Penny had a bad feeling she was going to find out.
What came out of the shower nozzles wasn’t water. It was some thin, purple liquid with an astringent reek like an industrial cleaner. After smelling it, Penny expected it to sting her skin and it did.
As the other captives yelped and screamed, trying to get away from the purple spray, the guards pushed them into it. The NeverBreeders had all suddenly produced menacing-looking pain prods and they threatened to shock their prisoners unless they got thoroughly drenched in the showers.
“In, get in and be cleansed!” the head NeverBreeder kept shouting, brandishing his prod with its sizzling arch of electricity at the end. “You must be purged of all outside filth before you may enter the purity of the Compound!”
Penny squeezed her eyes shut to keep out the stinging purple cleanser and squeezed her bound hands into fists. She kept her head down, trying not to breath in the noxious fumes from the spray, trying to endure. It wasn’t until she was soaking wet with her hair hanging limp around her shoulders and dripping purple fluid down her back that she was allowed to finally get out of the showers.
After the prisoners had been thoroughly “cleansed” the guards got into the showers voluntarily. Either their orange skins were tougher than most people’s or they were all a bunch of masochists, but whichever the case, they didn’t seem to mind the stinging purple astringent at all.
When they came out, the guards dried off with towels they produced from a chest in the cart. The prisoners, however, were given nothing to dry or cover themselves with. Nor were they allowed to get dressed again. Their clothes were confiscated and they were forced onto the cart again, naked and shivering.
“This is ridiculous!” Shurla muttered to Penny but there was real fear in her eyes as she spoke. “Where do you think they’re taking us?”
“I d-don’t kn-know,” Penny wasn’t sure if her teeth were chattering from the chill of being soaked to the bone or from fright—she only knew she was in trouble here, and she couldn’t think of a single way to get out of it.
Twenty-One
The cart hummed smoothly along, past the shower buildings and through another hundred yards of jungle before coming to a big stone arch which seemed to mark the entrance of the Compound. There was another, smaller statue standing beside the entryway and again Penny thought the man depicted looked somehow familiar.
Then they went through the archway and entered the Compound.
The first thing Penny thought was that it looked like an idyllic little village—almost too idyllic, in fact. It was too neat, too clean, too manicured. To her eyes it looked artificially cheerful, like Main Street in Disney World.
A vast swath of jungle had been cleared to make way for rows of snug white cottages trimmed in deep blue. There were pristine white paths leading to each door and not a speck of trash or litter to be seen anywhere.
Past the cottages, there was a kind of marketplace, with buyers and sellers manning rustic wooden stalls, all perfectly painted and trimmed with bright, crisp banners declaring things like, Bread Sold Here and, Fresh Produce Every Day.
Again Penny got the feeling of artificial perfection. The marketplace looked like it was just for show, even though people were actually buying and selling there. It reminded her of those frontier museums you went to sometimes where the General Store looked just like it had back in the old days, but when you went inside, all the items they used to sell were behind a big wall of Plexiglas.
Further on, past the marketplace, was a public park filled with lush trees, some bearing large pink flowers and others with clusters of pear-shaped fruit in blue, purple, and green. The trees and grass were trimmed to obsessive perfection without a single leaf or blade of grass out of place and the crushed white gravel pathways curved perfectly through the neatly landscaped area.
There was even a kind of arena which seemed to be an outdoor public meeting place, Penny saw, though it was deserted at the moment. It looked like someplace you might go to see Shakespeare in the Park or Theater in the Round, with tiered bleacher-like seats all carved from dark gray stone.
Despite the obsessive perfection of the place, there were lots of people in the Compound—humanoids of all different races all apparently living and working in harmony together. The crowd here was every bit as diverse as the marketplace in Hell’s Gate Station—except for the fact that everyone was dressed the same.
They all had on short, toga-like garments which ended at mid-thigh and made them look like extras in an old gladiator movie, Penny thought. The men wore dark crimson red and the women wore a soft, periwinkle blue and all of them wore sandals which laced around their ankles. It was like a little Roman villa but with aliens. Weird.
But even weirder than their clothes, were the people themselves—or rather, their expressions. Every single face that Penny studied was smiling and content. Nobody was frowning or looking angry or upset about anything at all. And when they saw the new captives in the cart, many of them waved.
“Welcome!” one man called. “Welcome to the Compound!”
The woman beside him took up the call and soon all of them were waving and smiling at the dripping, shivering women in the hover cart.
Of course they couldn’t wave back, because their hands were still cuffed behind their backs, so Penny and Shurla and the
