Down the corridor he went, feeling his way. About twenty feet along, the lights behind him dimmed into black, and another set came on just ahead.
It made sense, Milo thought. Conservation. There would be no combustible light sources, because they burned oxygen. Probably the lights operated on primitive motion sensors and a phosphorescent glow mix. It made him feel better, for a minute, knowing that the prison population was capable of such sense and subtlety. Maybe he wouldn’t encounter raw brutality here, after all.
A hundred yards down, shadows jumped out of the black, knocked him unconscious, stripped him naked, and left him bleeding on the floor.
—
When he woke up, he reviewed what had happened.
The prison was a resource-poor environment. It made sense that inmates would haunt the corridors near hatches, in case of a drop-off. He’d have to anticipate traps like that.
Atta boy! said his voices. Keep using your head….
Milo got to his feet and soldiered on. At least he didn’t have anything else they could take.
The voices didn’t comment on that.
—
An hour later, he encountered people. Real, discernible people, not just shadows and shapes. The hall opened up into a space about as big as an average living room, where several men and a couple of women sat playing a game with handmade cards. In the far corner, one man held a homemade-looking ladder for another man, who appeared to be doing something mechanical to a nest of pipes.
They all wore some form of burlap trousers, at least. Milo felt awfully, awfully naked.
He was hoping that this would be the point where someone would take him under a wing and talk to him and tell him things until he could learn— A wise man, advised his ancient soul, isn’t afraid to ask questions.
“Can someone please help me?” Milo asked, and that’s as far as he got before three of the card players—two men and one of the women—jumped up, slammed him to the ground (“Look how pretty!”), and took turns with him until he lost consciousness.
—
Milo woke up with foggy senses and a body that felt bruised and crusty. He was crumpled up on cold, damp stone. He tried to make himself go back to sleep, but someone kicked him and said, “Get up. Clean yourself.”
Milo didn’t want to be awake. He wanted to retreat inside himself. At the edge of his mind, he felt something like a pit, something dark and gibbering. The pit was something like madness, something he could disappear into.
No, insisted the voices. You’re going to remain human. Sit up, open your eyes, and survive the day.
So Milo sat up, feeling like a car wreck. He blinked his eyes clear and found he was sitting in a kind of hollowed-out hole, as if someone had dug a grave in the stone. There was a carpet of sorts, made of burlap and covering half of the tiny floor, and some bowls scattered about. A deck of cards. Some dark sticks that may have been charcoal or crude pencils. Something shiny and knifelike. The hole smelled like sewage.
Directly in front of him, so close that their knees touched, sat a heavy, round man with thick, long hair and a matching beard. His eyes, in the middle of all that hair, were like icy little points. Like Milo, he was naked.
“Clean yourself,” the man repeated, thrusting a moldy burlap rag at Milo and pointing to a bowl of murky water.
Milo wiped himself all over. Some of the grit and blood came loose; the rest he smeared around.
Some basic communication was in order, Milo reasoned.
“I’m Milo,” he said.
The man pointed to himself, saying, “Thomas.” Then he said, “Eat this,” and handed Milo a bowl full of something like camel sperm.
He couldn’t do it.
“Not now,” he said.
“You eat whenever you get a chance,” said Thomas.
Milo ate. He tried not to think about what he might be putting in his mouth.
Go along, for now, he thought. Then, later, revenge.
No, said his old soul. Be the ocean, be the pond—
Revenge, Milo repeated, swallowing hard.
—
Sooner or later, the nightmare sense of it had to go away, right? Sooner or later, Unferth would begin to seem real, and he would become less sensitive to its horror. Right?
No. But Milo learned important things. He sensed that paying attention and learning were the keys.
Milo learned that he had asthma. Between the dark and moldy damp and the unrelenting fear, he began to feel, at times, as if his own body were suffocating itself. Lovely, he thought, wheezing.
He learned that he “belonged” to Thomas. Thomas branded Milo’s shoulder: Thomas 817-GG. This was the number, in the prison’s homemade system, that described the location of Thomas’s cell. He didn’t keep Milo by his side all the time or on a leash, but if Milo wandered too far away, it was pretty likely that someone would return him and collect a reward.
Thomas was a plumber. Sometimes he left for hours or days, taking a bag of homemade tools with him. Everything in Unferth was homemade. There were people whose job it was to make things. There were people whose job it was to grow food, make clothes, make paper, glass, brew alcohol, take messages to people. There was even a sort of school system, where people shared their skills and their stories.
There were no janitors. You had to clean up after yourself or force others to do it. This kept people from being too messy.
When Milo had been Thomas’s “girl” for a week or so, he found to his horror that Thomas could loan him out.
Thomas needed a new tool. So he took Milo to spend the night at the home of Gob the Blacksmith.
“You will not like Gob,” Thomas told Milo, on the way to Gob’s shop.
They had to go through a heavily populated zone of the prison, a place that had been developed for shops and industry, where larger, better-maintained plumbing was available and power was more reliable. It was essentially a cave the size of a village. Phosphorescent lanterns hung from mossy cables. Stacked along the walls like Anasazi cliff dwellings were commercial spaces and residential cells. There were rude streets and passageways, packed with shoving, smelly, bad-tempered foot traffic.
Gob was a giant, Milo discovered when they got to the blacksmith shop. Milo couldn’t stop looking at him.
He had been born a giant, but then things had been done to him. One whole side of his cranium had been sculpted from an aluminum plate. His arms and shoulders looked as if a muscle bomb had gone off. Then levers and springs and other machinery had been worked into his flesh and bones. When they first arrived in his shop, he was tearing a piece of sheet metal with his bare semi-robotic hands.
“Are you shitting me?” Milo exclaimed.
“He has to be strong,” Thomas explained. “He can’t use heat, because fire uses air. So he can only pound and tear and cut and squeeze.”
Gob began rolling the sheet metal into a tube. As he worked, he cast a red eye on Milo.
“He’s pretty,” said Gob.
“It’s a loan,” Thomas said. “You understand? Two nights. One thread cutter.”
Gob understood.
To Milo, Thomas said, “You stay here for now,” and was gone.