Prism Read online

  We were trying to fall sleep again—there was nothing else to do—but my circuitry was still running at full speed. “Ozzy?”

  “Wha…”

  “We need to get out of here,” I said for the fiftieth time.

  “…kay.”

  At least one of us was resting. It was all right, though, sort of peaceful lying beside each other in a closet without light or ventilation or sheets and a pillow.

  Or a bathroom.

  My stomach lurched, churning as if to say, “Yup! No bathroom! That’s right, babe!” The snack may have been the last straw for my overworked, nervous stomach.

  “Oh, God,” I said quietly, clutching my belly.

  “Mm,” Ozzy hummed.

  My intestines were performing acrobatics. I jumped up, hitting my head on the ceiling. “Damn!” I pounded on the door. “I need a bathroom! I need a bathroom! I need a—”

  “One second!” a muffled voice called back.

  The door swung open and Maurice was there, this time dressed in bright orange scrubs.

  “I need a bathroom.”

  “No problem. Follow me.”

  I turned to Ozzy. “I’ll be back.”

  We began to walk, but almost immediately I tripped and fell facedown. There was too much light, and I was already cramped all over in pain.

  Maurice helped me up with his meaty palms. “Can you walk?”

  I had erupted into a cold sweat. “With help.”

  “Lean on me.”

  I did. He took me down a flight of stairs and into a hallway, passing a few doors before he opened one of them. Inside it was clean and white.

  “This is my bathroom, darling,” he said gently.

  “Thank you so much!” Despite my sore limbs, I nearly leaped out of his arms.

  The next twenty minutes weren’t fun.

  When I came out, Maurice was waiting for me.

  “Anything else you need?” he offered.

  I thought about it. What did we have to lose? I could say no and sit in a closet with Ozzy for the next thirty years or I could be honest. He seemed decent enough, although he could just be fattening me up for the slaughter. But even if he was, things couldn’t get much worse.

  “Yes, there is something.”

  Maurice raised his bushy gray eyebrows. Yes clearly wasn’t the predicted response.

  “Help me find my friends and help me get home.”

  There was a long, long pause. I felt I’d blown it.

  Finally he said, “Who are your friends?”

  My heart was beating so fast I could barely talk. “Joy Tallon and Zeke Anderson.”

  “How can I help you get home?” His eyes met mine. “I can’t even get myself home.”

  I tilted my head to one side. “Don’t you guys ever get a break?”

  He smiled sadly. “I need to get you back.”

  There was something about his face that captivated me: his droopy brown eyes, his sad, speckled nose, his glistening forehead marked by a scar.

  It was a captivating scar, and I couldn’t figure out why.

  Then it dawned on me.

  There had been stitches holding the seams together at one point.

  “No!” I gasped, nearly keeling over again. I could count them: six neat parallel hash marks over a crooked line. “You’re not from here, either!”

  Maurice’s eyes got wide. He let out a laugh, but it was tinged with anxiety. “I think the darkness got to your brain. Let’s get you back.”

  I pointed to my forehead. Then I pointed to his. “You have stitches,” I whispered.

  The hesitation was minuscule, and I caught it only because I was looking for it. “Stitches?” he said. “What are those?”

  “You know what I’m saying—”

  “No, I don’t. Look, little one, you’re a kid and I feel sorry for you, but—”

  “You come from where I come from,” I interrupted him. “Where there are doctors and nurses and hospitals and medicine and cures, and where spills aren’t illegal!”

  He grabbed my arm. “You have to whisper!”

  I nodded feverishly. I don’t know what came over me…to talk so freely. I guess it just came out in an uncontrollable rush.

  He loosened his grip. “I don’t…” He faltered. “It can’t be.”

  “I came through a cave,” I told him. “How did you get here?”

  He screwed up his face, like he was really thinking about it, but then his eyes got hard and his mouth set in a stony frown. “Back to your room!” He led me by the nape of my neck.

  “Ow!” I cried.

  “Enough out of you!” He led me back up to the closet and carelessly threw me on top of a dozing Ozzy.

  “Shit,” I swore as Maurice slammed the door.

  “Ye Gods,” Ozzy gasped while wrapping his arms around me. “Are you all right, Kaida?”

  “He comes from where I come from,” I answered breathily. I still felt his fingers digging into the nape of my neck. The pain had trickled down to my sore shoulders.

  “What?” Ozzy tried to sit up while still holding on to me. It took a few moments. “What are you talking about?”

  “Maurice. He’s from my world.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive. He’s scared to admit it. That’s why he was so nice to us. He knows about medicine, so he’s probably sympathetic to spill dealers.”

  Ozzy’s grip around me tightened reflexively. “Why would he be working here?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt defeated, as if my one chance had been blown sky high. My eyes watered. “Maurice is the only decent human being we’ve encountered in the last six hours, and now he’s lost to us because of my loose lips.”

  “Nah…” Ozzy brushed it off. “They’re all beasts. They’re all corrupt. I’m sure Maurice is just like the rest of them.”

  I was panting. “We need to find some way to get him to realize that we’re not the enemy. We’ve got to get him on our side!”

  “That, my dear, is impossible.”

  “He sympathizes with us, Ozzy. I know he does. It’s just that he can’t admit it.”

  “How do you know he’s from your world?”

  “He had markings on his forehead…stitches. Do you know what stitches are?”

  “No.”

  After I explained it to him, he didn’t answer.

  Then he said, “I’m nodding, Kaida, but I guess you can’t see.”

  “Look, he has to give us another meal, right?” I reasoned.

  “Yeah, someone has to. It might not be him.” The room turned deathly still. “If he’s scared of us finding out the truth, maybe he won’t be our guardian angel anymore.”

  I thought about it. It depended on whether or not the guy had any conscience. Tricky.

  I thought about calling him back, but I was afraid it was too soon.

  There was nothing we could do right now.

  The closet remained silent, both of us feeling too hopeless to talk.

  It must have been only a half hour later when the door opened and a beam of light shot into the cell. I held my hands over my eyes.

  “How did you get here?”

  The voice was almost inaudible.

  I thought: You should know how I got in this damn cell. You’re the police.

  But when I looked through my fingers, I saw Maurice.

  The meaning of the question shifted entirely.

  I went out alone with him, leaving Ozzy and a part of my heart behind. Maurice took me to a private room and closed the door. We sat with the lights out so as not to attract attention. It felt good to sit on a chair, albeit a steel one. At least it was a surface that wasn’t coated with muck. I told him my story. Then he asked me to repeat it. I gave him a summary this time: the trip, the accident, the storm, and finally the cave.

  “I fell in through a cave.”

  I could feel his breath on my face. It smelled like cigar smoke, not very pleasant but much better than the room I
had been in.

  “Actually, I got lost in a cave and fell into a pit. When I woke up, I was in my own room. Everything looked the same…but it wasn’t. The entire field of medicine had been wiped away from the face of the earth.”

  It took a long time for Maurice to speak. Then he said, “I’m going to tell you a story. It may be true, but it may not be true, get it?”

  “I understand.” I paused as my ears perked up. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “I heard something.” We stopped talking, but the sound had disappeared. Cease the paranoia, Kaida. “I’m nervous.”

  “You don’t trust me, kid?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Being suspicious is being smart. What was I saying?”

  “You were going to tell me a story.”

  “That’s right.” He cleared his throat. “One day a man was hiking. It began to rain and he also took shelter in a cave. The storm got very bad, so bad that he had to back into the cave a little farther to keep from getting wet. It was dark, it was muddy. He didn’t see too well. And then all of a sudden he fell into a puddle.” He paused. “Not in a puddle, into a puddle.”

  “A puddle that wasn’t a puddle.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Maurice finally said, “What about your boyfriend?”

  “He’s from here…from this world,” I answered. There was no reason to trust Maurice, but I figured I didn’t have too much too lose. “He’s a spill dealer with a very sick mother. He was getting some medic—some spills for my friend. That’s why we’re here.”

  “And your friends—what about them?”

  “Also from my world.” I waited a beat. “Our world.”

  “I want to help you, Kaida, but I don’t know what I can do.”

  You could do a lot…like getting me out of here. But it was important not to rush things. “I’m sorry if this is personal, but how did you end up working here?”

  Maurice’s voice was a hush. “I started as a dealer. When I got caught by the cops, I panicked and told them everything. About where I came from and how I didn’t belong.” He paused. “It was just the kind of information they wanted, those jerks. They kept me around to interrogate me. It started out as weeks, then it was months, then it lasted for more than a year. They asked me question after question until I dried up. When I ran out of information, they decided to use me as a jail guard…you know, to keep an eye on me. Better that they watch the enemy than have me running around loose.”

  “Why didn’t they just kill you?”

  “Good question.” Maurice paused. “There’s a woman who studies people like me. She’s a full professor with a lot of grants.”

  “Iona Boyd,” I said.

  “So you know.”

  “Ozzy does research for her.”

  “Tell him to watch his back. She’s not what she seems. She has a lot of clout because she’s married to someone who’s high up in the government in covert investigations.”

  “Like the CIA?”

  “Something like that. The point is Iona Boyd was one of the people who interrogated me. She learns things from people like us.”

  “I know about the testimonials,” I told him.

  “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.” He sighed. “And did you ever wonder what happened to those people?”

  “I hadn’t, but I was wondering now.”

  Maurice said, “I’m a prisoner here, one with a nice office, but I don’t have any freedom. I have no home, I live here. I stay here, day in and day out, doing dirty work.”

  I had to tell Ozzy about Iona Boyd. As I thought of him, my heart leaped in my chest. “Maurice, why are these people so opposed to the concept of health care?”

  “Because they’re cowards and hypocrites!” He snorted quietly. “They kept accusing me—accusing spill-dealers—of trying to change the natural order…that we’re tampering with the natural ebb and flow of the earth.”

  It sounded like a theory that could have come from my world.

  “But they don’t believe a word of that,” he growled. “The government agents take care of themselves. Iona Boyd makes sure of that.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “She uses the information that she’s learned from us for the select few, Kaida.” An angry grunt. “They all have secret spills and their own personal spill dealer. They have spills to help them get better, but just for themselves and for their families. They’re just too greedy to share them. It makes them powerful. It makes them strong and leaves the rest of us weaklings to die from neglect.”

  “There is some minimal form of health care,” I said. “People still shower and wash their face and brush their teeth and dry them with a tooth rag.”

  He let out a quiet but wry “Ha!” “They want their society not to stink. Odor offends all of us.”

  I tapped my fingers against my leg. “Maurice, do you want to get out of this world?”

  “Of course.” His voice was choked up. “Of course I do. But I don’t know how!”

  The next few pleas came out in a hot rush. This might have been my last chance to beg. “Then help us escape. My class is going on a trip to the same caves that we were visiting before we fell down the pit. Maybe if Joy, Zeke, and I go back on the trip, maybe, just maybe, everything will happen again. The crash, getting lost in the desert, the storm, escaping to the cave, falling down into the pit, running to the light and then falling…maybe we can go back to where we came from!”

  “And what if it doesn’t happen?” Maurice’s voice quavered. “What if you just crash and die?”

  “It couldn’t be much worse than this.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “The sooner you get us out, the closer we can come to finding a link, however faint, between these two places. And if we do discover that door, maybe we can bring you back.”

  “But how?”

  “I’m not sure. But isn’t it worth a try?”

  Maurice touched the scar on his forehead. “It’s more complicated than you think, Kaida. The government has people working everywhere. Anyone you know could be a member of the secret police. Hell, they might be watching us right now. You could have been sent here to frame me.”

  “Then we’ll have to be quick.”

  “I’m not sure there’s enough time to get you out without arousing suspicion,” Maurice said.

  “At least show me where Zeke and Joy are. Maybe they’ll have some ideas.”

  “Too risky.”

  I paused, trying to think up a plan to convince him that I was his only hope. I figured the only way to get him to stop worrying about himself was to make him worry about something else.

  I said, “Maurice, you have all the power. You don’t need to help us, I know. You’re safe even if we’re not. I could sit here forever in prison rotting. And no doubt I will rot, considering what this society believes about health. Maybe that was the idea of putting me in the closet in the first place. So guards could have fun watching us rot.”

  No one said anything for what appeared to be the longest time. Then he spoke. “What were the names of your friends again?”

  “Zeke Anderson and Joy Tallon,” I told him. “T-A-LL-O-N.”

  “Wait here.”

  “Okay.”

  As if I had any choice. He patted my head and left. As soon as I was alone, tears filled my eyes. I cried for what I had and lost. I cried for my parents and brother and friends. I cried for Ozzy and his sick mother. I cried and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. Maurice was my last chance, and if I lost him, I lost myself.

  When I finally had sniffed my last sniff, my eyes closed and I fell asleep on the chair until I woke up with a crick in my neck. Maurice still hadn’t returned, so I dropped to the floor, curled up in the fetal position, and closed my eyes. I slept the sleep of the dead.

  I was awakened by the sound of a door opening. Maurice had returned with another guard in tow.

  “Get up,” he said gruffly.
<
br />   I wiped the light from my aching eyes and recognized the second guard as Simon. I stood and said nothing.

  “We’re transporting you,” Maurice said officiously. “Making room for delinquents worse than you.”

  “Pretty hard to find,” Simon told us, “but we found ’em.”

  They took me down a long corridor with barred cells on either side. This area looked like the jails I’d seen on TV. The walls were the same ocher yellow and the floors were sticky plastic tiles. I couldn’t tell whether it was day or night because there were no windows anywhere and the lighting was artificial: casino time, my dad used to call it whenever he went to Las Vegas. Inside Sin City, there is no sense of the passage of time.

  Most of the inmates were sleeping on steel cots in spaces about as big as the closet we had been in. There was no privacy. Truly it was life in a fishbowl. I didn’t know what was worse—continuous light or nothing but darkness. Probably the latter. At least with light, you can close your eyes.

  A few minutes later, Maurice told Simon that he could handle me alone. To my eyes, it appeared that not exerting himself with work made Simon almost as happy as harassing me. After he left, Maurice started unlocking a cell door. Apparently Zeke and Joy hadn’t been thrown in a black hole, because they hadn’t punched the cops or tried to escape. Still, their accommodations were far from deluxe. The cell was bigger—room enough for four with four steel cots plus one sink and one toilet.

  Going to the bathroom in front of one another. Disgusting!

  “Kaida?” Joy choked when she saw me. She was curled next to Zeke. No blankets, but they did have a couple of burlap potato sacks for pillows. “Is this a dream?”

  I put my finger to my lips to shush her. They had formed a smile. I couldn’t help it. When this whole thing had started, I didn’t really care about Joy. Now I regarded her as a blood sister.

  Although to me it seemed like only a night had passed, Joy looked like she had been starved and beaten for weeks. Her eyes were sunken with bluish circles smudged under them. “Were you sleeping?” I whispered.

  She shook her head. “I haven’t slept at all. Her dark eyes smoldered, saying: How could I sleep?