Siphoned Souls

❃ Velika ❃

The rain is loud and heavy against the concrete. When the drops land in the puddles of water at either side of the road it makes mesmerizing ripples that I would have stopped and stared at if I wasn't getting soaked. As it was, I hurried along, trying to shake off the chill I feel in my bones. The bright billboards glare down at me from above, cars drive past, and people push by me on the sidewalk. It's a dreary day but the city is still full of life and noise. Every block or so, I would pass a government building with a digital clock that blinked down at me in angry, bright letters. 8:52.

It seemed to be taunting me. I'm going to miss my curfew. My house is still at least 15 minutes away. I hurry along and try ignoring my growing nerves. 8:53. My house is still a while away. I tune everything else out and begin walking faster, ignoring the sounds of the city and the people pushing past me, as I focus solely on getting to my house. 8:54. I wouldn't make it. 8:55. I'm running out of time and the distance is still too much. 8:56. My jeans are soaked, rubbing against my legs uncomfortably. I pick up the pace anyway. 8:57. My parents might kill me. The city had been strict about the curfew ever since one of the Jones' girls went missing. 8:58. I wouldn't make it.

Not knowing what else to do, I step into one of the government buildings. There's one on every corner, and they must have a phone that I can call my parents on. I sigh in relief at finally being out of the rain and timidly walk up to the receptionist.

"Um, excuse me." She barely looks up from whatever she's doing on her computer but seems to know what I want before I can even get a word out.

"Name?" she asks me, picking up her phone.

"Oh, um, Velika."

"Number?"

I recite my parent's number, and she nods, dialing it.

"Missed curfew?" she asks me while the phone rings. I nod. She makes a vague noise of acknowledgement and points me over to a row of chairs on the wall next to the door. It takes me an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out what she wants, before I go sit down. I'm next to a man smoking a cigarette, and I try not to breathe in too much. He doesn't acknowledge me, so I don't acknowledge him. I hear the receptionist talk to my parents in a perky voice before hanging up.

"They're on their way, sit there, and don't leave this room." she tells me before leaving into some type of back room. In the corner, a security camera blinks to life, a red dot telling me it's recording.

"They say that to everyone. I wouldn't listen if I were you." I startle, hearing the man next to me begin talking. He either doesn't notice or doesn't care, continuing, "The government has a lot of skeletons in its closet, and quite a few of them happen to be hidden in between these four walls."

I turn to ask him what he means, but when I look next to me, it's like he vanished, the only sign he was ever here was the cigarette smoke still curling through the air. I try to shake it off, thinking maybe I imagined it, but I couldn't get his words out of my head. And I did love an adventure. That's what had gotten me to miss curfew in the first place.

I look around the room. The door the receptionist had come through remains firmly shut. I quickly pull myself up off the chair and dart over to the hallway leading deeper into the building. It's long, with flickering fluorescent bulbs the only source of light. It looks like something straight out of a horror movie or some indie game. I ignore the uneasiness that rises inside of me, and I make my way down the hall to the elevator doors. It gets creepier the farther I go down the hall. I can see things hidden in the shadows and I can hear the skittering of little mice and bugs crossing the hall behind me, but anytime I look, it's empty space.

The elevator doors open as I approach them, and I notice there is no button next to the doors. Maybe it's motion activated? I swallow thickly and hope that no one is watching me on the cameras. The red lights are still blinking down at me from the corners of the hallway. I step into the elevator and notice again that there are no buttons. The doors close and the box jerks into action.

Less than two minutes later, the doors slide open to reveal a brightly lit grid of rooms. It's definitely different here. It seems clean and sterile as opposed to the dreariness of outside and the creepiness of downstairs. It just looks like a weird grid of offices at first, until I look closer, and I start to see the silhouettes of the people inside the cubbies through the heavily tinted glass.

It was the only thing you could see: a vague, blurry shadow of the person inside. Most of them were sleeping, but some seemed to be sitting against the glass or rocking themselves back and forth. I want to run back downstairs and sit quietly in the waiting room again, kicking my feet while thinking of my parents coming to get me. But I don't.

We had learned about places like this in fourth grade science. Heat farms, they were called. Instead of prison, if you broke any of the rules, you would be sent to a heat farm, where they would keep you in a little cubby and siphon off your body's heat to power the city. Some people did something bad to get here, and some were born here and never given a chance to leave.

One thing I did know: once you were put in one of these places, you weren't leaving unless you were in a body bag.

They were great deterrents for rule breakers.

I turn around and run back over to the elevator doors.

They don't open right away.

They don't open at all.

The lights flicker once and I turn around, only to see that the heavy tinted screens were lightened enough so that I could see inside. One of the first people I see is Mara Jones. The missing girl.

She looks rough, rocking back and forth and mumbling crazily under her breath. She looks around her, and when she catches sight of me, she begins banging on the glass and screaming, looking around wildly like someone was out to get her. The other people who are awake look just as crazy, and when they catch sight of a lone girl in the hallway, they also start pounding on the glass, screaming.

It stays near silent in the hallway, with just the dull thump of fists against glass and the buzzing of the overhead lights. Whatever they're screaming, I can't hear it, but it's enough to make me start running through the grid, passing more and more cubbies with people in them. Some are awake and crazy. Some also pound on the glass. Some sleep. Some just go about their lives like this was normal for them. I start noticing as I pass by, that projected on the glass are little infographics. Name, ages, gender, and how many years they've been in this place. One thing they never have though, is a date when they'll get out.

I hear some whirring from the hallway ceiling, and I try running faster, but I feel a small prick in the back of my neck, and my legs give out. The last thing I hear before my vision darkens is a familiar voice asking, "Why did you listen?"

I don't know, I think, I really don't know.

I swear I can see the cigarette smoke still curling through the air.

❃

I wake up the next morning to a blaring alarm and a robotic woman's voice saying "Breakfast!" over and over again until I want to rip my own ears off to escape it. A chute in the wall opens and something wrapped up in aluminum foil comes tumbling down, landing right in front of me.

I disregard it, opting to instead look around my surroundings. A bed with more blankets than necessary, a small amount of paper and pencils in one corner, and a tiny little bathroom off the side.

It's uncomfortably warm here, and I start sweating almost immediately. I can't hear any whirring that might suggest heating units running, though. The heat must be coming from me, trapped in by the thick insulation that lines the walls.

In front of me is a large piece of glass. On it, in the bottom corner, is a backwards infographic that I read quickly.

Name: Velika Kaneva

Age: 12

Sex: Female

Years in Facility: <1

There's no date for when I get out.