much as asking him first. He pummeled him, as hard as he could until his arms got tired. Brody didn’t even try to defend himself, just lay there, not even covering his face, letting him do it, watching him. It seemed pointless to keep going, so he got up and walked away from him, to the other side of the fire, trying to get his breathing back to normal.
“Never thought I’d get you to throw a punch at me, or a hundred,” Brody grinned at him. “If you had let me finish, I’d have told you that I had a plan, and I wasn’t going to put anyone here in danger, but me, and Laurel, but only if she was okay with it, and only if we knew for sure she’d be safe. None of you are coming, just me and Laurel, if she wants to. The rest of you will be safe here until we get back with Hassinger and hopefully, Trina.”
He walked over to him, looking at him with a smirk on his quickly bruising face, “Want to hit me some more, before the rest of them wake up?”
He didn’t. He let him fill in the other details of the plan, and he knew he’d be going with him, whether Brody wanted him to or not, but he didn’t want to argue with him over it just yet. He was still far too angry at him to want to talk. He went back into the cave, packed a small bag with everything he thought he’d need, stashed it under his blanket and waited for Laurel to wake up.