I did the math. I was near the end of the line, which meant I’d be part of either the fourth or fifth group. That gave me a wait time between ninety minutes and two hours. After the months of anticipation, it felt like an eternity.
The Warden wasn’t quite done. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to repeat my earlier greeting. Welcome to the Hole. You stand above the Free States’ premiere facility for incarcerated Powers. The security elevator behind me leads to the housing for the two-hundred men and women who work at this prison—guards, doctors, technicians, and support staff—as well as the space that has been converted to a meeting area for today.”
“The cell blocks themselves are located five miles below the surface, accessible only by a secondary elevator. At any time, either of those elevators can be disabled, preventing access to the surface. As those few of you who possess powers yourself will have already noticed, our dampeners run at maximum power at all times. Both you and our inmates are effectively normals while on these premises. We apologize for the inconvenience, but I hope you all understand why it is necessary.”
Around me, heads nodded.
“Excellent. Then let’s begin with group one.”
The elevator door was at least a foot thick, but it slid open with little more than a whisper. Accompanied by a dozen guards, the first twenty visitors stepped inside and were whisked out of sight.
CHAPTER 70
When you factored in the additional time it took to travel down to the meeting room, get everyone seated, and bring the requisite prisoners up from their cell blocks, thirty minutes of visitation ended up translating into more than an hour of real time. A little bit after noon, guards passed out sandwiches and water to those of us who had yet to make it down. It was synth-meat and stale bread, and a hell of a long way from what the Academy cafeteria provided, but I was hungry enough not to care. I’d drunk plenty of water, but the only thing I’d eaten in the past twenty-four hours had been a candy bar from Randy’s convenience store.
I know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t steal it. Randy had been asleep at the time, but I’d paid anyway. Overpaid, really. That may well have been the first and only $6.39 candy bar in history. But what the fuck, right? Life savings or not, you can’t take that shit with you.
By the time we’d finished our sandwiches and the guards had come by to collect our trash, the second group was finally on its way back up. I was already sick of waiting. I’d had ample time to make a more accurate recount, and it had showed that I was in the fifth group, not the fourth. That meant I had yet another hour of standing in the bunker with my thumb up my ass and an illegal weapon barely hidden under my clothes. I just wanted to get this shit over with.
From the grumblings around me, I was pretty sure everyone else felt the same way, which is why I was stunned to see a guy at the tail-end of group four swap places with the older woman directly ahead of me in line.
“Thought that lady was going to collapse if she had to stand up much longer,” the newcomer told me cheerfully. He was half again my age, but bone-skinny and ragged in a white tank. “Not everyone’s built for this sort of thing, you know?”
“Not sure I’m built for it either.”
His laugh was sharp, there and gone in an instant. “Wait until you’re almost thirty, and mortality’s starting to close in on you. Who are you here to see?”
“My father.” The last thing I wanted to do right then was talk, but something—maybe it was the limited manners the Academy had tried to drill into me, or maybe it was the multiple hours I’d already spent doing nothing—compelled me to ask. “How about you?”
“Older brother.” He eyed me speculatively. “You ever hear of Firewall?” I shook my head, and his expression fell. “Figured, but it never hurts to ask. That’s my bro. High-Two Technomancer. Somehow, he got the brains and the power in our family.”
Can’t remember if I’ve spoken about Technomancers yet. Didn’t have one in the Class of 76, so I might have skipped right over them. Most famous one is probably Legion himself, way out in Baltimore, but there’s a bunch in the Free States too. Technomancers interface with electronics. Not to power them—that’d be Sparks—but to make them do new stuff. Guy who created the testing machine was a Technomancer. Not much call for them in the Cape world, but the commercial and military sectors just love them.
Criminals too, I suppose. Bank robbery’s a hell of a lot easier when one of your crew can scramble the cameras and unlock the vault with a wave of their hand.
“I don’t know,” I finally replied. “Maybe he got the power, but you’re the one who’s still free.”
“Huh. Never thought of it quite like that.” He slapped me on one shoulder with a grin. “Guess maybe I got the brains!”
•—•—•
Two hours later, it was our turn. Finally. We crowded into the elevator with the same dozen guards, men and women who’d gone from the very pinnacle of paranoid awareness to something like resigned boredom over the course of the day. The door whisked shut and the elevator started down.
It was hard to gauge distance from inside the elevator, but we didn’t seem to go as far as I’d expected. Four or five floors down, maybe, and then the elevator was opening onto a room every bit as large as the entryway above. We exited to
