The Trap (3 page)

But it’s the other humans we gape at the most.

They mill around aimlessly, or gather in small groups of three or four. All young, mostly boys. Pale, gaunt, emaciated, often staring off vacantly at the walls. They blink as we pass, gazing
back at us with neither hostility nor warm hospitality. Just mild curiosity bordering on indifference, as if the arrival of newcomers is commonplace. Occasionally, Cassie would gasp with surprise,
her face paling at the sight of yet another familiar face from the past. But none call out to her or acknowledge her. They only avert their stares quickly.

Matthew leads us to the end of one corridor. Inside an enclave are stacks of clothing. All the same drab garb worn by everyone else, brown and bland, mildewy. I slip into the clothes quickly and
approach Matthew as the girls get dressed.

“My name’s Gene.”

He regards me with narrow eyes.

I point to the boys. “And that’s Epap—”

“No names,” Matthew says curtly.

“What?”

“We don’t have names down here.”

“But you’re named Matthew.”

He shakes his head. “That’s . . . from before.” He purses his lips. “Listen, we just don’t do names here.”

“Why not? You all—”

“We all disappear. Inevitably and suddenly. So there’s no sense in giving names. No sense in forming bonds.” He turns his back to me, starts walking away.

I take his elbow. Gently, but with insistence, I stop him. He flinches but does not snatch his arm away. “They take you for food, don’t they?” I say, remembering what Krugman
had told me about this place. “Randomly, you never know when you might get taken.”

Matthew doesn’t say anything, but he gives the slightest nod.

“Tell me how,” I whisper. “How do they take you?”

He resists at first. Only after the girls join us, Cassie standing closest to him, does he speak, mechanically, with only the slightest tremble in his voice.

About once a week (at least they think it is a week; there is no way to measure the passage of days and nights in these underground catacombs), an alarm goes off. You have one minute, he tells
us, to climb into one of the enclaves in the wall. Only one person per unit. Then a glass window will snap down, sealing you inside. That is a good thing. Because it protects you. The lights go
out—the only time they ever do—and the darkness is morbid and terrifying. And then
they
come down into the catacombs to gawk at the hepers. The Ruler and his retinue. Up and
down the corridors, looking and staring, drooling and shaking. The Ruler will inevitably point to a particular heper. If it’s you, you’re as good as dead. Because within the next hour
your enclave will be retracted into the walls, then whisked away on some transportation system. From bed to coffin, just like that.

“To where?” David asks.

Matthew’s lips stretch into a sad, horrific smile. “The kitchen.”

“You know this for sure?”

The smile droops. “No. Some think you end up in the Ruler’s private chambers. But nobody’s ever come back to say, so it’s all conjecture.” He spits on the ground.
“Empty, useless conjecture. ’Cause you’re dead, either way.”

Cassie speaks, her voice strained and tense. “Girls are taken first, right, Matthew?” She gazes down the corridor. “Because girls are the choicest of morsels. That’s why
there are so few here. We’re the first to get chosen.”

Matthew doesn’t reply for a moment. “Not necessarily,” he says, but his voice lacks conviction. “The Ruler likes to spread out the girls. Save them for special occasions.
You might not get selected for a while.” He says all this with his eyes staring down at his feet.

We’re quiet for a minute.

“Just make sure,” Matthew says, “when the siren sounds you get into one of these enclaves. Immediately. Drop whatever you’re doing. The glass separations will come down
sixty seconds later whether you’re ready or not. If you’re not, you’ll be stuck out in the corridors. Completely unprotected and vulnerable. And when
they
come down . .
.”

“What happens?” Cassie asks.

Matthew pauses. “That’s when the rest of us roll toward the wall, shut our eyes, clamp hands over our ears.”

We stare down the brightly lit corridor at the rows of recessed enclaves on each side. Arms and legs dangle out from a few.

“And this siren,” I say. “You said it goes off about once a week.”

He nods. “Thereabouts. You guys are lucky. The siren just went off yesterday, so you’re safe for a few days yet.”

David sits down halfway into one of the enclaves, his face drained of color. “It never ends, does it?” he says quietly. A flash of anger crosses his face. “We should have
listened to Gene. We should have headed east when we had the chance. Going back to the Mission was naïve and stupid. And what did it accomplish? The whole village was wiped out anyway. We did
nothing. Even the girls who escaped with us by train—they’re now dead. So we saved Cassie. So what? We lost Jacob, and probably Ben, to save one girl?”

“David!” Sissy says. “Stop.”

“No, it’s true,” he says, his eyes glistening with tears. “We wouldn’t be here if we’d only listened to Gene.” He looks up at Sissy. “We’d
be free, all six of us, journeying east. Not stuck in this place. Not sitting here like food on a platter ready to be served up for
their
consumption.” His lips tremble, and as he
closes his eyes two tears slide down his cheek.

Sissy sits next to him, puts her arm around his shoulders. She doesn’t say anything. Because David is right, and she knows this.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“We’ll find a way out of here,” Sissy says. She nudges his face. “Hey, chin up. We’re survivors, remember? We’ll find a way out of here.”

He doesn’t answer, only stares at the steel floor.

I look at Matthew. “You’ve been here over a year now. Tell me the weak spots. We can find a way out of here.”

Matthew opens his mouth to say something, stops. His face ripples with ambiguous emotion.

“Can we backtrack our way to the train?” I say. “Down the elevator, back to the platform? Not now, of course, but later when the station is empty?” An idea lights in my
mind. “Then we could all board it, trigger the train controls, set the train in motion, escape out of here?”

“That might work,” Epap says, catching on, his excitement growing. “Back to the Mission. It’ll be safe. The duskers there would have been destroyed by the sun days ago.
Then we could set off on foot eastward. Yeah, that really might work.” He looks excitedly at Matthew. “Is that possible?”

All Matthew does is stare back. And then he starts giggling with a shrill laugh, his body jiggling up and down like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. The sound of his laughter
sends chills down my back. And still laughing, he walks away, leaving us to stare and wonder. And then to realize.

There is no escape.

F
OR THE NEXT
hour we’re left to explore on our own. But it’s all the same dreary, monotonous repetition: brightly lit narrow
corridors, glaring light reflecting off the floor and walls. Only the recessed, shadowed enclaves offer a break from this garish sameness. The boys in the catacombs, their eyes vacant and dark,
stare ghoulishly at us, but when we meet their gaze they flick their eyes away. They walk away from our questions, ignore our greetings.

We discover two large spaces—both about the size of a large lecture hall—at opposite points of the catacombs. One space is the dining room, although that’s too fancy a term. It
is really little more than a feeding area for animals. Troughs run from one end of the room to the other, filled with slop-like porridge. The boys (and a sprinkling of girls) mill into the room,
and eat quickly with their hands, cupping the food into their mouths. Another trough is filled with water, and it is there we head first. The water is brackish and lukewarm, with a metallic tinge
to it. Other boys—giving us little more than a curious look—slip in and out of the dining hall, spending only about a minute at most. I realize this is how they dine: in small doses and
quickly, only enough to quell hunger pangs.

Nauseating as that realization is, nothing prepares my stomach for what awaits in the other large room. We smell it long before we reach it. It’s the communal restroom, but again,
that’s too grandiose a term. It’s really just an open cesspool of raw sewage. We stand at the cusp, none of us daring to go in.

A young boy walks out, shows only faint surprise on seeing us. “Don’t urinate or defecate anywhere but here. We don’t have many rules down here, but this is one of the few
ironclad regulations. Do your business in here and nowhere else. Or else.” He walks away, hitching up his pants.

Eventually, we’ll have to walk in, bear with the smells and sights inside. But not now. We walk away, the stink of sewage following us down this empty corridor. Farther away, where the
smell fades (it never entirely dissipates), we gather around one of the recessed enclaves.

“This is bad,” David says. “What are we going to do, Sissy?”

Sissy doesn’t answer. She examines the top edge of the enclave, pokes her finger into a thin groove. “I feel glass. This is where the glass door comes down.” After a second,
she climbs into the enclave itself, starts banging on the back wall. A hollow echo sounds back. She bites her lower lip, deep in thought.

“What is it?” Epap asks.

“It’s empty space behind this wall. Remember what Matthew told us? There’s a whole transportation grid back there. Probably a network of tracks or rails to shuttle these
enclaves back and forth.” She climbs back out with a look of disgust. “Feels like a coffin in there.”

We slump against the walls, preferring to sit on the floor rather than inside the enclaves. Although we’ve been in the catacombs for only about an hour, I already feel the fingers of
claustrophobia entombing me. The bright light unrelenting, the smells unbearable, the air morose and bleak. We will, eventually, have to eat the slop from the trough, use the bathroom. Fall into a
routine like everyone else here. And eventually, the alarm will sound and we will join the mad rush to find an empty enclave. This same dreary existence, repeated in indistinguishable cycles until,
inevitably, one day, enclosed within an enclave, we will be shuttled away. Into their kitchen, into the Ruler’s Suite, into his mouth, passing in half-digested chunks through his organs.

An unwanted thought flits through my head, one that catches me by surprise: life in the Mission, governed by Krugman and his predecessors, now seems in comparison not so unconscionable. I
shudder at the thought.

A determination sets in my bones. I look at Sissy and David and Epap. “We’re going to get out of here.”

“How?” David asks.

“I don’t know. But one thing I do know: we’ll escape or die trying. Because I’m not going to . . . simply waste away in this horrid place.” I put my hand on
David’s, pat it hard. “I promise you, David. We’re not going to become like these people here. Because their existence . . . it’s not living. It’s not even surviving.
It’s . . .” I shake my head. “It’s not for me. It’s not for us. I think I speak for all of us: I’d rather be dead tomorrow than alive for a year in
here.”

Sissy’s eyes, withdrawn for the past hour, spark. I place my other hand over hers, and she grips it back tightly.

“Matthew told us the siren went off yesterday. That gives us six days to find a way out of here. Six days. That’s plenty of time. And we’ll spend every minute of that time
examining every nook and cranny of this place. We use all our wiles and cunning and smarts. We’ll find a way out.”

“But Matthew said—” David starts to say.

“Matthew isn’t us. Matthew hasn’t survived a mass Heper Hunt, hasn’t escaped a horde of thousands. We have. Matthew hasn’t survived a journey down the Nede River, a
plummet down a waterfall. We have. Matthew hasn’t survived swarms of duskers in the mountains. Matthew didn’t just survive mass carnage in the station below.” I grip Sissy’s
hand tighter, grab David’s arm tightly now. “But we have. We are awesome together. We are formidable. I really believe that. There’s something about the four of us together. The
duskers—thousands of them, armies of them, armadas of them—have
never
defeated us. At the dome, on the riverbanks, in the mountains. Not once. We’ve stared them down each
and every time.”

Next to me, Epap is nodding. “Gene’s right. We’ll leave nothing unturned in this place. And we stay together over the next six days. Let’s not separate at all.”

The smallest smile breaks across David’s face. “Okay.”

“Then let’s do this,” I say. “Let’s start exploring and studying the structure, talk to people. Because I have a feeling that six days is going to fly
by—”

And that’s when I’m cut off.

By the sound of a siren.

F
OR A FEW
seconds, we’re frozen in place. We’re not the only ones; everyone around us is stunned. Then mayhem ensues. Bodies
running, jostling. Bumping, knocking against one another. David is elbowed to the ground.

I grab a young boy flying past me. “What’s going on?” I yell, my voice barely audible over the blaring siren.

He pulls his arm away. “What do you think?” he shouts.

“The siren went off yesterday! We’ve got six more days!”

But he doesn’t reply, only sprints down the corridor, head frantically swiveling from side to side, looking for a vacant enclave.

I climb into the nearest one. Crouched in the back is a terrified boy. He suddenly delivers a violent kick to my head.

“What the hell!”

“Get out!” he yells.

“There’s plenty of room for two, even three of us!”

“Only one to an enclave. Otherwise the enclave is automatically taken! Now get out!”

I feel a hand on my back, tugging me out. It’s Epap. “C’mon, if he’s right, we’ve got to move. We’ve got to find an empty enclave for each of us.” He
stares down at Cassie, at her lotus feet. “You take this enclave!” he shouts, directing her to an empty enclave on the bottom row. “Don’t let anyone pull you out,” he
says as she dives in. “Kick and punch if you have to!”