POV: Nova
The room had no windows.
That was the first thing I noticed. No windows meant no way to track the sun. No sun meant no way to know how much time was passing. I had a feeling that was not an accident.
They pushed me inside and the door locked behind me with a sound that was very final. Like a period at the end of a sentence you did not want to finish reading.
Six other girls were already there.
Four of them were crying. One was curled against the wall with her knees pulled to her chest, rocking slightly, staring at nothing. One was sitting completely still in the far corner with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap, watching the door like she was waiting for something specific.
That last one caught my attention.
I did not go to the crying girls. I know that sounds cold. It was not cold it was math. Crying meant they were feeling right now, and feeling right now meant they were not thinking. I needed someone who was thinking.
I crossed the room and sat down next to the still girl.
She turned her head and looked at me. Wide dark eyes. Young maybe seventeen. She had a cut above her left eyebrow that had dried without being cleaned, which told me she had been here longer than a few hours. Long enough for blood to dry and nobody to bring her anything to treat it.
"How long have you been here?" I asked.
"Since yesterday morning." Her voice was steady. Quiet, but steady. "My name is Sera."
"Nova." I looked around the room again. One camera in the top right corner. One camera above the door. The angle on the right corner one was slightly off a small blind spot along the left wall, maybe two feet wide. I filed that away. "Have you seen the guards rotate?"
Sera blinked. "What?"
"The guards outside the door. How often do they switch?"
She stared at me for a moment. Then something in her face shifted not hope exactly, but the thing that comes just before hope, the possibility of it. "Every two hours," she said. "I counted. They talk for about a minute during the switch. The new one always takes a few seconds to get settled."
I looked at her properly for the first time. "You were already counting."
"I had nothing else to do."
I almost smiled. Almost.
I spent the next hour doing what I do when everything is wrong and I cannot fix it yet. I made a list inside my head. One camera blind spot left wall, two feet. Door lock keypad from outside, handle bar from inside that did not work. Ceiling solid, no panels. Floor concrete, no give. Ventilation grate upper right wall, too small for a person. One guard rotation every two hours with a sixty to ninety second gap at the switch.
That was something. Not much. But something.
Sera watched me the whole time without asking questions. The other girls had slowly gone from crying to exhausted silence. The room got quieter as the hours passed. Quieter and colder.
Sometime around what I guessed was late evening, a guard slid four bottles of water and a box of crackers through a small slot in the bottom of the door. Nobody thanked him. He did not seem to expect it.
I drank half my water and gave the rest to a girl across the room who looked like she had been crying so hard she had nothing left in her. She looked up at me with puffy eyes. I did not say anything comforting because I did not have anything comforting to say that was also true. I just nodded and she nodded back.
Sera ate her crackers in small careful bites like she was making them last.
"You are not scared," she said to me, soft enough that only I could hear.
"I am terrified," I said.
She looked surprised. "You do not look it."
"Being scared is fine," I said. "Being scared and doing nothing is where it goes wrong."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Do you have a plan?"
I looked at the camera. Looked at the door. Looked at the blind spot on the left wall. Thought about the sixty to ninety second window during the guard switch. Thought about the hair clip still in my pocket that they had not bothered to take because I was Powerless and what was a Powerless girl going to do.
"Yes," I said.
"Is it a good plan?"
"It is a plan," I said. "That is what we have."
The lights did not go fully off at night they dimmed to a low gray hum that made everything look underwater. When the room had been quiet for a long time and most of the other girls had slid into restless sleep, I leaned close to Sera and told her everything. The blind spot. The timing. The clip. What I needed her to do, which was stay close and move when I moved and not stop for any reason once we started.
When I finished she was quiet for a moment.
"Will it work?" she asked.
I looked at her honestly. "I have no idea."
She nodded slowly. "Okay."
"Okay you will come?"
"Okay I have no idea either," she said. "And I am going anyway."
Something in my chest loosened slightly. Not much. But slightly.
I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes, not to sleep but to think. I thought about Reo running down the street. I thought about how small he looked getting smaller in the van window. I thought about the promise I made in the dark.
I was going to get out of this room.
I was going to get Sera out too.
And then I was going to figure out who was at the top of this whole rotten system and I was going to take it apart piece by piece until there was nothing left.
I was so deep in that thought that I almost missed the sound of the door.
It opened. Not during a rotation. Not at a scheduled time. Just opened, sudden and sharp, and a guard stepped in and stood in the frame and looked around the room at all of us with an expression that had nothing human in it.
Every girl who had been asleep jerked awake.
He looked down at a tablet in his hand like he was checking something. Then he looked up.
"Listen carefully," he said. "I am only saying this once."
The room had gone completely still.
"Buyers are coming at eight tomorrow morning." He looked around at us like we were items on a shelf. "All of you will be assessed and selected before noon."
He looked back at his tablet.
"Get some sleep."
The door closed.
The lock clicked.
In the new silence, one of the girls started crying again. Then another. The sound filled the room like water filling a low place.
I looked at Sera.
She looked at me.
We had one night.
I reached into my pocket and closed my fingers around the hair clip. It was small and thin and completely ordinary.
It was also the only thing standing between me and eight o'clock tomorrow morning.
I started counting seconds until the next guard rotation.