Extraction

by Stephanie Diaz

  I grit my teeth—gasping—

  The woman falls to her knees, choking for breath and clutching her throat. Go on, squeeze, I urge her. Finish what I started.

  The guard binds my wrists with rope.

  Yellow Eyes collects herself and stares me down, her teeth clenched. “I didn’t think she’d cooperate. Throw her in with the others.” She grabs a ladder rung and heaves herself back up with trembling hands. The guard shoves me after her.

  I scare her, I really do. I scare all of them, and that’s why they seek to control me. I’m not weak.

  I am powerful.

  31

  They haul me through tunnels of cement and stone. My heart beats too fast in my chest, threatening to shatter if my body doesn’t stop aching. If the Karum guard doesn’t stop digging his hands, fingers, and nails into my body.

  Here and there, I glimpse a high window where a speck of red sunlight blooms. It must be daytime in the world outside. It feels like I’ve been trapped in night.

  We come to a round metal door. The woman taps a code into a lock-pad—only three digits long, I notice. With six numbers on the lock-pad, that’s two hundred and sixteen possible combinations to get it open.

  The hinges swing to let us in. Beyond the doorway, the walls are jagged rock. Icy air drifts through the cave, and muffled, hollow sounds like voices emerge from the three tunnels that branch off. Whispers.

  The woman and the guard take me down the left-hand tunnel. The ground slopes, and we turn a corner. The end lies ahead. Relief floods me. My arms hurt from the guard wrenching them. My legs hurt from dragging on the floor. I grit my teeth to keep from crying.

  We come to a wide circular space. Doors formed by iron bars lead to six separate cell compartments. I can’t tell which ones are already filled. The dim bulb hanging from the ceiling in the circular space doesn’t cast much light.

  The guard takes me to the middle cell. Keys jangle in his pocket, and there’s a click as the key goes into the lock. The barred door opens. He throws me inside. My knees scrape on rough floor. A damp, rotten smell bleeds into my nostrils.

  “Welcome to your new home, Clementine,” the woman says. The bulb light glints on the pale pink shade of her cheeks. “Try not to rot too quickly.”

  The lock clicks, and she is gone.

  I swallow, shivering in my thin rags. My eyes flit to the other cell doors. I can only see two from here—the two on the edges of the circle. The others sit too close to mine. But I can tell some of the cells are occupied. I can hear people breathing.

  Dangerous. That’s what the instructors always called Unstables. Adults said they’re dangerous, brutal people consumed by insanity. That they would kill everyone if they were allowed to escape.

  But Charlie said that too. I don’t believe anything he says anymore.

  Still, it takes me at least a minute to work up the courage to speak. “Hello?”

  There’s nothing at first. Just that soft, slow breathing.

  Then a bony hand wraps around a bar of the farthest cell to my right. A face comes into view. A woman covered in blotches of bruises. Gray hair grows in uneven patches on her otherwise bald head. Her eyes are dead, dark as my old cell. She’s an old one—a strong one, to have survived in Karum for so long.

  She smiles at me. The wrinkles deepen around her mouth and her eyes. “What’s your name?” she asks.

  I try to speak, but it’s hard when my lips are numb. The air is a block of snow. “C-Clementine,” I manage.

  “What did they get you for?” another, hollower voice says. A second Unstable wraps his hands around the bars of the farthest cell to my left. An old man with dark skin and a scar on his forehead so jagged it must’ve been done on purpose.

  “Their injection,” I say. “The one that makes everyone submissive. It didn’t work on me.”

  The old woman smiles. “That’s a good one. Easy to prove.”

  I nod and pull my legs against my chest, thinking of warm things. Of sunlight and blankets and fire. Hollowness fills my stomach, and I latch on to it. Anything but the cold.

  “Do they ever give us food?” I ask.

  “In the morning,” the old woman says. “Barley bread, cheese, and a water skin.”

  My hands tremble from hunger. I’m not sure I can last until morning. But I’ll have to.

  “H-how long have you been here?” I ask.

  The old woman laughs, soft and light. “Who knows? A long time for some, even longer for others. I was young when they brought me.”

  “My age?”

  “A bit older.”

  “How…” I bite back what I was about to say: How are you still alive? “What do they do with us? They could just kill us.”

  “They call us Unstable, as I’m sure you know,” she says, smiling. “It means ‘prone to psychiatric problems.’ Got any ideas what we really are?”

  My teeth catch on my bottom lip. Well, if they’re both like me …

  “They can’t subdue us,” the dark-skinned man says. The light glints on his scarred forehead, and his dead eyes stare at me. “Sometimes we know too much, or we ask too many questions. They try to make us conform, but we fight them and don’t give in.”

  “Are you allergic to their injections too?”

  “Is that what you are?” He frowns. “Don’t let them hear it.”

  “S-sorry,” I say. My stomach feels sick. I wrap an arm around it, bending my head and breathing slow. “You still didn’t say why they keep us alive.”

  “We have the strongest minds out of all the citizens,” the dark-skinned man says, moving away from his cell door so I can’t see him anymore. “They observe us and do experiments. They keep us alive as long as they think we’re useful.”

  “They don’t like us very much, though.” The old woman’s lips stretch apart, showing me teeth that appear black from a distance. “We can see straight through their lies.”

  “I thought they were scared of me,” I say.

  “Of course they are.”

  I can’t help smiling a little. How silly I was to think these people were dangerous.

  They are dangerous, but for Charlie. Not for me.

  A thought stirs inside me. A hope. If some of them were locked in here for knowing too much … maybe they know things about Charlie.

  Maybe they know something about his war.

  Whistling reaches my ears from somewhere past the cells, in the tunnel. I stiffen, bottling my breaths. Two guards strut into view.

  “Ella, time to go,” one says, walking to the old woman’s cell. He sticks his key into the lock.

  She sighs. “See you soon,” she says to me and my cell mates. “Hopefully.”

  Her laughter echoes through the cave. The guards drag her away, while my eyes widen and my hands tremble.

  32

  The narrow table is cold and hard against my back.

  I lie inside a machine in the wall that feels like a tight box. My hands are clenched at my sides, trembling though Dr. Tennant said I need to be still. I can’t be still. There’s a whir in my ears and too-bright blue lights on the ceiling two inches from my face.

  “Don’t worry,” Ella said. “What they do here isn’t as bad as you think it will be.”

  Yesterday, she came back with a thin, metallic tube attached to her belly. An experiment. Inside the tube, a tiny animal like a miniature muckrat scuffled around, trying to escape. When it couldn’t break through the metal, it tried to break through her skin, instead. Sobs came from her cell all night. It’s hard to believe someone who cries.

  I can’t breathe inside this box.

  Fred, the dark-skinned man, didn’t lie to me. He didn’t speak when the guards came for me, but his eyes told me I’m right to be afraid. I’m right because fear is what they do here; fear is the weapon they use to make us weak.

  Let me out, let me out, I want to scream.

  The whir stops. The table I’m lying on slides out of the hole in the wall, out of the box, and
I suck air into my body. It tastes stale, but good to my lungs.

  Dr. Tennant snaps on white gloves. “It looks like you’re allergic to bavix, a protein in the aster pollen inside those injections we’ve been giving you. Thank goodness we caught it. We’ll have to try something different.” He smiles, showing me his polished rows of teeth.

  A boulder the size of a planet wedges inside my throat. I swallow, but it won’t budge.

  *

  Again I awaken atop a metal table with a tube in my arm. The drip bag is full of viscous purple liquid. This time I know where I am and what happened. I don’t know what the purple is.

  Back in my cell, sometime during the night, I wake and vomit the bread and cheese a guard brought me earlier. My stomach heaves again and again, even when it’s empty. Sweat trickles down my back. I’m a drenched rag, a body dragged out of an ocean.

  I hold my head with shaking fingers.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Ella says from her cell. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”

  Today, she told us, there’s a burn mark on her belly. The doctors removed the tube earlier to assess how much damage the muckrat had done. They seared the wound without giving her anything for the pain.

  “Be strong, Clementine,” she whispers.

  “T-tell me something,” I say. “Please distract me.”

  At first she doesn’t respond. When she does, her voice is so soft I can barely hear it from my cell. “There isn’t much left. My memories … they’re more like dreams.”

  “Please.”

  Another pause. “I remember warmth from sunlight. Wind in my hair. Leaves dipping in color from green to gold. A boy whose smile made the summer rain stop falling. A handsome boy.”

  Convulsions rack me again, and I dry heave, spitting mucus onto the floor. I press a palm to my stomach. “What happened to him?”

  “A handsome boy,” she whispers.

  She doesn’t say anything else.

  *

  I count the number of times guards bring us food between my new injections. Three times. Three days.

  The pain doesn’t go away. The little sleep I get at night is marred by periods of waking when I can’t stop coughing and crying. My stomach is a never-ending flood of acid.

  “What are you giving me?” I ask the nurses.

  They smile sweetly. “Something that will help you.”

  They’re liars.

  The doctors keep Ella longer than usual, into the night. I’m trembling alone in the back of my cell, my bony arms clutching my knees to my chest, when I hear Fred’s hollow voice in the darkness: “You awake, girl?”

  I’ve never heard him call anyone else that, so he must be talking to me. “Yeah,” I say.

  “Glad to hear it,” he says.

  Today, doctors injected him with a high dosage of their aster serum and with some of my blood. They’re curious to see if my allergy will spread to him and cripple him, the way some food allergies spread through blood transfusion. We both have type O blood, that’s why the doctors picked him as the test subject.

  He’s been feverish and aching all day, not seeing things clearly. Earlier he kept saying he was going to die. I can’t stand knowing my blood did this to him.

  “You’re doing well, you know,” Fred says. “Better than I did when I first came here.”

  I almost laugh, but it hurts my stomach. “Doubt that.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  I bet he’s lying to make me feel better. “How”—I have to pause to gasp for breath—“how old were you when you got here?”

  “No idea,” he says. “Age doesn’t matter in here. After a while, time is all one big blur.”

  “Then why stay alive? Couldn’t we just starve ourselves?” I ask before a coughing fit overtakes me.

  He waits for me to stop before he answers. “You have to stay alive because you’re better than them. Don’t you forget that. Don’t you let them make you believe you aren’t gonna get outta here and feel the sun on your face again.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “Sure as the stars, you are.”

  I shake my head even though he can’t see it. I don’t have the strength to run, or any way out. And where would I run, if I could? Once KIMO goes off, all of this will be gone. There won’t be a Surface for a person to stand on to feel the sun.

  “You got someone out there?” he says. “You got someone you miss?”

  Logan’s face comes to mind, and my chest tightens like someone shot a bullet through my ribs. “Of course.”

  “They got a name?” Fred asks.

  I don’t know if I want to say it. Saying his name makes me feel like I’m losing him again. But I take a deep breath and manage to say it: “Logan.”

  “Good, fine name,” Fred says. “You stay strong. You get outta here for him.”

  I lie down on the cold ground and curl up on my side. I want to be strong for Logan. Of course I do.

  But what Fred said isn’t possible, and he doesn’t get it because he doesn’t know what’s happening outside this prison. He doesn’t know the bomb is going to kill Logan before I can get to him, even if I do get out. I have no way to stop it.

  I’m alone. There’s no one on my side.

  *

  By the fifth day of the injections, I can’t handle it anymore.

  When the nurse tries to administer my shot, I struggle against her. I beg. I plead. “Stop, please. You’re gonna kill me. What do you want from me? What do you want me to do?”

  “Commander Charlie wants your loyalty, Clementine,” she says, touching my hand as if she’s trying to be gentle. A guard is holding me down. “If you give in to the injections, if you pledge to be obedient to him, this will all be over.”

  “No, I won’t. I won’t. Not unless he stops the bomb.”

  The nurse laughs. “Well, he won’t do that. You’re not that important.”

  She reaches for the syringe and jams the needle into my arm. I clench my teeth to keep from crying out.

  *

  On the seventh day, I lie on a metal table, staring at the purple liquid dripping into the tube attached to my wrist. The doctor walks in, and I lose it. Crying, choking on air. I open my mouth to say I’m sorry, that I’ll do anything Charlie wants if he lets me out of here.

  He smiles, showing me teeth that are too white. “Is there something you wanted to say, Clementine?”

  I want so badly to give in, to be done with this.

  But I can’t do it. These doctors and nurses think they’re so much better than all the kids in the camps, so much better than everyone, and I can’t give in to them. How could I even consider it? I can’t keep being weak like this.

  I don’t throw up that night. My stomach flip-flops and tumbles, but I hold back the bile. It’s a small feat, but it’s something.

  On the ninth day, I stop crying.

  The doctors increase how much they plunge into my veins at every meeting. They take brain scans to figure out what I’m doing to combat the medicine, but they don’t understand. And I don’t help them, even when they reason with me.

  I don’t care what they do or what they give me. I will not be subdued.

  So on the tenth night, when they give me something that makes the world fog and darken—

  darken—

  darken.

  I am ready.

  33

  “Three days,” someone whispers. “Four, maybe?”

  “Two, I hope.”

  The world is a blur of blues and whites. My lashes feel like they’re crusted with goo. It’s hard to open them.

  “It’s taking too long. Don’t they know the moon might—”

  I cough.

  “Quiet,” the nurse snaps. “She’s waking.”

  There are pins in my body. There are needles stuck into a thousand points on my skin, and I need air and water and something to stop the fire, but what were they saying? They were talking about the moon—

  The nurse leans over me, pursing
her lips and touching a gloved palm to my forehead.

  “Please.” I try to speak. “Please tell me—”

  “I won’t give you anything for the pain,” she says. “You agreed to this the moment you stopped cooperating.”

  “Please—”

  Her fingers spread my lips apart and jam a tube down my throat.

  I gag and retch and flail, but the pain is so bad I have to stop. I have to stop, and I feel cold trickling down my throat. Something like water, but not water.

  The tube comes out with phlegm and mucus, and I want to clutch my throat, but my wrists are tied down.

  “You won’t be able to eat anything tonight,” the nurse says. “So don’t even try.”

  “What did you do?” I gasp.

  “Dr. Tennant harvested some of your eggs and brain cells.” The nurse smiles. “No one can deny that you’re intelligent, Clementine. There’s hope that your offspring may prove more obedient and helpful in future generations, once the Core is far away. Don’t worry, dear. We’re almost done with you.”

  Her heels tap on the linoleum as she walks away.

  I can’t breathe. They stole what is mine; they stole my children. I thought they’d already stolen everything, but I was wrong.

  And Charlie is going to set off the bomb—that must be what she was talking about before she saw I was awake. Four days, three days, two days.

  She said they’re almost done with me.

  *

  Back in the cell, the guards leave me in a huddle on the floor, a tangle of clammy hands and trembling legs.

  Ella stares at me, wide-eyed, both of her hands on the bars of her cell door. A clang echoes in the hallway past our cells. The guards are gone.

  “What did they do?” Ella asks.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I say, wrapping my arms around my body. I can feel crusted blood on my rags when I move. The nurses didn’t give me fresh clothes.

  “Clementine, sweetie … it matters a lot,” Ella says.

  She’s right, but other things matter more. When Charlie sets off the bomb—and it’ll be soon, I’m sure—she and Fred and every other Unstable in here will die. We’ll all die, and they don’t even know yet.

  I’m afraid to tell them. But I think I have to.

  My eyes flit left and right while I try to figure out where to begin. I flatten my sweaty curls with my fingers. I take four deep breaths.