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As daylight crept through the high windows after my first night there, I was able to better see the space. There was no furniture or surfaces of any kind; just one large concrete floor spanning most of the home, with a small washroom at the far end.

There were fourteen of us in the building. To me, that seemed more than the space could hold, but the other inhabitants assured me that they were, comparatively, much more comfortable now than in the past. Two years ago the room had reached a peak of twenty people. However, a particularly brutal winter, a couple of accidents, and a virus had brought the numbers down again.

The corner of the room I slept in was shared by Jacob. He was a tall, thin man with a curly, unruly brown beard, and his deep set eyes held a focus that seemed to always be resolutely determined. The first full day there, I asked him how he ended up here.

He chuckled with a bitter laugh. “Dumb prank when I was sixteen. My friends dared me to break in, steal something and bring it back.”

I looked at his face, at the thick wrinkles across his forehead, and the graying tips of his hair. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine,” came his reply.

I did the mental math quickly. “Twenty-three years?” I gasped.

“I’m not the longest here,” Jacob replied. “Only third. Mary over there…” He pointed to a woman with gray hair that came down to her waist. It was thinning badly, and you could make out the patches of pale scalp between the threads. “...she’s been here forty-something years. One hell of an immune system, I guess.”

I stared across the room. Most of the prisoners were fairly young. I was above the average age. Jacob seemed to read my face.

“Yeah, people don’t tend to last too long down here. Few of us just get lucky… or unlucky… I’m not sure.”

“So, what happens now. They leave us in this room forever?”

“We work for them,” he said. “Someone’s got to keep the citadel looking shiny and white for the rest of the island to see. So they send us out. Paint the buildings, trim the grass near the gates. That kind of thing. We also go round their houses, tidy up for them. We’re the workers.”

“So you get let outside?” I responded with an naieve enthusiasm. “Do people escape?”

“They’ve tried.” He said, rolling his eyes at my stupidity. “They were shot. All of them.”

I slumped back in resignation, and tried to accept my new fate.

Those first few days were impossibly hard. I had gone from the island’s upper-echelons to borderline starvation, and my stomach was rotting at its emptiness. I felt queasy, weak, and only half awake as if my body and my mind were capable of a fraction of their usual function.

My injuries were also slow to heal. After a full day of staring in ignorance at my swollen knee and blood-ridden trouser leg, Mary walked calmly from the other side of the room to inspect my injuries.

“You’re not taking care of that properly,” she said, sitting down beside me.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your knee, it won’t heal like that.” She took off her long cardigan and began wrapping it tightly round my knee.

“You need that,” I said, fearing what the cold would do to her bare skin. Without the cardigan I could see her true age, the sagging skin hanging off frail thin bones.

“That thing? So frayed it hasn’t been good for many years. But now I’ve given it up someone on the other side of the room will probably feel guilty and give me something better.” She smiled, and with a final tug pulled the cardigan in tighter around my knee, before tying it in place.

“That’s the compression done,” she said sitting back. “Jacob, pass me the basket.”

He handed her a small wooden basket that was used to deliver a few loaves of bread - our daily rations. Mary flipped it over, and lifted my leg on top of it. “Keep that elevated on there the whole night. Tomorrow, they’ll take it away, and you’ll have to use whatever they bring the food in tomorrow. But keep it elevated,” she said.

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Mining family. Three brothers. They played rough.” There was a small grimace as she recalled. “Now keep that elevated, and put pressure on it.”

And with that, she stood up and returned to the other side of the room.

Her intercedence worked though, and over the next couple of days, the swelling began to reduce, and while still painful, some movement began to return to my knee.

--------------

After four days, the door opened, and we were ordered outside. Though my leg was healing, I was still slacking behind the other prisoners, and the guards berated me for not keeping up with the pace. However, soon we were down by the front end of the Citadel. Here the grass was clipped back, the roads were paved in smooth stone, and most importantly, the homes were real.

The guards gave us various tasks and set us to work. A few people were given long scythes to trim the grass. A second group were sent to run some new underground electrical wire to one of the homes. I, and two others, were sent inside to clean the homes.

As we walked towards the home, the woman in our group muttered “Thank fuck. House cleaning.”

“This a good job?” I replied.

“It’s safe.”

The man continued her point. “We could be dealing with those electrical lines out there? Or we could be changing the gas tanks?”

“Gas tanks?” I inquired.

“They burn gas from tanks for heating and cooking. They import it just for the citadel from somewhere. Each home has its own tank,” the man responded.

The woman let out a hum of agreement. “I was working on the tanks last summer. Me and a guy called Grant…” I heard the past tense of ‘called’, and a small knot began forming in the pit of my stomach. “We were changing over these tanks when one of them just cracked, and suddenly all this foul smelling liquid pours over him. The next thing I know, some spark catches some of the liquid, and in an instant everything’s on fire. Grant screamed. I never knew pain could exist so bad as to produce those screams. He ran towards the forest, he maybe made it five metres before he fell over. I couldn’t sleep for a week. Each time I closed my eyes I could just see his panicked silhouette trying to run away from his own flames.” The woman paused for a few seconds. “Thank fuck we’re cleaning.”

I chose to join her in the relief.

Much of what we did was tedious, but simple enough chores: washing clothes, sweeping, or dusting surfaces. I quickly came to realize exactly how rich the council members were. Each room was decorated with beautiful, vivid artworks; portraits, landscapes, abstracts, every wall adorned with its own masterpiece. Any flat surface, shelves, tables, or countertops, held lavish ornaments; long silver candlesticks, smooth curved vases, or carefully blown glass sculptures.

But perhaps most shocking of all were some of the artifacts.

On a table in one home was something I ascertained to be a clock. It was connected to the electrical grid from a long wire that stretched from its back. On the front were four digits, displayed in bright red light, that changed over with each passing minute.

Another council member had a glass case containing an array of brightly colored gas lighters. The small devices, no longer than a finger, were relatively common and cheap as far as artifacts went. But this cabinet was full of them, haphazardly thrown in. Jewels, each worth enough money to feed a family for a year, casually poured on top of each other to form a colorful collage.

Perhaps most wondrous was what I saw - or more accurately heard - in the final home of the day. There was a device that at first seemed like a plastic black box. I paid it no attention at first. However, eventually, a council member walked in, opened a case on the front of the box, inserted some small disc, and left again.

I was confused by the moment, until a few seconds later the box began to produce sound. At first it seemed like just a random mesh of different notes and noises. But that faded, and was replaced by the first few strokes of a deep violin. I don’t know how, but a melody began to appear from inside the black box. Then there was singing and words began to fill in the air in an impossible fashion. It took me a few seconds to even comprehend what I was hearing before I could even begin to process the words being sung.

“That if you dare to try, to rebuild the pieces of your life,

Then you’ll find, the things you held so dear, the things you held so close, were never really yours."

I hobbled over to the small plastic box, checking over my shoulder that I was alone. I looked at the case the small disc had come in. A grey image displaying a series of pins read: "Broken Records. Until The Earth Begins to Part".

My mind returned to the song.

"And rip it up, rip it all apart,

This place that are parents built, we’ll let it all burn down to the ground,"

I couldn’t even begin to describe the music that was playing. It’s rhythm, melody, and lyrical style were completely foreign to me. But still, it grabbed me. I felt something alien enter into my body, I could feel the drums and strings enter my veins, releasing some new chemicals in my brain. They latched on. And I knew somehow that I wouldn’t forget that moment, or what that song sounded like. I only heard it once, and yet I will be able to recall those words as long as I live.

And then there was one line on the end of the song.

“And we are nearly home”

The music continued to play as I worked. It was perhaps midway through the third song that the moment of peace was broken by a panicked scream from outside.

I ran outside towards the sound. Outside I could see a group of people standing next to a small trench that ran from the perimeter wall, towards one of the houses.

I could hear Jacob shouting to the others. “Stand back. The wire’s still live.”

“Someone turn off that box. Now,” someone else pleaded.

Peering round the group, I looked down to see Mary, her body frozen against the ground. Her eyes were wide open in a state of shock, but there was no life. Her thin white hair fell awkwardly across her face. A few strands brushed the corner of her open mouth, a wide gape with yellow teeth. Her lips were pulled back, as if going to speak words that would never arrive.

Her health, her luck, had all been wiped out in a moment. Any of us could have been next. Dice had been thrown, and you never knew when you might be chosen. When they opted not to shoot me on site the night I arrived, it was only a temporary reprieve. I would die here, perhaps sooner than later.

My mind was made up. I would have to try and escape.