Page 12

Chapter 12

?Maria

The door in front of Maria seals itself. It is locked. And for the first time Maria notices that there is no door panel on this side of the door. There is no way to reopen it. She is trapped. Beside the door there is only a simple metal plaque with the word Atrium engraved into it.

Maria places a palm carefully against the door, its coated metal warm to the touch, a living thing. She stares at the space on the wall where a lock panel should be.

This does not seem good. She will definitely not be paid now.

The room gives off a low-frequency whir now and its new pinkish tone deepens in hue. Something else is going to happen; she can feel it. The muscles in Maria’s legs tense, ready to move again if she has to, but what she is not expecting is a voice. A calm computerized female voice fills the room.

“System activated. Please make your way to the vestibule door,” it intones. Maria touches the locked door in front of her—she could not have made her way more to the door than this.

“I’m already here,” Maria says out loud, hoping the voice is some type of voice-activated assistant, like the speakers on the floors above.

The voice does not respond. Maria retracts her hand from the warm metal.

An idea. She steps back and tentatively waves her hands around the doorway, as if it were a supermarket exit, as if there might be a motion sensor she isn’t activating. Her waves broaden in span, then intensify, desperate.

But the door remains shut.

Maria looks around, certain suddenly that this is all some form of elaborate prank, a wave of relief coursing through her. This can’t be happening; it must be a trick. Her new client and her new wards will appear from behind the locked door and announce they have been watching her the whole time and secretly judging if she is a good fit for their family—as in so many reality shows. She lets out a chuckle of disbelief.

But the door does not open. Nobody appears to disabuse her of the reality of her situation.

The room remains still. Maria reassesses. The electrical fault opened the door; it might have also locked it. There is a strong possibility that the door is just broken. That the voice / computer / room / whatever-the-hell wants to let her out, but it can’t. She may be locked in for a while, at least until someone comes to check on her. And in her mind Maria carefully steps around the thought that there is a chance no one will become aware she is locked in, down here, for quite a while.

The client is not coming and the woman with the too-tight chignon won’t be back to sign her off for another ten days. There is a chance the woman may call and then, not receiving an answer, investigate, but there is no knowing how long any of that might take. Maria is fully aware that she herself has been the primary driver of contact between them up until this point.

The only other person she has seen over the last few days has been the electrician. But he had a lanyard, he had to get through security to even reach the house, and there would be no reason for him to return. Unless he wanted to collect his stupid fucking red pencil. She looks down at the offending pencil in her hand as if somehow she might be able to MacGyver her way out of the room with it. A humorless chuckle croaks out of her, like a toad.

Maria is thirsty. She tries to remember how long a person can live without water.

From the depths of her half-forgotten med school knowledge, the answer comes and with it a wave of urgency.

Her palms fly to the door as she tugs, gripless, at its smooth edifice. Her panic-slicked skin makes that act even harder to achieve. She fumbles for the edges of the hydraulic door, the seals, with her nails, in an attempt to pry it open, a simple truth driving her on: human organs begin to shut down after three days without water.

Three days is all you get. As a general rule, no one survives over a hundred hours. No one survives beyond four days.

And Maria is fairly confident that she might, safely, go unmissed for well over that time. And though she is clearly aware there is no point, that the room she is in, that the house she is in, will be soundproofed, this is when she begins screaming.

“Attention,” the computerized voice intones calmly, obliviously, interrupting Maria’s hoarse screams, freezing her mid-claw. “Please make your way to the vestibule door as soon as possible.”

And in spite of her mounting panic and the sheer quantity of adrenaline now pumping through Maria’s body, to her credit she forces herself to stop and think.

What am I being asked? She is being asked to walk to the door. But she is at the door. But then the question may be: is this the only door in the room?

There must be another door.

Maria spins around, her eyes flashing over the broad sweeping walls of the dim, pink-tinged room.

“Attention, this is your final warning. Proceed to the vestibule door immediately.”

Everything in Maria’s line of vision is degrees of white, the depth and perspective of the room hard to judge. Then her vision trips on something. On the far wall, a slight variation in depth, but no variation in light or color. But it is unmistakable now that she sees it. A new opening. The vestibule door. And through it, presumably, the vestibule. A low whirring tone begins, seeming to emanate from beneath her, and just like that, as Maria watches, the newly seen door slowly begins to close now too.

“No, you don’t,” she spits, springing into action and plowing full-tilt at the closing door, crossing the vast space of the room in a matter of seconds, to slip through the tiny closing gap, just in time, thwacking her other elbow hard into the wall just beyond the entry.

It is only when the vestibule door is firmly shut behind her that Maria, catching her rasping breath and clutching her incandescently painful arm, has the headspace to question whether going through was a wise next move.

Instinct has to count for something. After all, it’s been keeping people alive for millennia.

And, she reminds herself, her instincts have always sent her in the right direction.

She assesses the situation.

Either she has accidentally stumbled on something she shouldn’t have, something she was specifically asked not to stumble on—or none of this is an accident. This room, this situation has been meant for her from the very beginning.

Maria begins to realize that she never met the client, she never even met his children, only receiving jpegs of two smiling tots. She received emails from her agency, and flight information, and transfer details, but she never spoke to anyone in person. The only person she spoke to was the woman with the too-tight chignon.

She wonders if the woman is watching her now somehow.

Maria’s gaze whips around, half expecting the woman to be behind her. But the vestibule stretches out ahead, empty, a long, bare passageway with another door at the far end. She scans the corridor. There must be cameras in here, she decides, though it is impossible to tell where they might be located.

The room didn’t trigger when the electrician pressed the green button earlier in the day—it hadn’t played fair. It had been waiting for her.

About a hundred meters down the corridor from Maria, another door opens. She shivers, though it isn’t particularly cold, but the slight drop registers in an internal setting. The room beyond isn’t fully visible, but the light within is bright.

Maria starts walking toward the doorway ahead of her.

Someone knew exactly what was going on here. They had a plan and they were watching.

The next room slowly reveals itself as Maria approaches it. With a flush of relief, like no feeling she has felt in her lifetime, she recognizes the sound of running water coming from somewhere within.

Whatever happens, Maria thinks, at least I won’t die of thirst.

Through the doorway the room is now fully visible. It’s much smaller than the first, though also pure white and immaculate. On one wall a tap is flowing, its water pouring down onto a grate and disappearing out of sight. Every few seconds the tap stops and restarts in automated pulses. Above the tap a flatscreen panel is built into the wall showing what looks like instructions.

Once bitten, twice shy, Maria waves her arm through the doorway without going any farther, her motion activating the computerized voice.

“Welcome, Yossarian, Maria. Proceed to the control panel to begin.”

A shudder of dread passes through Maria.

That is her real name, a name she has not used with this client. It is not the name on her contract; whoever is doing this knows her birth name. They know who she is, her history, where she comes from, her damage and no doubt the series of leaps she took to get away from her old life and to arrive here.

She feels the twinge of her past awakening inside her. Her trauma—as always, buried just as far down as she can stuff it—twitching back to life. Her very own Frankenstein’s monster, a shadow self, made up of off-cuts, bits of memory and faded scars and half-remembered images. The journey she made as a child—the hunger, the thirst, the deep yawn of both inside her, deeper than the cold, or the heat, or the fear, and the dread of the adults around her disappearing, dropping away, the memory of only the three of them surviving. The three of them, alone, made it through with the forest dirt and the shiver of what it took to do so.

Maria inhales sharply. The realization hitting hard—she was not invited here to care for children, that is now a stone-cold fact, she was brought here to do this. This has something to do with the past. Her past.

She looks back the way she has come, down the blocked white corridor, but there is no way out. She reassures herself: sometimes the only way out is through. She knows this fact as implicitly as she knows how to stand and walk and run as fast as she possibly can. She learned it young. Sometimes the only way out is through.

The flow of water is the only sound in the silent rooms and Maria is already thirsty.

She has survived before and she will again.

And with that thought she steps into the next room, the door closing slowly behind her.