I’m not ready to talk about what happened next. It was a long time with no food or water. Or sanitary facilities. Just the cage and the dark. It was designed to break me down. It did.

The world consisted of the cage. I slept a lot. Everything hurt. I was very thirsty. Dry mouth, lips and tongue. When I felt my face, my eyes seemed wrong.

I kept fainting. I know because I’d bang my head against the bars. Dizziness and aches, all the time.

I hallucinated. My mom in her nursing scrubs, demanding to know who did this to me and filling the air with Spanish-accented threats on my behalf. My dog from when I was a kid; the best dog, my other self. I was able to pet her again, feel her warm fur through the bars. I sang to her, silly songs like when she’d been alive. She kissed me with her slobbery tongue. Both visitors had been dead a long time.

There were times when I was lucid. Intellectually I knew this was just a routine Harrigan was running to keep people in line. It wouldn’t work if I died. Not as well, anyway.

I’d be brought up to the camp again. The other campers would see my misery, drink it in and say: well at least I ain’t him. Better keep my head down so I never go through what Owen did. Or Mandy.

Then what? I’d taken to tapping the femur bone Mandy had given me against my teeth. Not chewing on it. Then what?

One day in the dark I woke up and was feelin’ blue. And I saw a light.

It was probably a tiny, tiny dull glow, a yellow spot on the stone wall near the stairs. But to me, after so long in the dark it was like a magnesium flare. I actually held up a hand to block the blinding brilliance of it.

A voice spoke, loud and inhuman. Clicks, whistles, groans. Then in another language; this one was a lot of gongs and hoots.

Then in another language, and another.

A loud pop, like a gunshot. A real one, not a movie one; real ones sound like a handclap. Stone cracked around the yellow light. More pops. Something was coming through the rock around the light.

Vines, leaves. A rush of them, growing and twisting, Tearing the stone away. A flat, artificial surface beneath. It was glossy, wooden. The light now came from a little window, I could see, with numbers and a single vertical line within. A silver knob beneath.

The stone fragments fell away, pattering on the stairs as the vines tore and grew. There was a sense of violence, anger, urgency to the work.

The vines grew until all of the wall I could see was covered with a dense foliage, green and furious in the dark.

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A burst of stone. A glowing circle, perfectly shaped and smooth, about the size of a dinner plate, had appeared above the window. Its surface was a cloth, fancy and golden.

Suddenly music blared from it. It was an audio speaker. I was looking at a radio, surrounded by vines and blasting from a cave wall. As the sound boomed around the cave, big, colorful flowers exploded from the vines around the radio. Angry, angry flowers. The air filled with acrid perfume. Stone tore, huge chunks of it began falling, shattering on the stairs.

I’d heard the song before, somewhere. It was a famous, old old song, old when my mom was born. I later learned it was called Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller. A sleepy, joyful song, no words. Not an angry song at all. But it fit, and I don’t know why.

This was no hallucination. This was mine.

MINE.

I felt it in my bones. Mine.

Mandy had some kind of water thing she did. Dr. Jeff Harrigan had his let’s-make-people-and-kill-them thing. This was me. Mine. I could feel it. The music entered my veins, filling me with energy, or at least pulling me from death’s door.

Imagine being at the edge of sleep, and a bucket of ice water hits. Not pleasant, but you’re awake. Very awake.

And pretty angry. An icy bucket of water is no joke, after all.

I was still locked up, however. The radio hadn’t gotten me out. I shook the bars with new energy. No result, of course. I knew, somehow, that whatever had happened hadn’t made me strong like Mandy. That’s not what this was.

But energy surged through me. I was full of it; whatever dehydration had been doing to my body was all over, yesterday’s news.

What had happened?

I remembered that Mandy had said something about becoming…what she’d become. That the world here wanted people for certain things. That Harrigan had something, and Mandy did too. Magic.

Was that me? Is that what had happened just now? Was I like them in some way?

But I hadn’t gotten super strength or shapechanging or the power of cage disintigration. I had a radio in a rock wall, surrounded by vines in the dark, where no sun would ever shine on their leaves.

Moonlight Serenade came to an end. And a voice came from the speaker, urbane, male, polished in an old-fashioned way.

“Our friend Owen Walsh was in a bind. But he knew that help was on the way!”

There was a pause. It went on. I tried to speak, to say I didn’t know, but I couldn’t talk. My throat was full of dust.

“Tuning in to the Green Radio will put the reet in your pleat, the drape in your shape, the zoot in your suit! Suddenly Owen knew that Sean Harrigan was on his way down here to get him out at this very moment!”

Really.

“That’s right, good old Sean. His father had made him do it and Sean was in poor spirits. He planned on taking his frustration out on whoever he rescued today, and he was expecting a weak or unconscious sad sack. Did that sound like Owen?”

I shook my head. I clutched that femur bone. It creaked as my grip tightened.

Batter up, yeah?