TWENTY-FIVE

A man’s voice descended into the dark hell that surrounded Jordan. “Heard Mason’s dogs ripped this guy apart. Wonder what he looks like.”

“You suggesting opening a sealed coffin lid?”

Jordan’s heart hammered. Although he’d become accustomed to the confinement and had assumed the worst, confirming his suspicion that he was in a coffin triggered new horror. He was entombed. He tried to yell into the gag filling his mouth, but nothing happened.

Rescue was less than a foot above him. Just a thin layer of wood away. He willed his feet and hands to move, but his body wouldn’t obey him. He had to get out. The claustrophobia was overwhelming but still not so strong that Caitlyn was out of his thoughts. Where was she? Did she need his help?

“Wasn’t saying we should do it. Just wondering.”

Jordan’s world tilted. Then he rolled against the side of the box as an outside force lifted it.

“Come on,” Jordan heard. “The funeral wagon’s waiting. And I’m hungry.”

Despite their silence, it wasn’t difficult to feel the rhythm of motion and realize that two men were carrying him. The cracks of light grew dimmer and brighter and dimmer again, giving Jordan more clues of movement. Until the light became so bright he could see the rough interior of wood.

The brightness told him that he was outside. Bird sounds confirmed it.

Then he heard a flat smacking sound while the box shuddered with the vibration of impact. The front end of the coffin had been dropped onto the wagon, he imagined.

It slid forward, then Jordan heard departing footsteps, along with the lighter slap of leather. Like reins. He felt a roll into motion.

The funeral wagon was taking him away. To be buried alive.

The factory foreman wore khaki pants and a freshly ironed white shirt. He sat in a cage above the factory floor. The sides of the cage were made of glass for an unimpeded view in all directions, and the floor of the cage was thick Plexiglas. He sat behind a desk in the cage, with a set of controls on the side of the desktop. The cage hung beneath a monorail system that matched the pattern of the assembly line below. By pushing the control buttons, he was able to take the cage anywhere on the factory floor and directly view any of the dozens of children who produced computer chips.

Mason Lee stepped into the cage, knowing the foreman had been alerted for his arrival and his protected status.

“Out,” Mason said.

The foreman raised his palms, as if warding off a blow. He moved away from the desk, past Mason, onto the upper deck of the factory.

Mason spent plenty of time in the factories. It was surprising how often one of the imprisoned would give out information, even hurting someone else, if it gave the prisoner some creature comforts. Without hesitation, Mason pushed the start button to move the glass cage along the monorail.

He moved above the dozens of children who worked on the smaller computer parts, their fingers much more dexterous than adults’.

Farther down the line, Mason zeroed in on the one prisoner he needed. He stopped the cage, then put his hands on the levers to control the hydraulics.

The factory was white, sterile, dustless, and nearly noiseless. The fifty children under the age of ten who stood in a long line at the conveyor belt barely made a sound. The workers wore white gowns.

Tasha stood behind her son, fifteenth in the line. He held a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver and was assembling the back cover of a communications device to be shipped Outside.

“That’s thirty-one,” she whispered. “You need to hurry up. You’re five behind for this hour.”

He answered without turning his head. “My stomach hurts.”

“I’m sorry, baby. Just a couple more hours.” She heard a sound that ripped her heart. Her boy was crying. Worse, a monitor had drifted over.

“Silence!” The teenage monitor glared.

Tasha wanted to strike out, but she knew the consequences.

The monitor glanced at a digital readout in front of Tasha. “He’s falling behind.”

“He’s sick. If you’d just call the foreman.”

The boy sneered and shook his head. “Not on my shift.”

Tasha gritted her teeth, holding back a reflexive reply. She turned away, disgusted with the monitor, then recoiled and brought a knuckle to her lips. The foreman’s cage dropped silently to the floor behind her.

And leering at her from inside was the face from her nightmares.

Mason saw the woman’s reaction as the cage slowed to a stop. He merely crooked his finger to beckon her inside.

She obeyed, like a zombie. That’s the way it was. Once he owned a person, he owned that person forever. Her walk was a broken shuffle. He hoped she’d been walking like that since the day he placed rats beneath a bucket turned upside down on her husband’s belly. She’d been too stunned to make any noise above the hiss of the blowtorch, but after the first rat emerged from her husband’s side and Mason told her that her son would be next, she agreed to tell Mason about the small network of friends who also owned books.

She opened the glass door to the cage.

“Inside,” Mason said. “And shut the door.”

He studied her. Since he’d arrested her for teaching her children to read, a year in the factory had dulled her hair, added flesh to her face, turned her complexion to the whiteness and texture of dough. Not much pleasure for the taking now, he thought, although the fear in her expression was a pleasant echo of their last occasion together.

“Walk around to this side of the desk.” Mason didn’t rise from the chair. “You’re going to help me with something.”

She began to walk. No protest.

Mason hit the hydraulics and raised the cage. He waited until they were high above the floor again.

“Your fourteen-year-old daughter is at this factory too,” Mason said. “You obey me completely, or I might drop the cage on her. I’ll see if she sounds anything like her mother when she screams.”

The woman’s head dropped, and he felt a warm tingling in his chest.

Mason stayed in his chair. “There’s a vidpod in front of me. It’s got writing on it. Read me what it says.”

She hesitated. “Reading is illegal.”

“So is what I did to you after your husband died. Need a reminder?”

He didn’t lift the vidpod toward her. Power meant that he could wait until she reached for it.

Slowly, she did. She frowned as she saw the screen of the vidpod. “There’s not much there and it doesn’t make sense.”

He rabbit-punched her in the belly. As she collapsed forward and brought her face down, he backhanded her across the cheek, straightening her again.

“Good Christians, like good soldiers, don’t ask questions,” he said. “It wasn’t your choice to decide whether it makes sense. Only to answer my question. What does it say?’

“Three p.m. Every day for the next week. Brij will guide you.”

The tingle increased for Mason. Not only because of her abject weakness, but because what she read made him nearly certain that his hunch about the unregistered vidpod had been correct. And because of what the knowledge would be worth to him.

He hid this satisfaction. “On your knees and beg that I’ll leave your daughter alone.”

Immediately, she fell to her knees. Mason locked eyes with her. She didn’t even have the willpower to reach up and wipe the blood that trickled from the side of her mouth.

“Please don’t hurt her,” she said.

“You’ll do anything I want?”

She glanced around. “This cage is glass. People will see—”

He lashed again, the smack echoing in the hush of the small cage. “Good Christians, like good soldiers, don’t ask questions.”

“I’ll do anything you want. Just don’t hurt her.”

“Then look at something else for me,” Mason said. He grabbed the vidpod and touched the screen several times until a graphic loaded. This was the image that had first given him an idea of why the fugitive had been carrying the vidpod.

“This.” Mason had his thumb and forefinger pinched together on the screen. Leaving them on the screen, he spread them apart, making the image bigger. He held the vidpod screen in front of her so she could see clearly what he meant.

“You’ve seen symbols like these before, haven’t you,” Mason said. “You even know what it means—3 p.m., every day for a week.”

It seemed like the answer was stuck in her throat. She stared at his chest.

“Think of your daughter. Is this a time you want to lie to me?” He used his voice to caress her.

She lifted her eyes back to his.

“I can’t read,” Mason said. “But symbols like these were on the sheet of paper that your husband threw into the fire.”

When Mason burst into their house, the husband’s first move had not been to protect his family, but to race from the kitchen table with a sheet of paper, toward the fire, ignoring the warning blast from Mason’s shotgun.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“You and your family were going to try to reach the Clan. Who delivered the paper?”

“You tortured my husband for those answers. He was telling you the truth when he said he didn’t know. Don’t you think he would have told when the…the…”

She was near hysteria now, certainly remembering the rats.

“You had a GPS location? And a message with it?”

On the fugitive’s vidpod in front of him, there’d been a point marked on the map of the Valley of the Clan. Beside it, the message she’d just translated. Three p.m. Every day for a week. Brij will guide you.

That’s where they’d be waiting for the fugitive Mason killed. No other explanation.

She let out a deep breath. She nodded. “A time and a location.”

“And the symbols? Were all the symbols the same?”

“I can’t remember. One was underlined too. A different one than on the screen.”

“What do the symbols mean? How were they going to help you escape?”

“I don’t know.”

“But your husband did.”

She shook her head. “He would have told you. He was a strong man, but what you did…”

Again, she sobbed and couldn’t finish.

“Look at me,” Mason said.

Her chin trembled, but she stared at his eyes.

“If there’s anything you’re not telling me, I’m going to find out. And when I do, I’ll be back. Not for you. What do the symbols mean?”

“I don’t know.” She was stronger now. Mason took that, combined with her uncontrollable tears, as a sign that she was telling the truth.

He began to lower the cage and said nothing until it was at the level of the factory floor again. When the door opened, he pointed for her to leave and deliberately waited until she reached the doorway, almost free of him.

“Your daughter’s name, Melissa, right?”

It froze her. He spoke to her back.

“I only live but a few miles over the next hill,” he finished. “You tell anyone about this conversation, Melissa is mine. Alone. At my cabin. It will only be a day, but she’ll come back years older. Nod if you understand.”

She didn’t turn back toward him, but nodded. She left the cage the same way she’d approached it. With a shuffle as broken as her spirit.

Mason leaned back in his chair. On the way back up in the cage, he gave some thought to returning for the daughter. If he didn’t escape Appalachia, he’d sure be in the mood for solace.