The Facility.
The Facility is east of the city, near the old waterworks. Wind shrieks through the tiers of the abandoned aqueduct. It whines around our silver outbuildings and whistles through the spiked fences that surround us. Terry and I are in the yard for free time. It’s marshy beneath our feet. From our silver homecube to the silver fence the earth is spongy with radioactive groundwater. Several years ago the birds disappeared from the wastezone. And after them, the insects. Only we can live here now, the rehabilitants, because we’re rigorously decontaminated, and medicated against the environmental toxins.
Terry nods my attention toward the silo near the fence. A crack has appeared in its side. Smoke leaks from the fissure and the wind whips it toward the brown glow that used to be sunset. I’m not really interested in the crack, but I watch it because Terry watches it, and sometimes his interest is how I fend off despair. There are only nine of us left at Boy’s Juvenile Justice Facility Bravo. Terry’s the only one I really know, although I’m not sure his name’s Terry. One day he drew an image in the mud of a figure in a fuzzy bathrobe—or maybe it was a coat—and I’ve thought of him as Terry ever since. We communicate well without speaking aloud.
We haven’t been near the fence since 32 died. The low electrical hum, the singed flesh smell, 32’s hatched-open jaw—my heart jitters to think of it. I force myself to walk next to Terry, who isn’t afraid, who walks on the balls of his feet, eager. Terry is small and wiry and two-thirds my size. He’s always in motion. I step hesitantly. I’m ready to run back to the homecube, because the spherical blue eye that’s affixed to the side of the homecube follows our progress, moving upward on its retractable stalk. I make a little bargain with the Facility: if it lets us walk to the perimeter without punishment, I’ll work my next waste cleanup detail without a single break.
Terry and I get to the point in the fence where it abuts the silo. The silo leans slightly, not quite silver anymore. The crack extends down its side to about four feet from the ground. Up close, through the smoke, I see a sticky brown substance bubbling from the aperture. Terry reaches toward the crack and in a panic I pull his hand back. My heart thumps, watch it, watch it. The wind is too loud for me to hear the fence’s electrical hum.
Finally Terry lets me pull him back to our customary spot under the overhang. The blue eye fully retracts into its shell and points down at us. Above us the Facility sign creaks in the wind. It reads, BJJFB: Retribution, Rehabilitation, Rejuvenation! I like the sound of the sign creaking. It recalls a tree branch creaking in a storm. A specific storm, a house, a family in the house. The copper letters behind the swinging sign, reading Homecube 4, have bled down the side of the building. I like that too, the way the streaks make a forest of red and green rust on the sheet-metal wall. Homecube 4 is the only operational homecube. The other fifteen molder around us.
Terry draws in the mud with his finger. He draws the homecube, with its overhang and columns of rivets. He draws an equals sign next to it, and next to that, an infinity symbol. I press my nails into my palm. I look toward the aqueduct, which usually calms me, but today makes me feel worse. The wind has knocked another piece from it. For some reason I feel that when that aqueduct’s gone, hope’s gone too.
Terry rubs out the image with his shoe and draws another: the fence, with its spikes at the top. He draws himself, on the homecube side. Then he draws a passage under the fence. Himself on the other side, running. Finally a figure running next to him that I understand to be myself.
Terry hasn’t drawn an escape plan in a long time. It’s hard to tell how much time, due to all the time slippages. After a week of waste cleanup, health services keeps us unconscious for intervals, and we lose weeks, months, we’re never sure. I make another little bargain with the Facility: If we don’t get in trouble for this drawing, I won’t even think about escape for a year. I erase Terry’s seditious drawing and listen for the whirring that precedes punishment. The blue eye used to brighten and emit a whirring when we spoke aloud, and then when we drew words in the mud. After a few days we only drew pictures. I don’t hear any whirring, so I draw my own image: the two of us, X’ed out eyes, in the middle of a flat plane. There’s nothing to eat or drink for ten days in any direction from the Facility. That’s what the Didactics tell us. If we leave we die.
Terry erases the plane. He leaves our dead bodies in the picture, but draws the homecube and the fence around us. If we stay we die.