indeed, studying his fingertips.
Sieracki's office was located off a long corridor linking Ward Seventeen with all the other Wards. Kendrick had never been inside any of those other rooms, but sometimes Sieracki gave away more during his interrogations than he perhaps intended. By this means, Kendrick had discovered that the experiments carried out in Wards One through Twenty-three were relatively benign, in that the death rate rarely rose above two or three in five.
Through whispered conversations with other prisoners Kendrick had heard stories that the entire population of some Wards had been known to die in a single twenty-four-hour period, keeping the dissection rooms busy through the night.
After a while, Kendrick began to suspect that Sieracki himself was disseminating much of this information deliberately as part of his ploy to get the most accurate information from his experimental subjects during their interrogations. Sieracki was careful to make sure that they all understood that failure to cooperate almost certainly meant transferral to a Ward where the survival rate was approximately zero.
What Kendrick knew about Sieracki's past was minimal. Still, some basic facts had emerged over the long weeks of Kendrick's confinement. There was no way to substantiate any of these rumours, but nonetheless he held on to such brief snatches of information as though they were precious jewels.
Sieracki had supposedly been engaged in running secret military research programmes even before the LA Nuke. Now he had carte blanche to do as he wanted. Kendrick had also come to understand that Sieracki's attitude to the prisoners was simple. They had been destined for execution, and to Sieracki this constituted a waste of valuable resources for his research.
Kendrick glanced down at his hands. 'They were feeling wrong,' he said at length.
'Yes?'
'They felt ridged, strange – like something was growing under the skin. I thought what happened to Torrance was going to happen to me.'
'Did you have any unusual thoughts, experience any notable delusions when Torrance was dying?'
Kendrick opened his mouth to speak, suddenly remembering the sense of connectedness that he had felt when Torrance died.
'What is it?' Sieracki demanded, his voice impatient. 'There's something else you're not telling me.'
Two others had died – less spectacularly – since Torrance. There were new faces in the Ward now, people whose names Kendrick hadn't even found out yet. 'I thought he was trying to say something to me, just before he died,' Kendrick lied.
'You're not telling me the truth. One of the doors malfunctioned at that precise moment.'
Kendrick shrugged non-committally. 'I don't see the connection.'
'If you're lying to me, I could have you transferred,' Sieracki warned him. 'The choice is yours.'
Kendrick looked down, avoiding Sieracki's gaze. 'I…'
'Yes?'
Give up, said a voice somewhere deep inside him. Let him transfer you to one of the Wards where none of them survive. Do anything, but just end it. Did it really matter, after all, whether or not he lied to Sieracki? He was going to die anyway
But it was still up to him to do his best to have the choice of how and when: that shouldn't be just Sieracki's choice. There had to be another way.
A calendar hung on the wall by the door. On it was a photograph of a spring day in the Rockies. A lake was visible in the photo's foreground. Kendrick studied the patterns of clouds and light and tried to remember what it felt like to stand outside in the open air.
He looked back to Sieracki. 'I can't think of anything,' he replied, making his tone apologetic. 'He died. We talked about it afterwards, sure. None of us understood what was happening. I don't know what else you want.'
The next day they were separated from the rest of the Ward.
There were just four of them: Buddy, Peter, Robert and Kendrick. Soldiers came and led them out of the Ward and along past Sieracki's office into a low-ceilinged room with a glassed-off partition beyond which Sieracki himself and several others sat watching. Technicians strapped them into new cots while the guards kept their rifles trained on them.
Then they were left all alone briefly.
A few minutes later, other technicians entered. Kendrick twisted his head and saw Sieracki still watching through the glass, his face expressionless. Kendrick bellowed with anger as a woman approached him with a hypodermic. He felt the needle slide under the skin of his forearm and almost immediately his limbs began to feel as if they were slipping into warm cotton.
Bemused, he watched as if from a distance while devices were strapped over his face. Then came the icy prickle of more needles stabbing into the flesh of his scalp, and monitors were attached to his wrists and across his chest. Earphones were placed over his ears, and finally goggles whose eyepieces were stuffed with wads of cotton wool were forced over his eyes to blind him from the world.
Static filled Kendrick's ears and he slipped gently into a limbo-like void.
'Can you hear me?' said Sieracki through the earphones. 'Answer.'
'I – yes.' His lips and tongue were numb and foreign-feeling. Random points of light played in the darkness.
'Kendrick, I want you to talk to the others.'
Talk to the others? But he was lost, alone, dead… surely he'd died. Now he floated… here. There was nobody else here.
No, there were others. He could hear them around him, mixed in with the chaotic, ceaseless buzz of electrons passing through the filaments of the electric lights that illuminated the chamber. He could hear so much, even the faint surge of energy through the laser-sights on the guns carried by the nearby guards.
Kendrick was only distantly aware that Sieracki was still asking him questions, and that he was still answering them. But for the life of him he had no idea what he was actually saying, could not begin to guess if there were rhyme or reason to the words pouring out of his insensate mouth.
After a little while he could hear the other voices more clearly: McCowan distant and blurred; Buddy sharp but unfocused, a torrent of images from the civil war, of flights through hazardous fire zones, his chopper downed while he fled on foot through the outskirts of some Mexican slum; Robert's mind…
Kendrick felt his body twist on the cot, his muscles filled with distant agony. He could see them… the Bright, spilling through their shared void, filling his mind with intimations of some other world.
Beyond the muffled hiss of his headphones, he could now hear the muffled screaming of the others. Hands grabbed at him roughly and the goggles covering his eyes were dislodged.
He could see the others, nearby. Wires trailed between the four of them, linking them together. He saw Buddy foaming at the mouth while McCowan convulsed in a fit.
And in the heart of it all, like the calm eye at the centre of the storm, lay Robert, his expression as peaceful as a Buddha's.
The next day Robert achieved the impossible. He escaped.
The four of them had been drugged yet again and placed back in the familiar environment of Ward Seventeen. As Kendrick lay in a stupor through the night, Robert had somehow managed to loosen his restraints. No one had seen or heard a thing; the cameras and microphones infesting the Ward had apparently failed to record anything but static. Even the guard had somehow failed to notice. He was replaced within just a few hours.
Three new guards – all heavily armed – were assigned to the Ward on continuous rotation. They hugged matt-black weapons to their chests. In the meantime, Robert's cot remained empty.
There followed an intensive round of fresh interrogations inflicted on everyone in the Ward still capable of communicating. These interrogations dissolved into a series of direct threats, sometimes implemented. Several
