I did my double day, and am approaching the local climax at the story’s middle. All I can say is… holy ****. I’m shivering, I think I’ve scared myself by writing my own story. I hope I don’t have nightmares about this stuff. And I hope you don’t, either, though I’m sure I’m not a good enough writer to scare anybody reading this story. Unless I am, which would be cool.

Word Count: 53,380

This is why for the next several days Graham remained secluded in his cell, yelling out for anybody who might respond and solve the mystery for him. He grew hungrier, and weaker, and his leg ached more so than any time before. He continued to scrawl drawings to pass the time. If he would look out the window when particularly bored, though he could not see much of Lanford City beyond the walls f the Black District. Clearly the black district was somewhere in the city – the view was partially blocked by the high district walls. He clutched his stomach one day, looking out of the window, wondering how many ore days it would be till he could get food again. He should have listened to the strange blonde man – if he had, he might not have been so hungry then. In fact, he might have been quite content.

As soon as the opportunity to leave sprung, just before the next lunchtime, he looked above his cell for a marking, but saw only a number; his cell number. Clearly having minimal significance, he searched further for anything that could mean something further – perhaps, he thought, there was simply meaning in the number. Indeed, when he looked around at other cell numbers, he noticed that his had an extra digit not present on anybody else’s. He walked the opposite direction from the elevator as far as could and saw no indication that any other person had this special number as he had.

He kept walking up the spiral of the Black District, hoping for another number similar to his – but clearly he was getting special treatment. Eventually he went to far, and was stopped by a knight, who told him to turn around and get to the cafeteria or he would begin beating on Graham. Terrified of this man in armor, Graham promptly turned around and rushed to the cafeteria, where he found the blonde man and began stuffing his face full of the tar-like gruel.

“I should have listened to you,” Graham said to the man, his face full of slop like a pig.

“Shut up and eat,” the man said. “James, I appreciate you wanting to talk, but this is the only time we’ve got to eat. We can talk on the way up.” The man smiled and shoved more food in his mouth, finishing the bowl, then left and walked up for more.

Graham was amazed – how had the blonde man known his name? His suspicions were advanced further when the blonde man made friendly gestures towards him throughout the course of the meal, as if they were familiar with one another, but the man had already denied the possibility that he was Joseph Wheat. Unless he’d lied.

Between the two of them over twelve bowls of gruel were consumed, and each felt as though their stomachs might burst, knowing that they would not feel this way for long. In fact, both men had lost considerable weight ever since arriving at the prison, the blonde man more so due to his rising fear that he would have to participate in the Refueling, which Graham was still unfamiliar with. This fear seemed to harbor in every prisoner except Graham, who was lost in the darkness due to his exception to the attendance rule. Why Graham was exempt he could not surmise.

The bell rang and people began clamoring out of the cafeteria. The blonde man hastily spoke with Graham, “I know who you are looking for, and I can help you get to him and his comrades. But you must do as I saw – ah, shush now, we are passing a few knights. There. All right, I can bring you to them now. Will you come?”

“You mean Joseph Wheat and all of Station A? They’re here?”

“Oh, indeed. This is not the first time, either. Station A has been demolished and relocated several times; Joseph Wheat is the sixth coordinator of Station A. I was the fifth. We have ways of keeping contact with the outside world. We are the Railroad, after all – we’re not without resources. Now, come with me.” After they had gone up the elevator (the elevator boy was again not present, to Graham’s relief), the blonde man pushed in a brick of the wall, after which Graham heard clicking noises – and suddenly a hidden passage appeared. The doorway of the passage was very small, but could easily fit an adult man, and the inside was dank and full of cobwebs. It looked like it had recently been used for travel, most likely by the blonde man when he’d heard about Wheat’s arrest. Together they carefully slipped away from the stampede in the hallway; there were no knights around to fit in the hallway and watch them, and security cameras were an advent that thankfully had not yet occurred in Talos.

“Make sure you seal up the entrance,” the blonde man said. “We don’t want others knowing about this passageway – it is a well-kept secret. You should be able to push the brick back out from behind the entrance.” Graham found the brick that the blonde man had pushed in and returned it to its former state, and watched as a sheet of metal – coated with bricks on the outside to act as a disguise – rolled its way back into place. Nobody had noticed their entrance into the tunnel; it had happened all too quickly for anyone of significance to care, and nobody was in a rush to return to their cells.

The passageway followed through the entire core of the Black District; Graham had initially thought something must be inside the center of the prison, which the cells revolved around, but this was clearly a misconception – the brick was thick around the passageway; there was probably nothing beyond it. The Black District was just one large tower as he saw it – around a core of stone and brick rotated countless dome-shaped cells, and somewhere along the line a cafeteria was shoved into the mix, but he didn’t really know where it was. All he knew was that the elevator took him up from the cafeteria and down from his cell, and back again with ease; learning the layout of the prison was not in his best interests. He did not intend to stay long – if he could just figure out a way to get back to Earth, he wouldn’t have to stay at all.

At some point the tunnel divided into multiple tunnels. The blonde man felt around, searching for some marker that would indicate, in a brail-like way, which direction led to Wheat’s cell. After finding the correct cell, he took hold of Graham and led him on. After several minutes they reached the end, and as carefully and slowly as possible the blonde man opened the way out of the hidden passageway. They exited into the hallway; there were no knights in sight.

Sitting in his cell twiddling with his thumbs was a scrawny version of the already scrawny Joseph Wheat, who looked up at the blonde man, and then darted his eyes over to Graham. Graham had never seen a man so ecstatic, yet so distressed – Wheat was glad that he could see Graham again, but of all places!

He moved up to the bars, limping; he had been injured as Graham had, but in different places – his head, his arms, his stomach and feet. Wheat was thoroughly destroyed in too many ways to count, yet surprisingly functional and resilient.

“James Graham… well I’ll be. How did you find yourself in here? I see you’ve met Alex,” said Wheat enthusiastically, through a raspy, hungry voice.

“Alex, eh? I was arrested not long after you I suppose; when Jessica and I received that broadgraph message from Station A, I rushed over, but you were already gone. A knight captured me and knocked me out, and here I am. Alex has been nice enough to show me the ropes and lead me to you.”

“That’s good, because we’re getting out of here,” Wheat said. “I’ve got several moles in this prison – or rather, the Underground Railroad does. The administration doesn’t know how ubiquitous we are, which works in our favor whenever people get arrested. Unfortunately, Alex has been here for over a year; it’s only recently that we’ve built up a legion of knights working in our favor. The knights around this area work for the Railroad, so don’t be worried – they know that you’re here and they know about the passageways.”

“Aren’t you worried they’ll betray you? I can see them getting a hefty reward for exposing an Underground Railroad,” Graham said.

Alex laughed, and quite loudly, causing other prisoners to begin talking and asking who was there. Wheat shouted that he was talking to himself, making impressions to create an imaginary conversation, knowing that nobody could see to the side of their cells with the view provided by the cage. Alex continued after, “We are not worried in the slightest. This is the umpteenth operation like this we have managed, and I am sure that we will be able to manage another with ease. Though nobody has ever broken out of the Black District, at the very least we can make our conditions livable by working together. We know the whereabouts of the other Station A members as well, but they are scattered all about the prison, which winds up and down forever.

“However, we will not be able to convene at the next refueling; I have seen that neither you, Joseph, nor our friend here are invited to that gruesome event.”

“How did you know that?” Graham asked.

“Why, your cell number begins with an even number and has an extra digit. Cell numbers are not randomly assigned, but they do change them every time a prisoner enters based on the classification of the prisoner, as I’ve been told. I do not know why you are special, but Wheat is marked because he led Station A.”

“What about the other two people who led Station A – Amelia Lavan and James Fleming? Wheat co-ran it, I thought.”

“They, too, are marked – though they did not run the station, they were only advisers and helpers that remained there.”

“I see – any more information?”

“Sadly, even with moles in the system information is difficult to obtain, and I know nothing else about the special markings and what they entail. This is what I know from asking fellow prisoners, and even the ability to converse is strictly monitored. That I was able to talk to you returning from lunchtime was miraculous and lucky, and we probably will not be able to do so again. But if all goes well, we will be able to convince our elevator boy to take us to the ground floor through a network of several elevators and the aid of specifically placed undercover knights, giving us a clear path to the exit. From then on, the outside will be our biggest challenge – but I digress, this is for Joseph to explain to you.”

Wheat spoke up, “I’ve devised a plan for all of us to escape using the tunnels and the elevator systems around the prison. If you two and the other five of us here will use the network of tunnels to exit at specific points bounded by two undercover knights each. In between these knights will be an elevator, and we will ride the elevator downward and follow through another network of tunnels, and another elevator hence, until we have reached the bottom. So long as our undercover knights are on shift, we should have no problems, but we have to be prepared for the worst – and all we can manage right now is hand-to-hand combat. I do not know their hours, but I believe they work in full-day shifts, so we should be fine on certain days of the week, specifically lunch days when we will perform the escape.

“The problem occurs, right now, when we exit. Nobody knows where the Black District is located in Lanford City – it’s not visible from any district due to the walls, and reports from all Railroad stations tell us that the Black District is not located anywhere in the five outer rings of the city. It could be outside the city, or it could be in the Orange District – which is highly unlikely given its small size. The White District is taken up by the city’s power plant, so that’s out of the question as well; I’m convinced we’re outside of the city limits, and will be forced to find a method of returning to Lanford, or simply fleeing as far as we can from the authorities.”

Graham rubbed his head – this was all incredibly convoluted. His entire life had been made for him, and so he was not used to things like prison, or jail breaking, or senseless and impossible machinations led by underground organization leaders. Already he was unsure who to trust in Lanford; if the knights would so readily beat and arrest him, why would there be any knight whom he could trust? And what was to say he could even trust Alex and Wheat, and Lavan and Fleming and the others? His head scratching went on forever – he was utterly lost in this conversation, and couldn’t for a moment imagine this plan working.

“I still want to know what my odd cell number means,” Graham said.

“I told you already that I have no idea. Joseph also doesn’t know… but we’ve tried to find out. There is no information other than that you miss the refueling, and I told you, in the cafeteria I believe, that the refueling is an event that you’re better off missing and even better off not knowing anything about.”

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll just find a way to go myself. I mean, I’m already about to break out of this place – who’s to say I won’t coerce one of the undercover knights to let me go to the refueling? Tell me what it is.”

“All right, if you insist. But it isn’t pleasant. I will tell you of my first visit to the boiler chamber and what I saw within. Joseph, you’ll want to listen as well, as I have avoided telling you this also.” Alex sighed, then took in a deep breath and began.

* *  *   *    *     *      *       *        *          *          *         *        *       *      *     *    *   *  * *

“I was just arrested by a team of knights, a little over a year ago last week, and was as unfamiliar as everything as you two men are now; why you would wish to know the gruesome horror is beyond me, but I digress. This was a time when arrests were just beginning to step up, and the Black District was becoming more and more filled every day. Over the last few years, a tradition known as the refueling had developed, of which several reluctant prisoners informed me on our way to then more frequent lunches. We have it very bad these days – I hear in years past inmates received up to two meals per day, each day of the week, although it was the same disgusting slop we have now.

“Nevertheless, we had three meals per day twice per week when I arrived, and these were always moments of intense dread for nobody knew who the next few prisoners to participate in the ritual would be. It always happened in between the feeding days – an alarm bell would sound, our cell gates would open by some province of God, and prisoners would hesitate to leave their cages before finally submitting to the knights, who in many cases had to force prisoners to leave. I, who knew nothing of it at the time of my arrest, simply followed instructions and hoped to remain alive. I’ve been lucky thus far, but I don’t know how much longer I will last, and you will see why.

“We were led to the elevators, which shot us upward to near the top of this wretched tower – for it indeed only goes so high, although to you it must seem endless – and packed into a large auditorium without seats. We all stood, tightly packed into the room, which was smaller than the cafeteria, and introduced to a very large cauldron filled with a thick, hot stew that bubbled out of the bowl and struck several prisoners close enough to it, burning them immensely and leaving them in excruciating pain. The guards did nothing for these men, only watched them squirm – several guards laughed at those who were burned, finding it funny that scum such as us were so vulnerable to a substance hot as lava.

“It was after a good half hour that a large, muscular knight shouted across the room for the chatter amongst the prisoners to cease at once, and I heard the room become more quiet than the darkest, emptiest caves. The whole room was focused solely on the cauldron, which rested on a platform high above us – there was a set of stairs to its right, and an exit thereafter through which workers brought in several filled brown sacks. The muscular man picked up one of the sacks and said garble that I could not understand through the reverberation of the room, and to this day still can barely decipher, but I do clearly remember him picking up the sack and holding it up for all of us to see.

“I, who was in the back of the room at the time, squinted to get a glimpse of the large brown sack, hoping to see what the fuss was all about when the muscular knight suddenly and forcefully threw the bag into the air. It flew high above the cauldron, and its contents slipped out in stop-motion time to my eyes.

“I saw first the head of a man exit the sack – a dead man, but still a man. Then the rest of his body left the sack and he plummeted into the lava substance with great force. At once the entire corpse caught aflame, and lava splattered all over the prisoners in the front, and as you have now heard being at the front of this assembly is the greatest misfortune of all, for it means you shall suffer indescribable burns from scalding lava. I, luckily, have never had such a misfortune, but witnessing the event alone is enough.

“The muscular knight proceeded to read a paper statement of the man’s will and testament, which included, as I interpreted with the help of several other prisoners, the man’s cremation for ‘the good of his country’. In effect, we were told that this dead man desired his body to be cremated in order to power the kitchens and elevators and gadgetry all around the prison, and that we should pray for his safe passage to heaven as one of the most noble men alive.

“This proceeded for two other dead persons, a male and a female, both supposedly incredibly wealthy folk who happened to pass away the day before. I have come to learn that incredibly patriotic folk often put in their wills that they want their bodies donated to the government for use as fuel, and I never thought much of that practice – I actually prefer it to coal, and I believe graves are useless if a perfectly fine body can provide us with much needed steam, but the prison was clearly not content simply cremating bodies on request as an alternative fuel.

“Once the bags were extinguished and there was no longer any will or testament left to read to us, and once we had been thoroughly reminded that those who had just been cremated were our moral and social superiors on every possible level, the muscular knight called for the entire room to split down the middle. Hastily everybody did so, for to not do so would invoke a painful beating from the crimson knights guarding the edges of the room. I was pushed even closer to several grotesque and dirty prisoners, though I now am grotesque and dirty, not to mention thin and weak.

“Through this newly formed center aisle several knights in black armor led two of the scrawniest and weakest prisoners I had ever seen up to the front. The muscular knight looked at them with intense disapproval – even from the back of the room this was apparent – and called for the first of them to join him up on the stage to put on a good show.

“The musical knight laughed maniacally and stared at the prisoner, then shook his head. ‘With great regret,’ he began, ‘I inform you all that this prisoner has been selected to take place in the rite of the refueling.’ The prisoner, who was now attempting to escape, was withheld by the muscular knight’s right arm – he detained a man with only one arm! – then promptly beaten with the other arm as a form of sedation. His face was pouring tears; it was clear he knew that his time on Talos was up, and I myself felt the sting of this realization as well. His cries were so melancholy that it seemed his jaw would fall right off if he frowned any further, and all of us collectively turned away – except me, who wanted to bear witness to the man’s fate. I must admit it was the only time I have ever looked.

“Still grasping the prisoner’s chains, the muscular knight now shouted, with great gusto, ‘Thank this man a thousand times over before you sleep tonight, for he is the only reason you will have food in two days’ time! Thank him when you awaken, for his is the only reason your elevators will operate! While he burns in the depths of hell, you scum shall live fueled only by the sins of your peers. It is for your sins that this man will now die. Farewell!’

“With that, the muscular knight, who I will now refer to as the executioner, held the living prisoner over the open cauldron for a good ten seconds, and then began, to my disbelief, to lower him in! I closed my eyes, but could not resist opening, and I witnessed the executioner release the prisoner’s chains and let him drop entirely into the cauldron. His screams were louder than ever before, and a high shrill filled the room, and all around me prisoners shivered in fear. At last the man’s screams reverberated through the room one final time, and the he was fully submerged in the lava. We were told that his body melted and he suffered the worst possible agony, because he was the weakest among us and deserved to die swiftly. Several crimson knights spoke amongst themselves, and I overheard them saying how just a death this was for the man, who supposedly would have died slowly and painfully over the next few weeks of starvation!

“From this point forward I shut my eyes and ears as the executioner repeated his previous statements and promptly disposed of the next prisoner. Once this was done, we all solemnly reported back to our cells, and on the way back I conversed with one veteran prisoner to discover that the entire prison was fueled by bodies alone – no coal, no steam, but some strange method to fuel a prison by human flesh! In shock I returned to my cell and very nearly sucked my thumb like a baby, and make a vow to consume as much food as possible so that I would never look the weakest and be the next subjected to death. At that is why I implore both of you to keep your strengths up – the healthier you are, the less likely it is you will be destroyed. They keep you alive here for one purpose only: You are cattle, bred to be used as fuel that will ultimately power the prison so that the knights can breed more of you to be used as fuel. And I fear that if we remain in this prison any longer, they may subject you to this death regardless of your condition. In recent weeks I have seen several of my companions gone missing, never to return, and it is with a heavy heart that I say I believe they were murdered outside of the horrific refueling. I may go so far as to say I now believe the refueling is a formality, and they confiscate prisoners every day in growing numbers to make room for the uncountable numbers of new inmates arriving.

“And that is the refueling. I pray that both of you never have to experience it, but I am kidding myself – as special cases you two may be, I have my doubts that you will remain exempt from attending a refueling forever. And when you are forced to go, one day, possibly before we attempt to escape, avoid the front and don’t face forward.”

* *  *   *    *     *      *       *        *          *          *         *        *       *      *     *    *   *  * *

Graham and Wheat were both silent after Alex’s speech, and they concluded that now was as best a time as ever to end the discussion, and it was stated they would meet up again next lunchtime. Alex planned to use the tunnel networks for the rest of that night to go and inform the rest of Station A that the plan would be executed on that next lunchtime, and that they would all meet in the cafeteria at a certain table and go up the elevator and through the passageways together.

Alex first led Graham back to his cell, where he promised to tell Graham if he found out anything about his and Wheat’s special imprisonment circumstances, but at the moment had to leave with much haste and inform the others of the plan, which would happen whether they met at the table or not. Alex was dead-set on escaping, and anybody who didn’t meet at the table come next lunchtime would be left behind to escape on their own. Graham’s cell was still open; he was surprised some other prisoner hadn’t taken it up. As soon as he entered into the cell the cage slammed shut. It was dark outside, and Graham realized he’d completely lost track of time while conversing with Alex and Wheat.

When Graham went to reach for his tiny slips of paper, he noticed that they were not where he’d left them. After extensive searching, he couldn’t find any of them at all, and thought that a knight must have taken them. Alex’s story now scared him half to death, and he worried that the discovery of those drawings would draw enough attention to Graham to make him a candidate for the next refueling. A robot suddenly clunked by and made excessive noise; it was the robot he’d seen a while back grouped with one of the knights. It spewed steam at regular intervals and its massive gears and pipes twisted and warped with every step – it must have weighed several tons.

Strangest of all was the inclusion of several organic components into the machine – what looked like tendons and human fibers, possibly donated by more patriotic wealthy citizens like those described in Alex’s tale, were attached to the robot in specific places, giving it extra mobility and flexibility. The robot, which Graham realized shortly had its own sentience, turned and faced Graham’s cell. Through Lamp Sphere eyes it stared at Graham, and he could have sworn it tilted its head at one moment in curiosity. On its chest was a tag with an alphanumeric sequence that read “0x18015DANIL”, which Graham could read clearly as the robot took a step closer.

He reached out of his cell to touch the robot; it was cool on the tag, but the piped were scalding hot, filled with steam being pumped and recycled through a Carnot Engine at its heart. At this action, the robot clumsily turned and faced forward, then continued its way up the spiral hallway.

Graham slept less peacefully than before. His fears about the Black District had been magnified a thousand fold by Alex’s tale, and he could not wait for the day that he and the other Station A residents would break out. He believed in Alex’s plan and knew that with effort they might be able to pull it off, as malicious as the knights were, and it was only this belief that enabled him to sleep with ay semblance of peace.
He was happy that he did not need to attend the next refueling, but still didn’t have a clue why he was exempt, which shook him even more – he began to theorize that he was a special prisoner set on reserve for when they could not select a proper candidate to be exterminated, but this turned out to be untrue; the knights seemed to take proper care of him, made sure that he had always gotten a hot meal. He soon learned that he could request one bowl of food per day from a knight to be brought directly to his cell, a luxury that other prisoners whined for, but that Graham embraced wholeheartedly. He ate with pleasure, not knowing what was soon to come, as the knights looked on at him with similar emotions.

Finally, the day of the breakout came, and Graham was beyond apprehensive as he worked his way down to the cafeteria. Luckily, his leg had now almost fully healed and he no longer required his cane to move quickly. He found the specific table that Alex had told him to meet at and sat down. All of his friends were there, everyone he had ever known in Lanford City, with the happy exception of Jessica Ames, who Graham had pined for in her absence and wished that she was still safe in the laboratory as she had been those weeks ago when he was first arrested.

Together they all exchanged sad looks and hopeful faces as they prepared to take the ultimate risk, aware that if they failed it could easily cost them their lives. No words were spoken amongst the friends; everything had been agreed upon. Alex looked at everyone near the end of the meal – nobody in the group had taken a bite of gruel the entire time – and nodded to affirm that he was prepared to go along with the plan in several minutes. Everyone nodded back; Graham was reluctant and unsure, but eventually nodded as well.

When the end of lunch bell rang, they all stood up quickly in unison and worked their way towards the elevator, careful not to get lost in the crowd. At last they reached the elevator and were able to get on together, which Alex called a stroke of dumb luck. But when Graham looked to see whom the elevator operator was, it was that same elevator boy who he’d seen now twice, working the elevator in their favor. It was clear to Graham now that this man worked for the Underground Railroad, appearing and disappearing at regular intervals to ensure that station members were safe. He, like all staff in the prison, was armed with at least one type of weapon – in his case, a simple steam gun, but at least it was something.

From there they moved to the passageway and slipped through undetected; even if prisoners had noticed, they would never have reported an escape attempt, for all of them wanted at least one to succeed so that they might try their hands at it.

They followed the passage and made a different turn than Graham and Alex had to get to Wheat – instead, all seven of them moved along a path that sloped downward; they were going down several floors without the use of an elevator.

“After we exit, we should have access to the elevator on this floor – by now the prisoners are back in their cells, so there shouldn’t be any riots either.”

They exited the tunnel and hastily made their way to the elevator, where Graham saw a crimson knight and panicked, but calmed down when he noticed they were all promptly ignored by this undercover operative. The elevator opened; inside was another cheery elevator boy – he looked just the same as the other one, but his hair was a different color. This cheery elevator boy lowered them several more floors, and they entered from that floor another passageway, which led them down to another elevator. This process repeated several times and they were fortunate enough each time to be surrounded, as Alex had told them, by knights affiliated with the Railroad.

Graham was astounded – they were almost at the bottom floor and had not been caught! Or so said Alex, who was beginning to spread the largest grin of the group.

It was at the bottom floor where troubles occurred. Graham had noticed that at each elevator the operator had given up his gun to one member of the group, but there were not enough to go around. Without arms Graham felt helpless, and when the alarms sounded he felt as if he’d already been shot dead.

Apparently, one of the so-called undercover knights had ratted them out – and received a hefty promotion in the process.

Faced with the entrance of the prison at last, the seven prisoners were confounded. Should they run to the exit and risk their lives, or go quietly with their pursuers, who would surely kill them anyway? Realizing these odds at once, the group dashed out the entrance – two gigantic metal gates that were open at the moment to deliver more prisoners.

None of them had ever seen the entrance from the outside – a gigantic stoop stretching for hundreds of meters approached the entrance to the Black District, which was a massive cylindrical structure that towered above everything else in sight – with the exception of the building that it was attached to.

Everybody except Graham was frozen at this sight, for now they knew where they were – the top of the cylindrical structure known as the Black District Prison was crowned with one of the massive pipes Graham had witnessed from afar before his arrest. This pipe, in turn, connected to a much grander structure: The power plant at the center of the city. And what they all soon realized was that this Black District was only one of several silos that surrounded the power planet.

“Good Lord,” Lavan said. “We’re inside the White District!” Without moving, without even talking, the group collectively knew that the refueling efforts did indeed power the prison, but the prison in turn was powering something greater: The power plant at the center of Lanford City.

That, in turn, provided steam to the metropolis at large.

All at once the group realized the source of power that the city chose to use – eventually Graham also realized this truth. That the ash and soot carried overseas was not burnt coal. That the ash forest was not really soot. That this was how the Lanford government regulated its power and technology: through the systematic killing of its residents. And, at this revelation, Graham doubled over and vomited, and wished he had figured out a way to home sooner, not knowing that his actions in attempting to escape had actually brought him closer to the solution.

However his vomiting, while unavoidable, proved fatal. Knights had already begun to surround the stupefied group of seven prisoners, who had not moved an inch from about halfway down the massive stoop. And once they were surrounded, they were arrested with great force. Each knight around them withdrew one of the strange taser-like devices from a belt sheath, and activated it. At once each individual Station A resident was surrounded by blinding blue light that shocked them painfully and sedated them into unconsciousness. They were then scooped up like dead mice, each person carried to a separate location inside this gravity-defying blue bubble.

* *  *   *    *     *      *       *        *          *          *         *        *       *      *     *    *   *  * *

When Graham awoke he was fastened to a wall at each limb in a pristine white room that seemed unreal. In front of him was a wide pane of recently washed glass that overlooked from high above a long room with a cauldron at one end – the boiler room. Hanging adjacent to him on the wall in the same fashion was Wheat, still unconscious. A strange device in the corner of the room followed their every movement – Graham noticed it and thought it was a security camera, but was smart enough to know that such cameras did not exist in Talos.

The boiler room glowed an intense bright red; it was almost difficult to make out what was inside with the exception of the even brighter cauldron of lava at the very end of the room. The room’s ceiling was filled with vents that would absorb the steam let off by a human being’s extermination, as well as the sweat from prisoners’ heated bodies in the room. The boiler room, in effect, was well equipped to absorb power for Lanford as possible – every step had been taken to ensure that any steam, any energy at all, that entered the room did not leave.

Wheat stirred, and Graham at once called out to him, “Joseph! Are you okay?”

Wheat’s misty eyes looked at Graham. “Where… where are we? Ow, my fucking head!” Wheat tried to move his hand to his head but could not; it was fastened to the wall tightly and would not budge. “This doesn’t look like any room I’ve ever seen.”

The device in the corner of the room shifted and moved along its two-dimensional axle.

“I don’t know, but look through that window.”

Wheat looked through and saw the boiler room just as Alex had described it, and together they witnessed a new event: prisoners flooding en masse into the room for an emergency refueling. An aluminum doorknob across the room turned; at the same time, Graham’s heart sank in anticipation of what was about to occur. He knew he and Wheat were the next to be sacrificed – that this pristine white room was meant to give them their one and only taste of heaven before being sent down into the boiler room, and thence to hell.

He was very wrong.

At once the door swung open, and an older man, grey haired and about the same height as Graham, hobbled in, clutching a cane that resembled the one Graham had been given by the knights. He calmly strutted over to the two men strapped to the wall, and smiled at them, then turned to face the boiler room, now teeming with apprehensive prisoners. “Pleasant little bunch, aren’t they?” he asked the two men, smiling.

“What are you going to do to us?” Wheat and Graham asked, together.

“Oh, nothing just yet, my children—”

“Don’t call us children,” Graham said angrily.

“Oh, but you are children,” the mystery elder said, “in comparison to me! You see, I’m quite old. But that doesn’t stop me from doing all of the wonderful things I’ve done with my life. It’s been many years since my inception, and still I never get tired of watching them squirm down there – all so insignificant, unaware that when they die they do so for a much greater purpose.” He made some clicking noises with his mouth, as if to say, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, what a shame!” and shook his head to and fro.

“What are you going to do to us?” Graham asked again.

“My, how rude! You have no manners, child. I install this wonderful screen for you, and not a word of gratitude. I would have prepared popcorn if I knew I would have guests today, though I suppose I did know I would have guests today – so I should have prepared popcorn! I’m becoming quite forgetful, you see, so forgive me. Ah, it is starting – look below!”

The two men followed the old man’s gaze to the boiler room below, forced to sit through the most terrifying show of their short lives.