Maelstrom

Chapter 1

ONE

LYSSA

The weight slid back into place with a soft pneumatic hiss.

My breath burned in my lungs, held in, as I stretched my arms overhead, releasing the pulldown bar.

It lacked the solid clunk of my normal gym equipment, the metallic impact that told you how much iron you'd moved.

Everything here was hidden behind smooth composite walls and touch-sensitive selection panels that wouldn't break no matter how many times I punched them.

Though I couldn't be too sure about that.

They always just gassed the whole room when I started trying to break shit.

The thick tube disappeared into the wall above the bar, flexing slightly as it took the load.

Whatever mechanism lifted the weights was buried somewhere behind the panels, deliberately inaccessible.

The tube itself was inflexible, with no give that could be used to wrap around one of those fuckers' necks, if I ever got a chance to try.

Everything in here was safe.

Above standard praise came the dull voice from inside my head. Reward dispensing.

A reward cube popped out of the slot on the wall next to the machine, but I ignored it and continued holding my breath.

My heartbeat pounded in my ears as my chest ached.

My diaphragm twitched, spasming with my body's instinctive effort to jump-start my breathing.

My lungs burned, CO2 acidifying my blood into carbonic acid and triggering my chemoreceptors.

I focused on slowing my heartbeat, my vision shrinking into a tunnel as spots began to float through it, and everything started to get hazy, like there was fuzz wrapped around my brain. I couldn't let go; I needed to hold it.

I could hold it until I passed out.

That I knew from experience.

"Don't syncopate on me," Sara said, reminding me. "If you start experiencing peripheral vision loss or seeing spots, your brain is starved for oxygen. Take a breath before you pass out."

I gave my friend a glare as I pressed my lips together, the black spots swimming around like minnows.

She just lifted a bushy brown eyebrow at me, her expression calm and clinical as always.

Sometimes I was certain she was a sociopath with how little all of this bothered her, but when I called her one, she insisted that she lacked the primary diagnostic markers to qualify for that label, and that her emotional regulation was an intersectional defense mechanism shaped to avoid the angry black woman stereotype.

Just being around these other women for so long was teaching me new vocabulary.

I exhaled in a rush, sucking in a fresh, glorious breath as my fingers and toes began to tingle.

"Did I make it?" I asked as I leaned forward to set my hands on my knees, the metal bench jutting out from between my grey-clad legs.

We were all dressed in the same grey uniform outfits with long sleeves that ended in pointed tips at the backs of our hands.

I never got too hot or cold in it, and it stayed clean feeling for long periods of time.

They'd give us new ones every ten-light-on cycles.

"Almost," Sara said. "You're making good progress."

"Almost isn't good enough," I said, frustration rushing through me. "We're not going to get anywhere if only one of us is able to stay awake."

"It can take professional divers months to get to a five-minute breath hold," Saoirse said from where she stood on one leg in front of me.

She had one of her knees hooked up over her elbow, and her other hand was on the top of her foot, pulling it so it was about an inch away from her head.

We didn't get treats for anything but weight training with the equipment, which had resulted in Saoirse refusing to use any of the machinery at all on principle, not wanting to do what our captors wanted.

Instead, she did a bunch of bendy-shit with Sara that left her sweaty and flexible.

Several of the other women had been getting into it, including me, and we had our own little bendy-shit class happening every lights-on cycle.

I got the whole not wanting to do what our captors wanted thing, but I wasn't going to give up my gains just because I was abducted.

The bendy shit worked slow-twitch muscle fibers, giving high relative strength in the core, shoulders, and hips, along with strong balance and heightened proprioception.

Doing reps gave me better fast-twitch muscle growth, improved bone mineral density, and accelerated metabolism.

Bendy-shit was better at endurance, and reps-people were better for punching others in the face.

Not that I'd gotten a chance to punch anyone in the face yet. They knocked us unconscious with gas before they came into the room.

"We don't have months," I said. "Not at the rate they are taking us."

So far, no one who had been taken had come back.

We wouldn't even know what our captors looked like if it weren't for Sara.

"Stop being so hard on yourself," Saoirse said. "What praise did you get?"

"Above standard," I said, annoyed at that as well. If I didn't hold my breath, I would have hit a higher praise level, and then maybe I would get the chocolate. I hadn't gotten chocolate for anything below excellent for a while now.

"I wish I had a CT scanner," Sara sighed. "It has to be able to send signals as well as receive them and translate languages. I just need to get one out so Mei can take a look at it and tell us how it works."

We all woke up with an alien implant that allowed us to understand any language and receive the reward messages. Sara had figured out it was embedded near the surface, back behind the ear, but there wasn't anything sharp in the room that she could use to cut someone open to look at it.

"I'm down to bite it off of someone," I said. "But I can't do it to myself."

"Stop suggesting that. Just because part of it is subcutaneous doesn't mean the entire thing is," Sara said.

"I've told you already, to talk to the brain, it would have to have microneedles penetrating the skull to reach the cerebral cortex as well as access the auditory cortex and Wernicke's area.

Biting it off could cause severe brain damage.

Brain surgery isn't just something you do with your teeth! "

I rolled my eyes at her as she lectured me again.

I wasn't actually going to bite someone.

Sometimes I just liked to make wild suggestions to deal with the boredom and anxiety of being trapped in this box.

Triggering Sara into one of her lectures was about as entertaining as anything else I could do, plus I kept learning new things about brains.

For example, I didn't have to have her explain what the Wernicke's area was because she'd already gone off about how it was the brain's data processor for auditory comprehension.

"Are you going to eat that?" Mei asked from across the room.

There was no privacy in this steel box. We had enough space that we weren't on top of each other, but not enough space that we could escape the initial whiff when someone had to use the single toilet tucked away in the small open-air cubby with the shower.

It was a meager blessing that the ventilation was so good.

I reached out and grabbed my reward cube and gave it a sniff.

"Blech," I said, holding it up by my shoulder. "It's the berry one."

There were a bunch of flavors given out as a reward.

Berry, citrus, something that tasted vaguely like cinnamon mixed with a hint of plastic.

A few were sweet, some were savory, and others had a chemical aftertaste.

Whatever the flavor, it was a far cry better than the standard rations cubes we received, whether or not we exercised.

It took us a while to figure out that the flavor of the reward cubes wasn't random.

Saoirse figured it out first.

Whenever someone discovered a flavor they liked and expressed that out loud or through their obvious enjoyment, that flavor started showing up more often in response to them using the equipment.

Day after day, they would get more and more of their favorite, until they had built a habit.

Then, once they were exercising regularly, other flavors were given, ones they didn't like as much but were fine with.

The favorite flavor cube appeared less frequently. For Mei, every berry cube became two workouts apart, then three, then five. Just enough to keep someone chasing the next reward.

Saoirse said it was variable ratio reward-based training.

She said it was what she used with dog training: you did continuous reinforcement, where the dog was rewarded every single time they performed the correct behavior, then you switched to intermittent to make the behavior durable, then you switched to variable ratio, like a slot machine.

So I started pretending I didn't like the berry ones.

My favorite, chocolate, I got less often, but the more I made faces at the berry ones, the more I got them. It wouldn't have worked if I ate them with any enthusiasm, but I didn't eat them at all.

I did it because I noticed that Mei had lost her appetite.

The bland food cubes we got, whether we worked out or not, were available as much as I needed and would give me the calories I needed for the workout, and I didn't have any issue eating them, so I didn't need the protein boost from the treat.

Mei held up her hands, and I hucked it across the room at her.

Milly flinched as the treat went by her, hitting her head on the metal wall with a thud.

I winced in sympathy but didn't say anything.

She was sitting next to Carla, who was suffering from extreme depression.

I'd tried to give Carla a pep talk, and that hadn't gone so well, and Milly made it clear it was better that I don't talk to either of them for a while.

When stuck in a box with other women, respecting even the smallest of boundaries was important, even if it made me uncomfortable.

"I'll give you my next chocolate," Mei said, and I nodded, not caring. This wasn't about trading with her. She didn't owe me anything, even if she liked to say things like that to make herself feel better. This was about making sure she didn't end up slumped on the floor, listless like Carla.

"It's my turn. Sara, you ready?" Saoirse said, drawing my attention back.

"Ready," Sara said, a strand of her dark brown hair falling forward into her face when she nodded. She tucked it back behind her ear with slender, delicate fingers.

Saoirse put her elevated foot down on the ground, closed her eyes, and took a deep, low breath.

I could see her ribs expand as she held in as much air as she could.

She gave Sara a thumbs up, and Sara repeated the gesture back, indicating that she had begun counting.

We didn't have a way to time our breath-hold practices, so we had to count for each other.

The soft hiss of gas releasing into the room caused my heart rate to spike back up, my hands clenching with the fury I felt every time I heard that sound.

"So soon!" Saoirse said, stopping her breath hold. "They just took Jessica a few days ago!"

I moved to sit on the ground, joining the circle that most of the women were forming to sit in the center of the room.

We looked at each other, making eye contact, and as one, we all took a deep breath.

Everyone except Sara.

"You got this, everyone," she said. "You can do it."

The gas filled the room, and my lungs began to burn with the urge to inhale.

I could hold it, I had to hold it.

Sara was small, delicate, no match for our hulking captors, not on her own anyway.

I was at least a good hundred pounds heavier than Sara, and that was all muscle.

She needed me. We couldn't risk them becoming aware that she was immune to the gas, not until we were ready.

Our best bet was if we could just train ourselves to hold our breaths long enough, and then we could try to take one of them on together.

The first of us slumped to the ground, and Sara lay down as well, pretending to be unconscious. She would gaze through her eyelashes and try to get as much information as possible until one of us was finally able to hold our breath long enough so that she didn't have to do it alone.

My diaphragm kicked, and the edges of my vision began to pinch in.

One by one, we fell.

Just a little bit longer.

But I couldn't make it.