8

The only small bag I possessed was the overnight bag I'd brought with me on graduation night. I now filled it with pretty much the same items I had then—minus the silky negligee my mom had insisted on. That was stashed in the bottom of the beautifully decorated plywood chest that sat in the corner of my room. The moving day chest had passed down from my grandmother to my mother to me, and was meant for my daughter one day. Given the direction my life, and my marriage, was going, neither the chest nor that slinky piece of silk would ever be put to good use.

I dressed in jeans, a thin t-shirt with a hoodie pulled over, and running shoes.

Roman appeared, resting a hip against the doorframe. "Bring a coat and scarf."

I'd considered my coat and dismissed it, since I needed to travel light. But Roman was right. Winter was creeping up on us. The mornings were frosty and the nights were bitter, and I had no idea what I was heading into.

I stripped off the hoodie and shoved it into my bag, and pulled on my coat. I selected a dark brown cashmere scarf from the wardrobe and hooked it loosely around my neck.

"Ready?" Roman asked.

I shrugged and swiped my bag off the bed. I was about as ready as I'd ever be. A little scared, a lot nervous, but underlying all that was a thrill. Not excitement. Not exactly. This was more like a buzz of wary anticipation in the pit of my stomach. I was about to get all the answers I'd been searching for, but I was under no illusion that any of them would be good.

Roman stood aside as I swept passed him out the room. "There's still time to change your mind."

I sent him a dry look over my shoulder.

He caught up to me and tugged the bag from my hands. "We'll drive to the access point, which means we have to get you through the barrier. I'd rather the guard doesn't know you're leaving Parklands."

"So you're shoving me into the lockbox after all," I filled in.

"That won't be necessary."

As I stepped outside the cabin, the frigid night air stung my cheeks and burned my lungs. I didn't care. I breathed deep, feeling almost lightheaded by an overwhelming sense of freedom. This wasn't the first time I'd been outside since my imposed confinement. If I hadn't spent some hours on the deck each day, I would have gone certifiably insane.

But tonight was different.

I wasn't just stepping outside the cabin.

I was walking out the cabin.

Roman's truck was a double cab and he instructed me to lie down on the floor in the back. Once I was squashed into the narrow foot well between the bench and the front seats, he threw his coat over me. I was blind and cramped, and it was a jolty ride once we got moving, but it wasn't the lockbox. I could breathe. The air wasn't getting thinner and thinner until my lungs strained for every scrap of oxygen.

We slowed down. Approaching the Parklands barrier, I presumed. The guard on duty usually just waved us through, but still, I held my breath. Technically, we hadn't done anything wrong. Yet. But this would look suspicious as all hells…and put an end to our excursion to The Smoke.

The truck sped up again without coming to a complete halt.

"We're through," Roman said, and a minute later, he pulled over to the curb so I could climb into the passenger seat. "Pull up the collar of your coat and wrap the scarf over your hair. The less recognizable you are, the better."

So that's what the coat and scarf were for. I did as he suggested, creating a hood with the scarf so it covered my hair and draped my shoulders. "I feel like a criminal on the run."

"Or an undercover spy."

A chill prickled my spine. "What do you mean?"

He went on to explain what an undercover spy was as we continued driving and I let him. We had fiction books and every once in a while, there were film screenings in the town hall. There was this one movie, a comedy, about a man who'd disguised himself as a frumpy housekeeper to spend time with his children. It was ridiculous, and hilarious. Jessie and I had laughed until tears streamed down our cheeks. He wasn't a spy, not in the true sense, but he'd gone undercover.

I knew what an undercover spy was.

But did Roman know how closely he'd scraped against the truth?

Was it an intentional slip to trip me up?

Because that's what I was in this marriage, in our home. I was a Sister of Capra disguised as a slightly off-kilter, stubborn and spoilt but moderately acceptable St. Ives graduate.

I watched Roman like a hawk from the corner of my eye, my heart slowly ramping up its beats. But he barely glanced my way again as he navigated the roads. Unless he had eyes in the side of his head, he wasn't watching for my reaction.

We passed through the Legislative District, where I'd grown up, and then into the Quantum Zone. Here the homes were boxy and the streets were all symmetrical, as if the entire suburb had been designed on grid paper. We stayed on the main road, the side streets flashing by as we rode deeper into the zone, leaving the residential area behind for large buildings that each took up an entire block on their own.

The Quantum Zone was our main technology hub for research and development. This was where they researched the cure for the fertility plague. This was where they'd refined the IVF treatments until it was now 80% effective.

I stared out the window at the sterile white and glass buildings. I'd never been this deep into the zone. It wasn't a forbidden area, it just wasn't particularly interesting. The Bohemian Quarter was my favorite.

Tonight, there still wasn't anything of interest to see from the outside. Inside, however…one of these sterile facilities housed our precious store of frozen ovarian eggs. Some huge walk-in storage freezer. Or perhaps many smaller freezers in many buildings. The supply had already lasted us 95 years. How many more years did we have before every last egg was gone?

Female reproductive systems no longer worked naturally. Our eggs were rotten. The entire purpose of Capra, of the Eastern Coalition, was to fix nature. To fix us. Until then, all we had was the limited supply that had been saved from the old world.

Which was an irony in itself.

Both the Puritans and the Evolutionists agreed: whether it was a plague brought down on us by God or Mother Nature. The fact that so many women had harvested and banked their frozen eggs because they were always too busy to get on with procreating was our downfall. Now that very act was all that saved the human race.

It was something to think about.

And something to worry about. "You said Sector Five was a trading post. What is traded?"

"Mostly necessities, and some luxuries." He shot me a look. "The barons formed empires around their plantations, ranches and mines. There's the Corn Baron, the Cattle Baron, the Tabaco Baron…you get the picture."

He turned his eyes back to the road as the streetlights dimmed behind us. We were beyond the Quantum Zone, travelling on a dark road that cut through forest.

I shifted in my seat to study him in profile in the ambient light from the truck's headlights. A trade goes both ways. "What do we give the barons?"

His jaw clenched, as if he were crunching down on his back teeth. "Technology. Medicines."

That wasn't all.

I knew it in my bones.

Roman had told me something of what the Outerlanders would do to me if I crossed that bridge.

The baron will have first rights to you. You'll be handed to him in exchange for coin or favors. If he likes you, he'll add you to his harem, otherwise you'll be a reward for one of his trusted men. Once you're used up, you'll be passed on to the dwellers for breeding which the baron will be happy to pay for.

I'd seen the children for myself.

You'll be passed on to the dwellers for breeding.

The baron will be happy to pay.

"That's not all we trade, is it?" My voice was thin, shaved with accusation. "We trade from our frozen store of eggs."

He took a long moment before replying. "The Eastern Coalition has farming land, but we produce mainly vegetables and fruit. For everything else, we rely on trades. We wouldn't survive without the barons."

"So we do trade our eggs in exchange for commodities."

He dipped his head my way, not taking his eyes off the road. "We do."

And this, right here, was why I couldn't trust Roman's truths. Why I had to see for myself. He wouldn't have mentioned the frozen eggs unless I'd challenged him on it. And how was I supposed to challenge his truths when I didn't know what I didn't know?

Roman pulled up beneath a seemingly random tree in the middle of the forest. He grabbed his backpack from the rear seat and extracted two flashlights, handing one to me. "We go on foot from here."

Without the truck headlights, it was pitch black. The stars were up there, but the thick canopies of evergreens here consumed their faraway light.

I turned the flashlight on before I climbed out of the truck. "Where are we? Won't it be a problem if someone sees the bobbing lights?"

Roman fitted his backpack on his back and hauled my overnight bag out, sliding the strap over one shoulder.

"I can carry my own bag."

He ignored that. The truck lights flashed as he locked it and started walking. "Very few people know about the access points and I have the security clearance to be here without raising suspicion."

We didn't walk for long, perhaps five minutes, before we came to a stop by another seemingly random tree. Roman hunched down and dug a hand into the nest of damp nettles and leaves that covered the forest floor. He found what he was looking for and straightened, pulling as he came up, and a hole opened in the ground.

I dropped to my knees to peer down. My flashlight beam revealed a long drop into blackness and a ladder bolted to the circular wall of the hole.

My pulse sped up.

The access point.

Right here in Capra. We hadn't gone through any barrier or gate or any form of guard security check.

My voice dropped to a whisper, because this felt like a secret too dark and deadly to even share with the night creatures of the forest. "Does this take us into a tunnel beneath the wall?"

"In a manner of speaking," Roman said. "This access point takes us into the tunnel for the supply train between Capra and The Smoke." He waved his flashlight toward the hole. "You'll have to go down first, so I can close the trapdoor."

I stared down into the black hole.

"It's not a long a drop," Roman said. "About fifty rungs."

That wasn't my problem. "How do I hold onto the ladder and my flashlight?"

"I'll shine my beam to light your way."

I tucked my flashlight into my coat pocket and used the ladder to carefully lower myself into the hole. As promised, Roman knelt on the ground and shone his torch down, helping me to see as I grasped the rungs. My feet had to feel their own way to make purchase on each next rung as I slowly climbed down the suffocating hole.

The air was musty and my lungs constricted, not unlike that crushed feeling in the lockbox. I definitely suffered from a mild case of claustrophobia.

Or maybe it was just a mild case of survival instinct.

Humans were not meant to squeeze themselves through a sausage funnel.

Acknowledging all that to myself didn't make any difference. I could still feel the walls closing in around me.

I forced myself to think of something else.

Anything else.

My thoughts landed on the Sisterhood. Supposedly, they occasionally smuggled women out of Capra to The Smoke. I wondered if they knew about this access point. I wondered if this was how they did it.

My contact, Rose, appeared to know a little about The Smoke. That's why the Sisterhood went to great lengths to avoid smuggling women out. Well, that, and the fact that disappearing women would raise suspicion. But Rose had heard that the conditions in The Smoke were appalling. That's what she'd told me. She'd heard it from a reliable source.

The Sisters of Capra were secretive to the point of ridiculousness—and malfunction, if you asked me. How do you achieve anything if no one is allowed to know anything? But I was starting to gather my own intel about their ways, such as this: the reliable source that Rose mentioned could be someone who knew about this access point.

The bottom of the ladder came quicker than expected. Fifty rungs wasn't a long drop at all, but I immediately saw why the hole had seemed so much deeper. It was pitch black down here. And I could still feel the cold, stone walls all around me.

I fumbled in my coat pocket to extract my flashlight.

What I saw wasn't reassuring. The tunnel opening up from the bottom of the hole was approximately six foot wide and six foot tall. But it couldn't go on for too long. Eventually it'd have to open into a tunnel wide and tall enough for the supply train.

When Roman joined me at the bottom, we had to walk in single file. This time he went in front. I fought for breath and trailed the tips of my fingers against the stone as I walked, reassuring myself that the walls remained an arm's length away, they weren't closing in on me, they weren't about to crush me.

Finally the tunnel opened up into a room-sized square. The walls were the same natural stone as the tunnel. Cut into the far wall was a solid metal door with a keypad.

This was the security that had been missing.

Roman punched in a series of numbers and the metallic clang of heavy duty lock pins disengaging echoed in the bare room. He depressed the handle bar and pulled the door open, gaining us entrance into the train tunnel.

I stood back on the raised platform against the curved wall, waving my flashlight up and down the tracks. I assumed he knew which direction to take, but that wasn't the question burning in my throat.

"Does the Guard know about this access hole?"

"In the highest levels, yes, they would have to know," he said. "This tunnel was part of an existing transport network from before. These access points were service hatches back then."

So either Rose's reliable source was high up in the Guard, or knowledge of the access points had filtered through the ranks over time. I was inclined to think the latter. Or I could be wrong. Maybe the Sisterhood didn't use this tunnel to smuggle people out.

We walked a few steps, and then the platform ended abruptly, forcing us to jump down onto the tracks. I shone my flashlight across the tunnel. On either side of the tracks, there was barely more than a meter or two. That wasn't a whole lot of distance between us and a train rushing passed.

"What happens when a train comes along?" I asked.

"The train has already returned to The Smoke for the night." Roman started walking beside the track. "It runs on a daily schedule, leaving The Smoke in the morning, and returning to The Smoke at four in the afternoon."

I hurried my steps to fall in line beside him. We settled into a steady pace with him lighting the way while I tucked my flashlight away as a backup if his batteries ran out.