Against Gravity

It was all of them.

The door stopped its hideous slamming. The ensuing silence was immediate, shocking.

Kendrick recognized the new arrivals as members of the Maze's medical staff. Or perhaps they were merely technicians – their exact role was never quite clear, although they spent much of their time taking blood samples or X-rays of every prisoner in the Ward, always well disguised behind plastic visors. Two of the men who had arrived during Torrance's death throes now kicked down the wheels on the dead man's cot.

They wheeled Torrance out through the Dissection Door. Nobody ever came back from there. The guard followed them, his eyes still wide behind his transparent visor.

Kendrick realized that they had been left unguarded.

McCowan pulled himself up from his narrow cot and hobbled over to Kendrick. "Jesus, did you see that?"

Sieracki had a policy of keeping prisoners in restraints for up to forty-eight hours after they emerged from the operating theatre. But Torrance had been strapped to his cot for over four days, while Robert had been under restraint since almost the begi

Out of the sixty-odd men kept in Ward Seventeen since Kendrick's arrival, perhaps thirty-five had so far survived the ordeal of surgery.

Kendrick licked his lips. "That depends what you're talking about."

McCowan studied him carefully. "I saw that" he replied, nodding towards the vacant space where Torrance had been. "I'm talking about…" He looked as though he was searching for the right words but couldn't find them. In the end he reached up and tapped the side of his head, a furtive look on his face.

Kendrick nodded in understanding. So he hadn't been the only one to see what he'd seen. "I saw something, too," he said carefully. "But I'm not sure what."

"In your head?"

Kendrick nodded. "In my head, yeah."

Peter McCowan's journey over to Kendrick's side of the Ward had been precarious. His sense of balance seemed to have disappeared since his most recent surgery. Sieracki's augmentations had grown long roots into the fertile flesh of McCowan's nervous system and, as a result, he lurched like a drunkard every time he took a step and he fell over frequently.

McCowan moved his hands along the side of Kendrick's cot for support, until he could sit himself carefully on the edge. "I knew we'd all seen it. I knew." He glanced over at Whitsett, whose eyes darted around frantically under closed eyelids.

Kendrick looked over at Buddy Juarez: the surgery had reduced him to a shambling wreck, his head constantly tipped over to one side, his eyes rheumy and distant. He shook uncontrollably, and for a long time -several days now – had lost the power of speech. He appeared to be recovering slowly, however, which had saved him so far from being wheeled through the Dissection Door. Unlike Torrance, Juarez still had a chance.

"Yeah," said Kendrick. "But was it real? It felt like I was… inside-"

"Inside Torrance's head, yes," McCowan finished. He looked as if he was about to cry.

Despite his restraints, Kendrick managed to touch the other man's hand, laying his own gently on McCowan's scarred fist. That seemed to calm him, and after a little while the man's expression smoothed again. But he still could not look Kendrick in the eye.

"Dear Christ, what I would give. What I would give to…"

Get out of here, Kendrick finished in his head. "I know, I know." It remained an obsessive desire for all of them, even as they became resigned to the knowledge that it was an impossible hope.

"I saw them! I saw them!" This time it was Robert, struggling against his restraints. He writhed pathetically on his cot, his expression flickering between terror and delight. "I saw them."

McCowan pushed himself around in his half-kneeling position to stare over at the boy. There was still no sign of the guard. "Saw What, Robert?" he asked.

"The Bright," Robert whined. "I saw them."

McCowan shook his head and looked back at Kendrick. "What d'you make of that?" he asked softly.

"He doesn't talk about anything else." Kendrick glanced along the ward. Another prisoner stood up and stared angrily at Robert, his fists clenching spasmodically, one side of his face hanging slack. He tried to take a step forward, then started to slump to the ground, catching hold of the edge of someone else's cot. Other men – wherever the women prisoners in the Maze were, Kendrick had no idea – conferred in low murmurs. They too were aware that their guard was suddenly absent.

"Robert," Kendrick called out. The boy took no notice of him. He tried again, a little louder. "Robert, are you okay?"

Robert twisted his head up to stare at him. "I saw you. I saw you from the inside. Did you see them?"

"I've seen a lot of things, Robert. Take it easy. You're making people frightened." The man who had been clenching his fists sat now on the edge of his own cot, staring at his hands with an expression of utter despair on his face.

"I'm going to escape," the boy shouted excitedly.

"We're all going to escape," Kendrick promised him.

"You mean we're all going to die. I want to go with the Bright. They showed me the way!"

"The what?" asked McCowan.

Kendrick let his head drop back down. "He's been muttering about that for the past couple of nights." Robert still muttered and moaned and twisted on his cot.

"They'll show me the way," the boy continued. "The Bright. Only us."

Kendrick looked away from him, settling his gaze on the ceiling above. He could sympathize with Robert's desire for freedom. They all could.

"You were studying your fingers."

There was a screen mounted on the wall behind Sieracki's shoulder. He had cropped his hair close to the skull since Kendrick had first encountered him in the garage. His thin lips barely moved as he addressed his prisoner. On the screen Kendrick could see an overhead shot of himself, from an angle, sitting on the edge of his cot and, indeed, studying his fingertips.

Sieracki's office was located off a long corridor linking Ward Seventeen with all the other Wards. Kendrick had never been inside any of those other rooms, but sometimes Sieracki gave away more during his interrogations than he perhaps intended. By this means, Kendrick had discovered that the experiments carried out in Wards One through Twenty-three were relatively benign, in that the death rate rarely rose above two or three in five.

Through whispered conversations with other prisoners Kendrick had heard stories that the entire population of some Wards had been known to die in a single twenty-four-hour period, keeping the dissection rooms busy through the night.

After a while, Kendrick began to suspect that Sieracki himself was disseminating much of this information deliberately as part of his ploy to get the most accurate information from his experimental subjects during their interrogations. Sieracki was careful to make sure that they all understood that failure to cooperate almost certainly meant transferral to a Ward where the survival rate was approximately zero.

What Kendrick knew about Sieracki's past was minimal. Still, some basic facts had emerged over the long weeks of Kendrick's confinement. There was no way to substantiate any of these rumours, but nonetheless he held on to such brief snatches of information as though they were precious jewels.

Sieracki had supposedly been engaged in ru