7. Inside The Compound
Inside The Compound
Honor
The vent is too narrow for anything useful.
That doesn’t mean it’s useless.
I’ve been staring at it since dawn, waiting for the machinery outside to get loud enough to cover what I’m doing. The generators have been running since before six. A loader starts somewhere beyond the building, followed by the long warning beep of a haul truck reversing.
Perfect.
I drag the cot beneath the vent and climb onto it.
The metal grille is fixed with four screws, but one has been loose since I arrived. I’ve worked at it every day with the edge of a screw I took from beneath the bed frame, careful not to leave fresh scratches anyone might notice.
“Come on.”
Today it finally gives. I catch the screw before it falls.
Yes.
The corner of the grille lifts less than an inch.
Enough.
I climb down and look at what I have.
Not much. Blanket. Sweater.
The clothes I was wearing when they took me have been replaced with whatever Lockhart decided prisoners need indoors. None of it will carry enough of my original scent to mean much after twelve days.
But scent isn’t only clothing.
I tear a narrow strip from the inside hem of my sweater, then hold it against my skin while I work out what comes next.
Grandmother Rose taught me enough about tracking to understand what dogs can do. Hunters use them. Search teams use them. People looking for someone lost in winter use them.
If anyone is out there searching properly, they may have dogs.
It’s a ridiculous hope. I use it anyway.
I rub the cloth through my hair, then wipe some sweat from beneath my armpits onto it. If a tracking dog gets anywhere near this place, I want to make its job easy.
Lena hears me moving.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying something.”
“What?”
“Giving anyone outside a reason to come closer by dropping a clue through the vent.”
She goes quiet.
I climb onto the cot again. The grille lifts, and cold air pours through the gap hard enough to sting my face.
I feed the strip through slowly, keeping hold of one end until the wind catches it. For several seconds, the cloth stays trapped between my fingers and the edge of the vent.
“Shit.”
I work it farther through until the wind catches hard enough to tug it free.
The strip disappears.
I lower the grille and work the screw back into place.
Lena speaks again through the wall.
“Think someone will find it?”
“I don’t know, but I hope so.”
That’s the truth.
I don’t know whether anyone has made it this far. I don’t know whether Grandmother Rose convinced the police to keep searching, whether people from the community are combing the roads, or whether someone entirely different has picked up the trail.
But whoever took me didn’t bring me here on foot.
There’s a route. There are tracks.
And there was my glove, dropped deliberately beside the road when they dragged me from the vehicle. I’d let it slip from my hand and kicked it toward the snowbank before anyone noticed, hoping somebody searching would understand I hadn’t left it there by accident.
If the snow hasn’t buried it, that’s one breadcrumb already waiting.
Now there’s something carrying my scent somewhere outside these walls.
I climb down from the cot.
“What happens now?” Lena asks.
“We keep doing what we’ve been doing.”
Listening. Remembering. Keeping Ivy drinking fluids. Learning every woman’s name. Waiting for the smallest opening.
I glance at the frosted window.
Maybe that strip of cloth ends up buried under snow ten meters from the building. Maybe nobody ever sees it.
Or maybe somewhere beyond the fence, something catches my scent and follows it back.
I’m not sitting here waiting to be rescued.
If someone is looking for me, I’m going to help them find us.
Lockhart Mining Compound, Northern Manitoba, Canada. 1100 hours.
By late morning, we have a shorthand language we use.
Two taps means a guard is coming. Three means it’s safe to talk. Four means someone is being moved.
A rapid series means trouble and everybody shuts up.
It started with Lena and me through the wall. Now Mariah and Tessa have passed it farther down the corridor, one room at a time, until every woman in this building knows the code.
Lockhart thinks walls separate us.
They don’t. They just make us creative.
We’ve also started collecting things.
Nothing dramatic. Just things men who think women are helpless don’t bother counting.
A loose screw from my bed frame. A short piece of wire Mariah worked free from beneath her cot. Two plastic utensils Tessa kept instead of returning with her tray. Strips of cloth. Sugar packets. A small metal clip Lena found beneath the radiator.
None of us knows yet what will matter, so we keep everything.
We learn the guards too.
The tall one carries the keys on his right hip. The younger one checks every door properly. The heavyset one doesn’t. He rattles the handle and keeps walking.
One guard smokes outside after the evening meal. Another disappears for nearly twenty minutes around shift change.
Ivy has become our best listener because she can identify three of them by footsteps alone.
“You’re creepy,” Mariah tells her through the wall.
“I’m bored.”
“Stay bored.”
A quiet laugh travels down the corridor. Even that feels like stealing something back.
We have other advantages.
Cold is one of them.
Lena grew up farther north than I did. She knows what water does when you put it somewhere at thirty below and leave it there.
Mariah knows heavy equipment because her father operated it for years.
Sarah apparently knows generators.
I don’t ask why yet. I only remember it.
Nobody here has everything we need, but between us, we might.
I start asking different questions.
If the doors opened right now, who could run?
Ivy can’t.
Mariah says she’ll carry her if she has to.
Who knows which way the main road lies?
Lena does.
Who has seen where they keep our coats and boots?
Tessa thinks she has.
Who can drive a snowmobile?
Three women answer. That almost makes me laugh.
Lockhart took Indigenous women from northern communities and locked us in the middle of winter.
Maybe they should’ve considered what we know about surviving here.
We start planning around the things they assume we won’t use against them. A spilled cup of water can freeze where a door needs to close. A blocked drain can bring someone inside. A sick woman can become a reason for two guards to enter instead of one.
None of it means much alone. Together, it starts to look useful.
I don’t have an escape plan yet. I have pieces, so I keep collecting them.
People. Skills. Weaknesses. Timing.
Anything Lockhart gives us without realizing it.
If an opportunity comes, we won’t waste the first ten minutes deciding what to do.
We’ll already know.
Lockhart Mining Compound, Northern Manitoba, Canada. 1430 hours.
By afternoon, I stop asking the women what they’ve learned about Lockhart.
We already know who owns this place.
I start asking a different question.
“How many women do you know who disappeared?”
Lena answers through the wall. “Personally?”
“Family, friends, women from your community. Anyone whose disappearance never made sense.”
“Eight.”
I write the number beneath the bunk.
“Mariah?”
“Eleven.”
“Tessa?”
“Nine.”
The question travels down the corridor through taps and low voices, each woman adding what she knows. We try to catch overlaps where we can. Same woman, same community, same year, we count her once.
Even then, the number keeps climbing.
By the time we’ve done the best we can with seven women locked in separate rooms, I have sixty-eight.
Sixty-eight missing women connected in some way to seven prisoners.
Aunts. Cousins. Sisters. Friends. Classmates. Women from neighboring communities. Some disappeared recently. Others before several of us were born.
And that’s only what seven women can remember.
I stare at the number scratched beneath the bunk, then ask the question that matters here.
“How many had some connection to Lockhart?”
“Mines?” Lena asks.
“Mines. Exploration sites. Camps. Haul roads. Contractors. Lockhart land. Anything.”
The answers take longer.
We work backward through what we know. An aunt who cleaned rooms at a Lockhart camp. A cousin who took a catering job at another site. A woman who vanished after protesting exploration. Others last seen along roads heavily used by Lockhart vehicles.
When the count comes back, I check it twice.
Forty-three.
“That can’t be coincidence,” Mariah says.
“No.”
Sarah’s voice reaches us faintly.
“One of mine worked for them.”
“Lockhart?”
“Different mine. Years ago. She finished a shift and never came home.”
“What did the police say?”
“That she probably left.”
“With what?”
Sarah gives a bitter laugh. “Exactly.”
Then Tessa speaks.
“One came back.”
I straighten. “What?”
“A woman from my cousin’s community. She disappeared for nearly three weeks. They found her outside Thompson.”
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
“Did she say where she’d been?”
“Wouldn’t talk much about it. Barely talked at all afterward.”
“Did the police investigate?”
“My cousin said they asked questions. Nothing came from it.”
A woman came back.
Which means whatever has been happening around these mines isn’t simply about making inconvenient women disappear forever.
Some are being kept. Some may be moved. Some may be forced to work.
“What was her name?”
Tessa answers without hesitation. “Maya Cardinal.”
I repeat it once so I won’t lose it.
Maya Cardinal.
If she survived long enough to come home, she may know what happened to others. And if I get out of here, I’m finding her.
Outside, heavy machinery continues moving through the compound. A reversing alarm sounds, followed minutes later by a warning siren and the distant concussion of blasting.
An ordinary working day at Lockhart Mining, with seven Indigenous women imprisoned inside one of its buildings.
I look at the numbers again.
Sixty-eight known to seven women.
Forty-three with some connection to Lockhart.
One known survivor.
Whatever this family has been doing didn’t start with us.
It scares the crap out of me, but fear isn’t useful unless I do something with it.
“We remember everything from now on,” I tell them. “Names. Dates. Mines. Roads. Camps. Companies. Guards. Vehicles. Anything you’ve heard since you got here.”
“For when we get out?” Lena asks.
“Yes. When we get out.”
I look at the marks beneath my bunk.
Escaping isn’t enough anymore.
If somebody gets through that door, I want Lockhart to lose more than its prisoners.
I want decades of secrets walking out with us.
Lockhart Mining Compound, Northern Manitoba, Canada. 1700 hours.
The numbers beneath my bunk keep pulling me back to something I photographed months ago.
Survey maps.
I sit on the floor and work through the memory carefully.
Honor St. John, activist with a phone camera and a habit of photographing anything officials told me wasn’t relevant.
Grandmother Rose used to call it being nosy.
She wasn’t wrong.
The documents came from a public consultation packet for one of Lockhart’s proposed exploration projects. Most of it was environmental assessments, access corridors and land-use boundaries, pages designed to bury anything interesting beneath technical language.
One map showed the older mining sites, including this one.
I didn’t know where they’d taken me when I woke here, but the machinery, the abandoned-mine road and what little I can see through the frosted window have been filling in the gaps.
There was something strange on that survey.
An exclusion zone west of the old pit.
No development proposed. No environmental explanation. No access permitted.
Just a section of Lockhart land marked differently from everything around it.
At the time, I photographed it because unexplained restrictions around mining companies are usually worth remembering.
Now I wish I’d looked harder.
“Lena?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you noticed which direction the guards watch when they’re outside?”
She takes a few seconds. “The trees.”
“Which side?”
“Mostly west, I think.”
Mariah hears us and joins in. “The heavy one always looks that way when the trucks come past.”
Tessa adds something from farther down. “Yesterday two guards went out there on snowmobiles.”
That gets my attention.
“How long?”
“Maybe an hour.”
I sit back against the cot.
West.
The exclusion zone was west of the old mine. It still doesn’t prove anything.
But forty-three missing women with Lockhart connections, a survivor who came home barely able to talk about where she’d been, and guards paying particular attention to land their own surveys tried to make invisible?
I don’t like where that points.
I tap twice against the wall.
Guard warning.
The corridor goes silent immediately.
Footsteps pass my door, continue toward the end, then return.
A lock opens somewhere. Closes.
When the footsteps disappear again, three taps come back from Lena.
Safe.
Our system works.
That matters more tonight than it did this morning.
“Change of plan,” I whisper.
The message travels room by room.
“From now on, four taps still means someone’s being moved. Five means remember everything you see. Doors, vehicles, buildings, roads, anything outside.”
Mariah answers first. “Why?”
“Because I think there’s something around this mine Lockhart doesn’t want anyone finding.”
Nobody asks what.
Maybe they’re thinking what I am.
I don’t say it aloud.
Instead, I think about the strip of cloth I pushed through the vent this morning and the glove I deliberately left behind when they took me.
Both are out there now, two chances for somebody searching to realize I didn’t vanish without leaving a trail.
I look toward the frosted window.
“Be ready,” I tell them.
“For what?” Lena asks.
“Anything.”
A guard making a mistake. A door opening. A vehicle arriving that doesn’t belong to Lockhart. Dogs barking somewhere beyond the fence.
Whatever comes.
I don’t know if anyone is searching for us, but today I gave them another way to find me.
Tonight, I choose to believe somebody will.