The Loop

  For Sarah. Sorry there are no dragons in this one.

  He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.

  THE CALL OF THE WILD, JACK LONDON

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  In the Loop

  Day 736

  Day 737

  Day 738

  Day 739

  Day 740

  Day 741

  Day 742

  Day 743

  Day 744

  Day 747

  Day 748

  Day 749

  Day 750

  Day 751

  Day 752

  Day 753

  Day 754

  Day 755

  Day 756

  Out of the Loop

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 3

  In the Block

  Day 1

  Day 3

  Day 6

  Day 10

  Day 14

  Day 17

  Day 22

  Day 25

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The harvest begins, and all that exists is fear.

  This is how it goes, every night at the same time.

  Minutes pass, or maybe hours—it’s hard to tell—but at some point I begin to hallucinate.

  My mind recoils from the pain and the panic, and I’m no longer in my cell. I’m standing on the roof of the Black Road Vertical, the mile-high tower block where I used to live. The boy with the blond hair is screaming, he’s trying to pull a weapon from his pocket as he steps back toward the edge of the building, and the girl in the witch mask is getting too close. If I don’t do something, he’ll kill her.

  “Stay back!” he screams, his voice cracking in his rage and dread.

  One last tug, and he frees the pistol from his pocket. He takes another step back, increasing the distance between himself and the girl in the mask, and then he aims the gun at her head.

  My eyes snap open as the harvest ends, and I’m left completely drained on the hard concrete floor of my tiny gray cell. My heart beats so loud and so fast that I can hear it echoing off the walls of the clear glass tube that surrounds me and reaches from the ceiling to the floor.

  I try to brace myself for what comes next, try to hold my breath, but there’s no time. The cold water falls from the ceiling so relentlessly and so powerfully that I’m sure I’ll suffocate. My lungs are on fire as the tube begins to fill with the chemical-laced water. My exhausted body begs me to suck in oxygen, but if I do, I’ll drown.

  After what feels like a hundred years, the grate opens below me, and I’m sucked to the floor. The water drains away, and I’m left choking and gasping for air.

  My breaths come out in ragged coughs as I lie naked at the bottom of the tube. The heated air comes next—a blast of constant wind that’s so hot it’s on the very edge of burning my bare skin.

  Once I’m dry, the air stops and the tube lifts, disappearing back into the ceiling for another day. For the longest time, all I can do is lie still on the cold floor.

  * * *

  In the Loop, this is the closest thing we get to a shower—a government-approved waterboarding.

  Soon it will be time for the rain; every night, despite the pain of the energy harvest, I force myself to stay awake and watch the rain. It comes at midnight—half an hour after harvest ends—and it falls like a monsoon for thirty minutes.

  “Happy, talk to me,” I manage, through gasps. The screen on my wall comes to life.

  “Yes, Inmate 9-70-981?” the screen says. The female voice is calm, almost comforting.

  “Vitals,” I command.

  “Heart rate 201 and falling. Blood pressure 140 over 90. Temperature 98.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Respiration rate 41—”

  “Okay, okay,” I interrupt. “Thanks.”

  I push myself to my feet, legs shaking and muscles straining against this simple action. I scan my cell; the familiarity helps settle my breathing: Same four gray walls, bare apart from a ten-inch-thick door in one, a screen in another, and a tiny window in the back wall. My single bed with its thin cover and thin pillow, the stainless-steel toilet in the corner and sink beside it. Not much else, apart from my stack of books and a table that’s welded to the floor.

  I feel as if I haven’t recovered at all when I look at the dimmed screen on the wall and see that it’s five seconds to midnight. So, exhausted, I force my legs to move and take trembling, shuffling steps to the back of the room. I focus my attention through the small rectangular window and up to the sky.

  I’m still breathing so heavily I have to step back from the glass so that it won’t fog up and obscure my view.

  Hundreds of small explosions flash across the black night air. I can’t hear them because my room is soundproof, but I remember what they used to sound like when I was a child, and I can almost hear that ripping echo. Dark clouds plume out from the afterimage of the bursts and join together, forming a shadowy sheet across the sky. The rain comes down so hard that the first drops bounce off the concrete of the yard. Deep puddles form in seconds and the smell hits me—not a real smell, but again I remember the way it used to smell when I was young. A fresh, pure scent that—if I close my eyes—I’m sure I can sense in my nostrils, and every time I think of it, I wish I could go out there and feel the wetness on my skin, but I can’t.

  The rainfall signifies a new day. The second of June, my sixteenth birthday. I’ve been here for over two years. This is the start of my 737th day in the Loop.

  “Happy birthday,” I whisper.

  “Happy birthday, Inmate 9-70-981,” the screen replies.

  “Thanks, Happy,” I mutter.

  I lie down and tell myself not to cry, that it won’t do any good, that it won’t change anything, but I can’t stop the tears from forming in my eyes.

  I can feel the closeness of the walls, feel the thick metal of the door that I can never open, feel the futility of it all. I tell myself that I don’t have to take the Delays, that I could refuse and accept that I was sentenced to death, and therefore death is the only way this will end. I don’t have to keep fighting it.

  This sense of futility, of hopelessness … this is what happens when you take compassion out of leadership, when you take mercy out of judgment, when you let the machines decide the fate of humans.

  I’m awake before the alarm again.

  I watch the screen go from its dulled-out sleep mode to a bright glow.

  7:29 a.m. ticks toward 7:30 a.m. and I speak along with the wake-up call.

  “Inmate 9-70-981. Today is Thursday, the second of June. Day 737 in the Loop. The temperature inside your cell is 66—”

  “Skip,” I mumble as I swing my legs over the side of my bed and stand up.

  “Very well. Please select your breakfast option,” the voice requests.

  I tell Happy to give me toast and orange juice.

  I turn to face the screen. There is a picture of me in the top left corner. This picture was taken on the day of my imprisonment and is an especially bad image: I have a dazed look on my face, various scars stand out light against my dark skin, my nose looks even bigger than normal, and my ears are sticking out of my head like jug handles. If I had been rich, these unconventional features would have been cosmetically fixed before I was born, but I’m a Regular, so I’m stuck with my big nose and big ears, and the scars that came later. I don’t mind, though—my mom always used to say that they give me character. Beneath the photograph is the information that the screen reads out to me
every morning: the outside temperature, the temperature inside my room, the date and time, how many days I’ve been inside, and a countdown to both my execution and my next Delay (these are one day apart).

  A panel opens beneath the screen and a tray with my breakfast on it rolls onto the small metal table.

  The toast is dry and hard to swallow. When I’m done, I place the tray against the same panel it appeared from, and it’s taken away by the conveyor belt.

  Happy speaks again. “Inmate 9-70-981,” she says, “today is Thursday, you are issued with a clean uniform.”

  “Right, right,” I say, peeling apart the Velcro strip that runs down the front of my prison-issue white jumpsuit while kicking off my shoes.

  I step out of the prison-issue boxer shorts (horribly starchy, scratchy things) and put the bundle of clothes into the tray that comes trundling down the conveyor belt. The dirty clothes disappear, and I wait, standing naked in the middle of my cell. A few seconds later, a clean set of clothes appears, neatly folded and stiff.

  I lay out most of the clothes on my bed but put on the extra pair of shorts I requested and was granted as part of my uniform. I begin my workout: push-ups, sit-ups, squats, pull-ups on the doorframe, and half a dozen variations of the same exercises until I’m dripping sweat and exhausted. Normally, I would stop after an hour, but today I want to keep going, I want to keep working, I want to outrun the pain that is trying to catch up to me. I go again: push-ups, sit-ups, squats, pull-ups. I go until I can force nothing more from my burning limbs.

  I lie, exhausted, on the floor. And then let the pain level me.

  Maddox is gone.

  I accept this fact. I let it roll over me, let it settle.

  I wash, using the water from my tiny sink, and then dry myself off with my towel before getting into my fresh prison uniform.

  “Inmate 9-70-981,” Happy says, “prepare for the daily address from the Region 86 Overseer, Galen Rye.”

  “Wonderful,” I mutter, sitting down on my bed and facing the screen.

  Across the city and in the villages on the outskirts, the Barker Projectors will cease spewing out their holographic advertisements; Lenses will halt all gameplay, augmented reality, and social functions; every TV, VR module, and screen will be forced to show Galen’s daily message.

  His face appears on my little prison screen. Friendly, warm, and confident.

  “Good morning, citizens,” Galen starts, that sly smile spreading across his lips. “I know you are all busy people, so I’ll keep it brief.”

  I have no interest in these daily political broadcasts, but broken eye contact makes the footage pause until the viewer is watching once again. Better just to get it over with.

  “My pledge to increase engineering roles is coming to fruition, and I’d like to personally guarantee that 50 percent of those non-robot jobs will be reserved for Regulars. We are not the divided nation that the media would have you believe we are. I won’t let that happen, not on my watch, not during my term as Overseer.”

  I roll my eyes, and for the second I’m not focused on the screen, Galen freezes in place, one finger raised in the air, until I’m watching once again and he continues, talking about his policies and how Region 86 is the most successful it’s been in fifty years, which is debatable at best.

  His address ends with his usual sign off—As One—and my next two hours are spent reading. I’m lucky; I made friends with the one human employee of the Loop—Wren Salter, the warden—about a year into my incarceration. She collects antique books—not the electronic kind, not the kind that can be displayed on a Lens, the original paper books. In the Loop, the rooms are scanned every three seconds to ensure that the inmate has not escaped and to check for contraband electronics, so old-fashioned paper books are the only versions that can be successfully smuggled inside. I have 189 books piled up at the foot of my bed, everything from damp-smelling Westerns from 300 years ago, the pages yellowed with time and the text fading in the corners, to the last of the mass-printed paper books from around the time I was born.

  I can read a book in a day if it’s really good. There are a few I keep going back to: stories so good, characters so well written that they don’t go away and I wonder if they were popular when they were printed. Kindred, Harry Potter, Life of Pi, and The Left Hand of Darkness, for example.

  Right now, I’m halfway through a book about a family trapped in a haunted hotel. It’s by an author I like—I’ve read at least five of his other books, and this one might be the best so far.

  What I like about books is the way I can disappear for a while into a place that someone else created; I don’t have to be who I am or where I am for as long as I’m in that other world, and I need that sometimes. In that way, I suppose, I’m not much different from the drug addicts who populate the tower blocks and slums on the edge of the city.

  At 11:30 the back wall to my room begins to slide slowly up. It moves silently, but I hear the birds and I can feel the wind and the warmth of the sun. I put the book down and stand at the wall as it rises.

  We get an hour of outdoor exercise every day. I spend forty-five minutes of it sprinting laps of my walled-up triangle of yard.

  It’s only when the door is open fully that you ever truly get a sense of the shape of the prison. Unsurprisingly, it’s one big loop, hence the name. The Loop is a half mile in circumference with 155 cells and a gap at the entrance that leads directly to the only way in or out—the Dark Train, which is connected to the Loop by a system of tunnels. Each inmate’s room is nine feet at its widest point and just over eight and a half at the wall that opens up to the yard. There is four feet of concrete on either side and three feet above; this makes the rooms soundproof, escape proof, and virtually bombproof. Each inmate gets a strip of yard, a continuation of the tapering shape of their room that stretches for almost two hundred feet to the enormous concrete pillar in the center, on top of which the drones reside.

  Exercise hour is the only time inmates are allowed to interact with one another. We can’t see one another due to the fifty-foot-high walls that separate us, but we can talk, and before the back wall is even halfway up, I can hear the shouts and screams of all the other inmates. I hear Pander Banks singing one of the seven songs that she remembers from the outside world. When she finishes all seven, she’ll start again at the first.

  I can hear the drones on the other side of the yard whirring to life and issuing threats to Malachai Bannister, who likes to climb the walls and wait until the robotic security guards reach one on their three-second countdown before he drops down and laughs. Four and five cells to my right, I hear Pod and Igby, two of the quieter inmates, who are continuing their strange adventure games played with five dice each that Wren snuck into their cells. They must be extremely honest or incredibly gullible, because neither can see over the wall to confirm what the other has rolled.

  On both sides I hear the planners; a group of four inmates—Adam Casswell, Fulton Conway, and Winchester Shore on my left, and Woods Rafka on my right—who discuss ways to escape, their ideas ranging from the absurd (using the flight technology of the drones to fly over the walls) to the ingenious (a coordinated attack, utilizing the Delays and hijacking the Dark Train). They know as well as anyone else that escaping the Loop is impossible, and they also know that everything we say is recorded, and—although it’s against the law—the government could access the pinhole cameras surgically implanted in the middle of our foreheads, yet it doesn’t stop them.

  But over all the disorder, I hear a gravelly voice screaming over and over again about how he wants to kill me. He chants my name constantly, from the minute the back wall opens to the minute it closes. Every. Single. Day.

  “Luka Kane,” he screeches, “Luka Kane, I’m going to kill you. Luka Kane, I’m going to kill you.”

  The screaming boy arrived in the Loop the day after me and has been making declarations of murder for 736 days. I admit that it scared me for the first few days; I didn’t eve
n leave my room for more than a second. I would step out into the yard and then reenter my cell. This action would tell Happy that I no longer wanted to be outside, and the back wall would close, leaving me in silence once again. I soon realized how foolish I was being, that there was no way he could get to me, no way that he could make it over the enormous walls that separated us—they were too high, and the drones would shoot him full of poison if he tried.

  The warden told me the screaming boy’s name is Tyco Roth. The worst part about him wanting to kill me is that I have no idea who he is and no idea why he wants me dead.

  Finally, the wall of my cell reaches the top of the ceiling, and I race out into the yard. I run as fast as I can, pushing myself to the limit. I watch the center pillar grow in my field of vision as I approach it, slowing myself enough to touch my palm against the cold concrete column before sprinting back to the entrance of my room. To the center and back takes less than twenty seconds, and I repeat the lap over and over and over until my breaths are coming in sharp painful gasps and my muscles are burning. I can feel the lactic acid in my legs building up, and I push harder, ignoring the pain. This is my act of rebellion; this is how I tell the government what I think of their torture chambers.

  I run back to the middle. The walls that separate me from the yards on either side are close enough to touch, and I think about the empty area to my right; that cell has been unfilled for two days now. It used to belong to Maddox Fairfax, my best friend, a Regular who was three months away from being transferred to the Block. Maddox had ridden his luck through eleven Delays until his final one, a surgery; they took his eyes and replaced them with prototype prosthetics, a mixture of technology and laboratory-grown tissues. For a while, the new eyes worked. He was in agony when he returned to the Loop, the stitching and swelling still fresh, but he could tell me the exact dimensions of the yard just by looking from one wall to the other, he could immediately tell how many liters of water filled the harvest tube, and if a plane flew overhead, he’d tell me how high up it was, the exact direction of travel, and how fast it was going.