Twenty

“Okay, okay,” she told them as they pulled her along painfully. “I’m coming, you don’t have to drag me.”

The two men finally relented, let go and motioned her to walk on ahead of them, Instructing her to go left or right or to climb up a set of stairs when they wanted. Well, where was she going to run? Even though she could visualize the maze so far, getting out would mean going back, not forwards to where she was being put. Tory had yet to cross her path.

And then she was put in a small room, a cell of some kind, this time absolute solitary confinement.

“You stay here,” she was ordered, and then the door was closed in her face and locked.

There wasn’t much to the room. There was a cot against one wall, and a thick window on the opposite wall so caked with dust on the outside she couldn’t even see out of it. There wasn’t much light anyways coming through, so maybe it was dark, night, but she didn’t think so. Perhaps the windows didn’t look out on the outside, but into some other cave chamber, or would have if it wasn’t so caked with orange-red dust.

Tory swore and raged through the room, trying out everything that she wasn’t supposed to say in front of her parent or classmates, either back in the CU or home, The kind of words the team back home would use when they thought she wasn’t listening or didn’t care. But all that didn’t really make her feel better. She wound up lying on the cot and staring up at the cracked ceiling, imagining the cracks represented this place, folded them over in her mind into a three-dimensional maze, and went over all the ways to get out.

She’d always liked mazes for some reason, always. New Angels was a maze really, just a massively big one, and Tory mourned that she would never get the chance to explore even the tiniest bit other than what she had. The outer towers had been the borders, the city itself, rebuild most of the central part had been flooded when the sea came in. Levels and levels, millions of places to sneak around and check out.

And then her life had compressed into a Mars-hard rock of a real prison. As much as Tory had complained about the CU, she’d managed to put herself in a real prison right her, all on her own. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

It was better to think of mazes, trace her steps all the way back to the airlock out. Easy.

Mazes were easy. Locks were harder. Guards with guns had to be worse. And she was being held in a crater millions of kilometers from anywhere.

But now she had an idea why.

“You’re a hostage,” one of the guards had told her. “Your parents give us what we want you get to leave.”

Was she being held for ransom now? How did that make any sense? It wasn’t like her parents were rich or anything like that. The corp had paid for their trip, relocation from Earth to Mars.

How could her parents be so important to some group of Marian terrorists? They were just A.I developers. What were they doing? It had something to do with a big ice field in the northern hemisphere. Utopia Planitia, that’s where it was.

And probably just programming robots here to cut up the ice to make water, oxygen for air to breathe and hydrogen for fuel. Robots who did what they were told, unlike Martians. Martians.

Tory decided that she hated them as much as the people who had brought her to this planet in the first place. But saved her most burning hate for Gurminder. He was the one who had pretended to be her friend, brought her here and left her to rot, he deserved the worst that could be coming to him.