In The Afterlight

What if they’re not coming at all?

I shoved the thought away before it could plant itself too deeply in my heart.

At six o’clock that evening, I lay in my bunk, hands folded on my stomach. Sam’s mattress shifted as she rolled onto her side, distorting the shapes I had made in the plastic. I reached up, taking a small piece of the curling plastic cover between my broken fingernails. Tugging gently, I pulled the strip off, carefully working it around, around, until it formed an even circle.

“—so the girl, after the robbers decided to take her away, she managed to steal one of their daggers and cut the rope off her hands...” Rachel was leading the story today, filling in the hour before we were called to dinner. Tonight, she wove the tale of yet another nameless girl, in yet another perilous situation. I closed my eyes, a faint smile on my lips. The stories hadn’t gotten any better or any more original—they all followed the same plot: girl is wronged, girl struggles, girl escapes. The ultimate fantasy at Thurmond.

Physical exhaustion kept me still. As much as I had trained at the Ranch, these hours of endless work with no break, on limited food and water, were designed to drain us of the energy we’d need to muster to escape or push back. My body was a mess of quivering muscles, but I felt oddly calm, even though I knew what would happen if I made one misstep, or they figured out what I was before I could complete what I’d come here to do.

I have to walk out of here.

“Ruby?” Ellie called from her bunk at the center of the room. “It’s your turn.”

I shifted onto my elbows, scooting back to swing my legs off the cramped bunk. I worked out the kinks in my lower back as I thought about how I was going to finish this story. “The girl...” When I was younger, I would have passed it on to Sam after adding only a few words, but I could use this. I wasn’t sure they would understand, but I hoped some part of them would recognize the warning when the time came.

“The girl cut herself loose from the rope and knocked the bandit off the horse in front of her. She took the reins and turned the horse around the road, heading back in the direction they had come from—back toward the castle.”

There was a murmur at that. Vanessa had spent the better part of fifteen minutes describing the battle raging outside of its walls. It had provided the distraction the bandits needed to take the girl in the first place.

“She used the darkness,” I explained. “She left her horse in the nearby forest and crept toward a passage she knew was hidden in the far stone wall. The fighting had stopped once the knights in black had taken the castle. They locked the white knights out, and they were unable to help the families trapped inside. But no one noticed a small, plain girl coming through the back door. She looked like a helpless servant girl, bringing a basket of food into the kitchen. For days, she stayed in the castle, watching. Waiting for the right moment. And then it came. She slipped back outside and made her way through the shadows of night, unlocking the gate for the white knights to come pouring back in.”

“Why would she come back? Why didn’t she just escape—hide?” Sam asked, her voice small. I blew out a soft breath, glad that, if nothing else, she understood.

“Because,” I said finally, “in the end, she couldn’t leave her family behind.”

The girls shifted silently in their bunks, looking at each other as if wondering the same thing. No one asked the question—I don’t know how many of them actually dared to hope. But three short minutes later, the electronic lock on the cabin’s door popped open. The door swung in and a PSF stepped inside.

“Line up,” she barked.

We hastily assembled in alphabetical order, staring straight ahead as she counted us off. She motioned for the girls at the front of the line to start moving.

I couldn’t help myself. A step before we reached the door, I glanced back behind me. No matter what happened, it would be the last time I ever saw Cabin 27.

But when we walked through the door of the Mess Hall that evening, I already had to revisit a key component of my plan. Because, set up against the wall opposite of us, to the left of the window where we lined up to receive our food, was a large white screen. O’Ryan stood in front of it, his arms crossed over his chest, the blue light from a digital projector washing over him. Sam threw a nervous look my way as our PSF escort pushed her toward our table.

The last time we’d seen them use this screen had been our first week here. The camp controllers had set up the projector to scroll through the list of camp rules. No talking during work duties. No talking after lights out. Do not speak to a Psi Special Forces officer unless spoken to first. On and on and on.

Rather than have us line up to get food, the PSFs signaled for us to sit down and remain seated. The energy in the room was unsettling; I couldn’t get a read on any of the camp controllers or PSFs.

“There have been some recent developments,” O’Ryan said, his natural voice loud enough to carry through the building, “regarding your situation. Pay attention. You will only be shown this once.”

The move, I thought. They were finally going to tell them about closing the camp.

O’Ryan stepped back as the lights were dimmed slightly. A computer was hooked up to the projector, giving us a glimpse of a desktop before the video window expanded and the PSF hit play.

The video wasn’t about the move.

Next to me, Sam actually recoiled, her hand reaching for mine. I blinked in horrified disbelief.