by Spencer Baum
Jenna pulled the panel all the way open. There was a lever inside the box, a U-shaped handle that was sitting in the up position.
Another message for Jenna was written on the inside face of the panel. It said, “Pull the lever down then step through to the other side.”
Jenna pulled the lever.
Nathan Cavanaugh continued his soliloquy on live television. He was now speaking about “the shared guilt of everyone who refuses to stand up against injustice.”
On the arena floor, Malcolm Campbell and Solomon Moss were out of the forest and onto the next obstacle, a small lake of murky water. They had no idea that the world was no longer watching them. To them, this was still a death race from which only one could survive.
To cross the lake, Malcolm and Solomon had to traverse a series of pedestals that arose from the water. The pedestals, each one topped with a circular platform, slowly moved up and down on hydraulics, requiring them to time their jumps, and giving that part of the course the air of a platform-style video game come to life.
The ventilation fan slowed and then stopped. Jenna ducked through the space between fanblades. On the other side she found a dungeon-like space with a perforated steel grate for a ceiling.
Through the grate above she had a clear view of a television on the wall of the Underdeck. A man was talking.
Was that man on the TV…?
No, it couldn’t be…
But it was.
It was Nathan Cavanaugh.
He was giving a speech.
…and so it went that America abandoned its principles with the passage of the Redemption Act…
Nathan wasn’t running, just standing in place—it was like the camera was pointed right at him, like they had turned over the whole broadcast to Nathan to give an anti-Redemption Act pep talk.
What the hell was going on out there?
…becoming a society so bound by its laws as to be lawless…
It was Sunny. Maybe she’d hacked the signal. Maybe this was a pre-recorded message.
It had to be a pre-recorded message, didn’t it? After all, Nathan was in the middle of…
…a race…
… that Jenna had just escaped…
…with Sunny’s help…
… Nathan could have escaped with her help as well…
And now Jenna realized that the sound of Nathan’s voice was bigger than the buzzing of a few television speakers. Standing in place, she opened her ears, and heard a sound that was deep and resonant, a sound that echoed through the concrete walls of the building.
Yes, the sound—Nathan’s voice—it was bigger than a few televisions in the Underdeck. It came from all around. A bellowing, vibrating sound that made the concrete floor buzz with every word.
As if it were being played live on the sound system in the arena.
Panic was bubbling in her gut. What was she supposed to do? Something terrible was going to happen here, with each passing minute she was more sure of it. But she’d tried to tell them and they didn’t listen. Could she try again? Could she find her way to the Underdeck and tell someone there’s a bomb? Tell someone they need to evacuate the arena?
Was it already too late for that?
The time for peaceful dialogue has passed, Nathan continued. The time for resolution through the political process has passed. With the passage of The Redemption Act, the prison-industrial complex declared war on the people of the United States…
Jenna allowed her gaze to drift downward, to the wall in front of her, where Sunny had painted another four-petaled flower.
A trash bag was on the floor. Jenna picked up the bag and dumped its contents. She found a pair of glasses, a black leather jacket, a hat, a Devlin employee badge, a paper folded into Sunny’s distinctive origami rectangle, and a shiny silver key with a square head.
She grabbed the key. She slid it into the keyhole on her cuff. She relished the sound as the infernal device popped open and fell off her wrist. As the open cuff hit the floor, and bounced, something lit up on the other side of the fence.
Her eyes were drawn to the light.
The light was one of several on a black panel that was marked “TAC Status Grid.” There were three rows of numbered LED bulbs on the panel. Six of the bulbs were red. Five were green. One of them, number eleven, was yellow.
Jenna looked down at the number pinned to her shirt.
Number 11.
“Shit,” she whispered.
Now that the cuff was off, somebody somewhere was getting a signal that her vital signs weren’t registering. Maybe it was a mistake to take the cuff off first. Maybe she should have read the letter for instructions.
Maybe it didn’t matter one way or the other.
She couldn’t help but stare at the yellow light corresponding to her number on the grid. They had a similar grid at the guard station in the cellblocks. Green light means all is well. Red light means no vital signs, prisoner is dead.
What did yellow light mean?
There’s no time for this Jenna. Read the letter and find out what to do next.
She snatched the letter off the floor, unfolded it, and began to read.
Hi Honey,
In the interest of saving you time, rather than put you in a whole new uniform, I’ve just left you a jacket, hat, and glasses, which should be plenty to get you out. You’d think people would be on the lookout for you running loose, but you’d be wrong. Believe me, right now you are the last thing on their minds.
The van in Space 43 is still waiting for you. Nobody’s touched it since the last time we tried to get you out. Nobody knows that everything you need…
Jenna wanted to keep reading but she couldn’t. Too many distractions. The yellow light on the grid, the thought of what might be happening in the arena, the certainty in her heart that Sunny intended to kill everyone in the Tetradome.
And the sound of Nathan’s voice, still echoing from the televisions on the deck above. His speech had segued into familiar territory.
…I am a man who has heard the voice of God…
He was reciting the soliloquy from the end of Spartacus Jones and The Serpent’s Mouth.
…when God spoke to me, she spoke in the silence of the morning...
Jenna knew she needed to read Sunny’s letter. She needed to get on with getting out. But Nathan’s words brought such intense feelings for her she could pay attention to nothing else.
…God spoke in the gentle kiss of the ocean breeze. She whispered in my ear that it was time for me to open my eyes…
The words took her back to Blue Brigade meetings, where you never knew when Spartacus’s end-of-the-book speech might break out like a prayer.
They took her back to a morning in the spring of her first year of college, when five friends rehearsed a stupid dramatization of a stupid book in Sunny’s car.
…Sisters and brothers, we are created in God’s image. Each of us. All of us…
The words took her back to a long and frightening morning on Albuquerque’s west mesa, when Seth recited an abridged version of the same speech. When Rudy and Sunny got into a fight. When Sunny, in a fit of rage, lit a fireball all around them.
…And as we treat the lowest among us, so do we treat our God...
Another flash of light from inside the cage. Jenna’s yellow LED had turned red. No more signal from her cuff at all. As far as the status grid was concerned, Jenna was dead.
“Come on now,” she whispered to herself. “Gotta get out of here.”
She wanted to read Sunny’s letter but her body was in the midst of a full-on panic and had its own ideas of where she should be looking. Up to the ceiling her gaze rose, up to the television where Nathan spoke.
…I cannot stand silent when I witness the injustice of those who would seek dominion over a free people…
There was a snarl of cables on the wall next the television, and in that snarl, Jenna saw a four-petaled flower.
…I cannot stand still when I see
their acts of cruelty…
She was seeing that damned flower everywhere—in the wires, in the flowerpots, painted on the wall. It made her think of the night she tried to escape and visions of a four-petaled flower danced in the shadows as she ran through the Underdeck.
…We are all born equal in the eyes of God, but we do not stay that way...
She had dismissed those visions as tricks of a panicked mind. But what if they weren’t? What if the four-petaled shape she thought she was seeing everywhere, really was everywhere?
…When we exploit the lives of others, we violate God’s plan for us…
There were so many wires cluttering the walls that you wouldn’t see it, couldn’t see it unless you knew what you were looking for. But it was there. So clear to Jenna—undeniably so. Sunny Paderewski had rewired this place. She had covered the walls with the circuit pattern that was her trademark.
…When we violate God’s plan, we make ourselves unequal in the eyes of the Lord…
Jenna’s gaze was running the visible length of the wall above. The wall of the Underdeck, a wall covered in wires, TV monitors, and flowerpots. Sunny’s distinctive circuits were peppered atop the tangle of wires at regular intervals. They reached into the backs of each flowerpot.
“The flowerpots,” Jenna whispered.
…God has taught me to see the difference between good and evil in this world…
She followed the full path of the circuits with her eyes. Into the back of each flowerpot, then back to the wall, then back to the main line, which led…
…here.
The wires led back down to this basement. They led to the electrical equipment inside the cage.
The generators down here, in the cage, were the power source. It was classic Sunny. The setup was no different than the one she built that morning on the mesa, only instead of a big battery pack, the whole thing was powered by a generator inside the Tetradome.
…God has taught me what to do when evil is present…
Ignition, detonator, and switch. Every setup Sunny had ever built was constructed this way.
Where was the switch?
…God has taught me that I must fight for good, that I must die for good if I have to…
Sunny liked to put the switch between the ignition and the detonator. She liked to loop the lines of her circuit into a flower shape with the switch in the center.
…and so it is that I stand here before you today…
The status grid.
…to declare that there is evil in this world…
The TAC status grid was a switch that was wired between the generator and the flowerpots.
…evil that cannot be reasoned with or appeased…
A single cable ran from the generator to the status grid, which now had five of its LED’s glowing green and seven glowing red. Jenna couldn’t see the wiring in the back of the grid, but she could imagine how the circuit looked.
…evil that reduces equality and justice to the law of the jungle…
Why would Sunny wire her circuit through a panel of LED lights in a subbasement of the Tetradome?
…evil that knows only how to rule or be ruled…
Jenna ran to the chainlink fence of the cage, put her hands on it, shook it. “How do I get in there?” she yelled.
…how to be master or how to be slave…
If she could get inside the cage, she could yank out the circuit, disabling the switch. But there was no way in. Not from here.
…how to kill or be killed…
Her heart racing, she realized Nathan’s speech was nearing its grand finale. And she knew. Even though she hadn’t been actively listening, even though her mind had been occupied with the mechanics of Sunny’s device, the words had filtered down to her ears and she knew.
In the book, Spartacus threw down his torch after the final line, incinerating the boat. And the final line of the speech…
I give my life to the battle for justice!
And there it was. Jenna stepped back, looked up, found the television above her. Nathan had his arms raised. He was stepping forward. The camera that had been filming him pulled back, and Jenna saw for the first time that Nathan had been standing on top of the giant television screen that hung from the ceiling of the Tetradome.
He wasn’t standing anymore. Now he was walking forward. Walking to the edge.
Jenna could hear the crowd’s collective gasp for breath as Nathan leaned over the edge and let his body plummet, a beautiful swan dive through the open air, a shadow passing in front of a brightly lit screen.
The crowd screamed.
Jenna understood.
The status grid was the switch, and Nathan’s cuff was the toggle. He was contestant number one. His was light number one on the grid, presently illuminated bright green.
After he died, it would turn yellow.
Then red.
The camera watched Nathan fall. Whoever was controlling this broadcast—was it Sunny? It had to be Sunny. Whoever it was, they were intent on showing Nathan’s descent all the way to the arena floor.
He landed in the forest, a few feet away from a bright yellow orchid.
What Jenna did next she did without thinking. What was there to think about? When Nathan’s light turned red, Sunny’s bomb would ignite, and half a million people would die.
The key Sunny had left for her still in her hand, the cuff from her TAC system open on the floor, Jenna ran back the way she came.
Back through the ventilation fan. Back through the concrete tunnels. Back into the manhole. Up the ladder, and back into the Tetradome.
CHAPTER 71
In the Control Room, Jodi saw nothing. Her entire monitor bank had gone black.
All the TV’s at Polaris went black as well.
On a private highway running through the Southwest Nevada desert, Gordon Bogel drove alone in a Devlin Enterprises van he stole. He had the radio on. The live broadcast of The Tetradome Run that he had been listening to went dead. Nothing but static.
In a subbasement of the Tetradome, a green bulb on the TAC status grid turned off. The corresponding yellow bulb, Nathan’s yellow bulb, turned on.
And a sixty-second countdown was initiated in the grid’s internal computer.
Sixty seconds to red.
Sixty seconds to detonation.
On the arena floor, hidden beneath the canopy of a burning forest, Jenna Duvall emerged from a hole in the ground. She ran up the same service road that took her off the course. As she neared the main path, she heard two harpies rustling in the underbrush. She followed their sound. She found Nathan’s body.
The harpies were eating his face.
“Shoo!” she yelled at them.
One of them cawed in response, making to attack. Jenna kicked it like a football. It crashed into the foliage in a burst of feathers.
The other harpie, visibly upset at this affront, shrieked at Jenna even as it backed away.
“Shoo! Shoo!” she yelled, raising her arms high, in the way a Girl Scout leader once taught her to act if she ever encountered a mountain lion.
The harpie jumped back, flapping its pathetic little wings as it fell somewhere in the greenery. Jenna crouched in front of Nathan’s body. She found the cuff on his wrist. She twisted it around to expose the keyhole.
Before she could insert the key, the harpie came roaring back, leaping out at her with talons out. She had to drop Nathan’s wrist to fight the damned thing off.
The internal clock on the status grid was at 30 seconds.
In his van, Gordon waited for the sound. He suspected he would hear the blast well before the news reported it. Even out here, some twenty miles away, he expected it to be huge.
Jenna got her hands around the harpie’s body and pinned it to the ground, but not before the bird put a gash in her temple. With blood covering her face and stinging her eyes, she pressed the harpie’s body into the ground with her left hand, squeezing its neck with her right. She bent and twisted
at the creature, as if it were a thick bundle of sticks she was trying to break.
The clock on the status grid was at 10 seconds.
She heard a snap and the creature went limp. She let out a sharp exhale. She wiped at her eyes, covering the back of her hand in blood. She stumbled back to Nathan’s body. She found the key next to his hand. She inserted the key into his cuff and it popped open.
“Do we ever get control of our show back?” said Jodi.
“We’re working on it!” said Parna.
“Work faster! We’re totally blind in here! I want to know what’s happening!”
The crowd in the Tetradome was restless and confused.
Jenna snapped Nathan’s cuff onto her own wrist. Her rapidly beating heart gave a strong pulse signal.
On the grid, with three seconds left, Nathan’s LED went from yellow to green.
Jenna stood up. She made to get back on the service road. She intended to finish this escape with Nathan’s cuff on her wrist. If anyone saw her, if anyone tried to stop her, she’d tell them everything she knew and pray that they’d listen.
She didn’t get far. Two steps onto the path and a flock of harpies, fifty or more, emerged from the forest to cut her off. They charged, a blur of wings and beaks and teeth. Jenna had no choice but to run away.
With a murder of angry birds on her tail, Jenna ran back up the service road, back onto the path, and back into the race.
CHAPTER 72
“I just got a text from Phil in systems,” said Parna. “He thinks they’ve found the source of the hack.”
“What does that mean?” said Jodi. “Does that mean we’ll have our show-”
The lights came on before she finished her sentence. An array of television monitors went from black to brightly lit all at once. It was the most beautiful thing Jodi had ever seen.
“Is it ours? Are we back?”
“It appears we’re back,” said Parna, who quickly switched the live feed to a view of the lake, where Jurrigan Tulpatec was leaping from one pedestal to another.
A nervous Chad Holiday. Welcome back everyone from…well…
