I am awakened by a voice barking, “Tray!” I sit up, and see that Julian has gone to the door. He is crouching on his hands and knees, as I did yesterday, trying to get a look at our captor.
“Bucket!” is the next sharp command, and I feel both relieved and sorry when Julian picks up the tin bucket in the corner, which is making the room stink sharply of urine. Yesterday we took turns with it. Julian made me promise I would keep my back turned and my ears covered and, additionally, hum. When it was my turn I only asked him to turn around—but he covered his ears and sang anyway. He has a terrible voice, totally off-key, but he sang loudly and cheerfully, like he didn’t know or didn’t care—a song I hadn’t heard in forever, one that used to be part of a kids’ game.
A new tray comes through, followed by a clean bucket. Then the flap door clangs shut, the footsteps recede, and Julian stands.
“Did you see anything?” I ask, although I know the answer will be no. My throat is hoarse, and I feel weirdly awkward. I shared too much last night. We both did.
Julian is having trouble looking at me again. “Nothing,” he says.
We share the meal—this time, a small bowl filled with nuts, and another large piece of bread—in silence. Under the bright light of the ceiling bulb, it feels strange to sit on the floor, so close together, so I eat while pacing the room. There is a tension in the room that did not exist before. Unreasonably, I resent Julian for it. He made me speak last night, and he shouldn’t have. At the same time, I was the one who reached for his hand. This seems unimaginable now.
“Are you going to do that all day?” Julian says. His voice is strained, and I can tell he is feeling the tension too.
“If you don’t like it, don’t watch,” I snap back.
More moments of silence. Then he says, “My father will get me out of here. He’s bound to pay soon.”
Hatred for him blooms again inside of me. He must know that there is no one in the world who will spring me. He must know that when our captors—whoever they are—realize this, I will either be killed or left here to rot.
But I don’t say anything. I climb the steep, smooth walls of the tower. I enclose myself deep inside its casements; I build stone between us.
The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other. They smell sour and musky, like the breath of someone who is starving. They move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down, endlessly down.
And then, without warning, the light clicks off and plunges us once again into darkness. I feel a sense of relief so strong it borders on joy: I’ve made it through another day. With the darkness, some of my unease begins to dissipate. In the daylight Julian and I are edges, set awkwardly and at odds with each other. But in the dark, I’m happy when I hear him settle on his cot, and know that we’re separated by only a few feet of space. There’s comfort in his presence.
Even the silence feels different now—more forgiving.
After a while, Julian says, “Are you asleep?”
“Not yet.”
I hear him roll over to face me. “You want to hear another story?” he asks.
I nod, even though he can’t see me, and he takes my silence for assent.
“There once was a really bad tornado.” Julian pauses. “This is a made-up story, by the way.”
“I got it,” I say, and close my eyes. I think of being back in the Wilds, my eyes stinging from campfire smoke, and Raven’s voice coming through the haze.
“And there was this girl, Dorothy, and she fell asleep in her house. And the whole house was lifted off the ground by the tornado and went spinning into the sky. And when she woke up, she was in a strange land filled with little people, and her house had landed on this evil witch. Flattened her. So all the little people—the Munchkins—were really grateful, and they gave Dorothy a pair of magical slippers.” He lapses into silence.
“So?” I say. “What comes next?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I say.
Rustling, as he shifts on his cot. “That’s as far as I got,” he says. “I never read the rest.”
I suddenly feel very alert. “You didn’t make it up, then?”
He hesitates for a second. Then: “No.”
I keep my voice calm. “I’ve never heard that story before,” I say. “I don’t remember it from the curriculum.” Very few stories get approved for Use and Propagation; at most two to three per year, and sometimes none. If I haven’t heard it, chances are that’s because it was never approved.
Julian coughs. “It wasn’t. On the curriculum, I mean.” He pauses. “It was forbidden.”
My skin gets a prickly feeling. “Where did you find a forbidden story?”
“My father knows a lot of important people in the DFA. Government people, priests, and scientists. So he has access to things … confidential documents and things that date from the time before. The days of sickness.”