Chapter 14 #4
I looked around, finally finding a low slot on the wall through which a tray could potentially be shoved. I knelt down.
“Be careful,” Alice advised. “They may not know you’re there, but if they see the hatch on the meal slot move, they could try to stab you through the opening.”
“Stab me with what?” I asked. “You said there was no metal.”
“They use bamboo cutlery. It still hurts when it stabs you.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said, and gently eased the hatch open, taking care to keep my fingers on the very corner of the flap. It was made from polished wood, out of place against all the paper, but at least fitting with the tech level of its surroundings.
I crouched lower, peering through the slot.
There was a single male Johrlac in the room, huddled in the corner next to the bed that had been provided for him, hugging his knees.
He didn’t look inclined to stab anyone. He also didn’t look like he’d noticed me.
Unlike the other Johrlac I’d seen in this dimension, he wasn’t wearing a colored jumpsuit: instead, he was dressed in a loose gray-brown uniform that looked almost like pajamas.
I let the hatch swing closed and looked over my shoulder at the others, shaking my head.
“Not this one,” I said.
“But there was a prisoner?” asked Thomas.
“Yeah. Just a Johrlac, all by himself. He looked … defeated. Like he’d given up on ever getting out of here. But the room didn’t look any emptier than the rest of the building.”
“We don’t know what their homes are like,” said Alice. “Maybe he’s used to lots of color and activity, and being put into a boxy little room is bad for his mental health. Maybe he’s been cut off from the rest of the hive mind so he can think about what he’s done. Do you want to ask him?”
“No. I want to find Arthur and Sarah.”
“Then we keep moving.”
The next three cells were the same story: single Johrlac, not moving or looking toward the hatch, dressed in gray-brown prison clothes.
In the fourth, when I eased the hatch up, there was a Johrlac already crouching on the other side, her eyes blue and glazed with white, like she was barely holding back the urge to reach out with her telepathy.
“I see you,” she said, in a dreamy tone.
I managed, barely, not to recoil.
“Kairos, yes? Little rats in the walls. I tried to tell the queens you were here, spying on us, but they told me I was overreaching my authority, said I had no right to approach them with security news, even though security is meant to be my purpose. But now here I am, locked away, and there you are, roving free.”
“How can you see me?” I asked, cautiously.
“The cells cut us off from the collective, to keep us malleable,” she said, surprisingly matter-of-fact.
“They strip away the white noise that controls the universe. No more thoughts, no more feelings, no more ideas from the outside. Just me, alone in my head. It seemed like a fair punishment when I was on the other side of the door. Now it seems like eternity turned against me and made of teeth. I understand why the cuckoos go mad. The loneliness must swallow them alive.”
“Oooooo-kay,” I said. “What did you do?”
“I spoke against the will of the collective,” she said. “I wanted the Kairos rounded up and removed. My queens wanted them left alone, only harvested on occasion, when we need them.”
“Need them?” My voice sharpened. “Need them for what?”
She turned her face away from the hatch, looking toward the wall. “No. I’m a criminal, but I’m not a traitor. I won’t tell you what you want to know if you don’t know it already. I am loyal to my queens. You’ll tell them? You’ll tell them when they ask you what I said?”
A wave of pity crested over me, crashing down and leaving me soaked to the bone. “I’ll tell them you’re loyal,” I said solemnly, and let the hatch swing shut. I turned to my companions. “You all heard that?” I asked.
Thomas nodded. “I did,” he said.
Sam and Alice nodded in turn but didn’t say anything—it wasn’t necessary. I rose, and we continued down the hall.
When I opened the hatch on the fifth cell, I almost didn’t realize that anything was different.
Like the others, the figure in the cell was wearing loose gray pajamas, and seated in the corner with his knees pulled up to his chest. He had his forehead tucked against them, blocking his face.
Still, something about the pattern of his breathing was wrong when compared to the Johrlac I’d seen before.
He was holding himself too rigidly, clutching his legs too hard.
His pants had pulled up slightly, revealing his feet and ankles, and I paused.
There were scratches on the sides of his feet, scabbed over and surrounded by angry red inflammation.
It didn’t look bad enough to be medically worrisome, but he could definitely use some antibiotics.
Johrlac blood—or hemolymph—has naturally antibiotic properties.
More importantly, it’s clear. The inflammation meant he wasn’t Johrlac.
“Arthur?” I whispered harshly.
He twitched, but didn’t lift his head.
“Arthur,” I repeated. “It’s me, Annie. Come on, look at me.”
He lifted his head, slowly, and gave me a mistrustful look that transformed into wide-eyed amazement as he realized I wasn’t lying to him.
“Annie!” he exclaimed, more loudly than I liked, and pushed himself onto all fours, crawling across the cell floor to stare at me through the hatch.
“What are you doing here? How are you here?”
“I’m here to bust you out, and I’m here because our grandparents are better at dimensional travel than is honestly reasonable. Fortunately, I don’t get to make the rules, so what I think is and isn’t reasonable doesn’t matter much.” I looked over my shoulder. “Sam, get the lock. It’s Arthur.”
“Got that from the yelling,” he said. “On it.”
Arthur looked like he was about to cry. “Sam’s here too?” he asked. “How many of you came?”
“Me and Sam, Grandma Alice and Grandpa Thomas. Elsie’s pretty worried about you, but she was too far away to join the field trip.” I smiled wanly. “She saw them take you, and I guess she didn’t approve of having people teleport in and abduct her brother. She’d like you back.”
Arthur pulled a face, and for a moment, I thought he was going to argue. Then he nodded. “I want to go home,” he admitted, in a low voice.
That must have taken a lot out of him. Being built on the wreckage of the person who used to own your body wasn’t something I’d experienced, and so I couldn’t fully understand what he might be feeling in the moment. Still, we’d managed to find him.
Sam worked at the lock, brow furrowed in concentration, until there was a click and the door swung outward. I blinked.
“All the doors we’ve seen here have opened out instead of in,” I said. “Why?”
“Humans build our doors to open inward for security reasons,” said Alice, offering me a hand so I could get off the floor.
I didn’t need the help, but I still appreciated the thought.
It was nice to have someone worry from time to time.
“It protects the hinges. Here on Johrlar, most doors are sliding. It’s actually unusual to have this many hinged doors in one area.
If I have to guess, I’d say the doors open outward to block off prisoner access to the hinge mechanisms.”
“They’re less worried about people breaking in than they are about the prisoners breaking out?” said Sam. “That seems right. Normally when you lock somebody up, you figure they’ll stay that way. I wonder why they didn’t go with sliding doors like a human prison, though.”
“Isolation seems to be a big part of what they’re going for here,” said Arthur, standing and stepping barefoot into the doorway.
“Sometimes at night the other prisoners scream and scream and it sounds like I’m surrounded by giant cicadas.
Am I being racist or something if I say I don’t like it here? ”
“‘Speciesist’ is more accurate, darling, and no. You’re allowed to dislike the people who abduct you,” said Alice. “All we need to do now is find Sarah and we’re all home free.”
“Sarah?” he echoed, brows knitting together as he frowned. “Sarah isn’t here. I would know if Sarah were here.”
“I think she’s gotten better at masking her presence from you,” I said. “She’s been to the compound in Portland a few times in the last year.”
He looked hurt, shoulders hunching inward like he wanted to make himself as small as he possibly could. “She knows I want to see her. Why would she do that?”
“My dude,” said Sam, who had only known Artie for a little while before he’d been deleted, and was thus more comfortable with Arthur than most of the rest of us. “You know why she’d do that. She doesn’t want to see you, and she’s never going to start wanting to see you.”
“I can’t get her out of my head,” said Arthur, frustrated.
“Yeah, because she put you in your head, and sort of sent herself along for the ride.” Sam shrugged. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this here?”
“Here,” said Alice, digging another anti-telepathy charm out of her bag and offering it to Arthur. “Put this on. It should make you effectively invisible to most Johrlac. It’s going to be a lot easier to get you out of the building if they can’t hear you thinking about escaping the whole way.”
“Oh, fun,” he said, taking the charm and slinging the cord over his head. Then he embraced Alice, head low and pressed against her shoulder while he gathered her close to him. “Thanks for coming to get me, Grandma.”
“Of course, baby,” said Alice, skating her hand over his hair. “I’d do it for any of you kids and you know it.”
“Yeah, but sometimes I don’t believe that ‘any of us kids’ applies to me,” he said, letting go and stepping back. As he almost always did when in the field, he looked to me, waiting to be told what we were going to do next.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s keep moving.”
We checked the rest of the cells along the hall.
Two more of the Johrlac actually noticed the motion of the hatch and rushed over to accuse me of being a saboteur, working against their queens in some way they didn’t explain but also quite clearly didn’t approve of.
Neither of them would tell us what they’d done to get thrown in here.
We made it all the way to the end without any sign of Sarah.
She wasn’t here.