Insight

Chapter Eighteen: Hole in the Wall

The times on my watch changed over to Onowon times as opposed to Earth times after two weeks, thoroughly confusing me. However they correlated to my body's internal clock a lot better and soon enough I got used to it and it made a lot more sense to use the Onowon times for the camp's schedule, let alone the fact that Onowon days had 36 hours and Earth only had 24.

Most of us had gotten to the point where walking around the camp didn't cause us unnecessarily bad muscle weakness, dehydration, and the shakes, though a couple kids still push it too hard on days where we had to participate in physical activities to the point where Eir still had to suggest to keep the requirement to every other day to avoid a build up of dehydration, exhaustion, and heat stroke victims in the Infirmary. But this meant that the schedules we got now replaced the time we were supposedly supposed to be working out with the camp chores. Each cabin got assigned a different chore from the next and the chores changed on a weekly basis so nobody had to constantly be cleaning the bathrooms in the Dining Hall or taking out the massive amount of trash the camp managed to acquire.

This week our chore was the trash and I didn't mind it. It was physically taxing to load up the automatic carts with heavy bags of trash and occasionally one of us would get a bag with a tear in it that leaked disgusting mystery fluids on us, but we were required to follow the carts of trash to the gates of camp in case the automatic carts couldn't sense where the opening was and we needed to reroute them. We normally weren't allowed to get close to the gates; this fact wasn't explicitly stated anywhere but there was always a Nurse to distract anyone who got too close. The gates also only opened for the removal of trash. The carts would pass through the gates to a truck that blocked the road out of camp and the truck had some kind of mechanism that compacted the trash from the carts before loading the compacted garbage into the truck and sending the carts back. Oftentimes they had the same problem getting in through the opening in the gate that they had getting out and the guy that drove the truck would have to jump down from the driver's seat of the truck and direct it back through the gates all exasperated. I usually stayed with my cart to see it back to where we were loading trash and often saw the truck driver get annoyed with the automatic carts.

He was strange looking, though when I asked Nurse Allison about it, she said that he looked like all Jurisdiction 12 citizens. He had red hair that, even without light glinting off of it, gleamed like it was on fire that came down to his hips and really dark eyes. It wasn't until I had seen him closer up that I realized that his pupils weren't circular, but more elliptical, not quite like a cats but not quite like those of the rest of the camp. His limbs seemed disproportionally long-and he was a lot taller than anyone I'd seen in camp-but not so much so that it spooked me. He also always wore a cloak, despite it being really warm at camp and I saw him shiver a couple of times like he was cold. Nurse Allison said his Jurisdiction was a lot hotter than where we were, though I sometimes couldn't see how that was possible.

On the fifth day that we were on trash duty, one of the carts seemingly could just never find its way back into the camp and the truck driver seemed to get increasingly more annoyed every time he had to exit his truck, which I assumed was probably heated so he wasn't cold. I was waiting for my cart to return while Moxy's cart got stuck outside the camp once again. When he came out to almost angrily redirect the cart, I decided to see if I could help him.

"Would you like me to stay here and make sure the carts get back inside so you don't have to?" I called out to him. I was sweating but he was visibly shivering. He looked at me with his strange eyes, surprised. Then his gaze flicked behind me and seemed to survey the entrance to camp. I turned around, wondering what he was looking at, and saw a Nurse walking away from nearby. After she was out of sight, I heard a voice from behind me.

"Yeah, actually, I would really appreciate that." Though the voice was super quiet and sounded somewhat musical, I realized it came from the man. He had a strange accent that I thought sounded vaguely like my dreamscape's Irish. "Just, don't tell the Nurses please. I'm not supposed to let anyone out."