John could count on one hand the number of showers he had in the last month. How long had he been in here? Somewhere around the second week, he had forgotten to keep count of the days. No way to keep track, even if he had remembered. The spray cut off, and the nozzle retracted back into the ceiling. Searing air blasted down from four jets, pushing the steam and lingering water into the drain in the floor.

Once the air halted, John tore the thick, plastic bag covering his cast off and flushed it. A thick layer of water still covered the walls, the toilet, the door to his cell, and the slab, John’s poor excuse for a bed. The air didn’t dry much. More like it made his constrictive living space so humid he almost couldn’t breathe.

With nothing but time to think, John’s mind ran rampant. The many trains of thought went down the same damn rail every time: Frantzisca and Oly. Were they OK? What did they hear? Did they even know he was alive? An opaque window—the only other feature in his cell—ran lengthwise beside the door. John had tried to exorcise his frustrations by slamming his knuckles into it. If he had a thousand years and unbreakable fists, he might be able to shatter it. His fists turned out to be plenty breakable. Every time he smashed his cast, the nozzle dropped and sprayed some gas. He woke up with a new cast and a hangover headache he never imagined possible. After the third time, he got it through his thick skull not to do that.

The slot in the wall slid open again, and the metal arm extended. Instead of a plastic bag, a bright orange jumpsuit hung off it. They hadn’t given him a stitch to wear all this time. And who were they? Hadfield wasn’t the utopia Leadership sold to its residents. When things went counter-spinward, the elites needed… police. They had to be police. There wasn’t any other way to describe them.

John had never seen an orange jumpsuit before, but he figured out what caste the color meant: prisoner. He put it on. His chin quivered. With the thin amount of modesty, emotions threatened to erupt, and John squeezed his throat until they retreated down. No way would he give his jailers the satisfaction.

The rattle of metal parts reverberated inside the door, and four square holes opened, two on the bottom and two about waist height. A voice, deep and authoritative, emitted from the ceiling. “Place your hands and feet through the door.” It sounded recorded. John bent over and peered through. Another door stood on the far side of the hall like the hotels in the old vids, but this was anything but a hotel.

Prisons were an anachronism, a supposed obsolete social construct from a savage, bygone age. However, Hadfield had plenty of dark corners where someone might tuck one away. If he would get out of this one, he would have to do what the voice said.

John plopped down on the floor. The leftover moisture soaked through the fabric on his legs and crotch. As soon as he put his hands and ankles though, cuffs tightened around his cast, wrist, and ankles. The door, between his hands and ankles, split into four parts and slid into the wall, floor, and ceiling. It left behind a chain leading from a track in the floor, up through the cuffs on his ankles and hands, into another track in the roof.

The chain tightened and pulled John to his feet. The handcuffs pulled him low, just high enough to hunch over. All the tracks from the doors fed into one main track in the middle of the hallway. There might have been more cells to the left in the hallway darkened, but John didn’t check them out before the chain yanked him right. He shuffled barefoot as fast as possible. The cell across from his own was dark, but the next two cells beside his had their lights on. Most likely, there were at least two more in the same bind.

Heavy doors blocked the track. They parted enough to let John through and closed as soon as he cleared them. The chain took a quick turn at the first door on the left and paused. Mechanisms inside the door twisted and whirred. The latch freed itself with a definitive click.

The room had even less space than the cell. Nothing inside except a table between two chairs and another door on the far side. The chain pulled John to one chair and stopped. Like the last door, this one closed behind him. John sat with his hands suspended in the cuffs. John waited for the voice to give him some instruction, but there was nothing but the familiar silence, the same silence that filled the hours of the days. Little else to do but wait.

Mechanisms in the far door whirred and clunked. It slid open. The brothel manager—or the guy he assumed was the brothel manager—stepped in and glared at John. He wore a blue jumpsuit, but he didn’t carry himself like he worked a factory line. Labor all looked like they carried a weight on their shoulders, on the job and off. The manager looked more like he worked in a gym. Instead of sitting in the chair opposite him, the guy turned to stand at the back of the room. That rectangular hunk of metal still poked out of the back of his collar. He stared John down.

John needed to hear the voice of someone else, anyone else, even the man who dragged him to this place. The isolation had been maddening. He fought the urge to talk, though. They might use anything against him.

Another man came in, also wearing a blue jumpsuit, a terminal in one hand and a cane in the other. His hair was pure white, thin, almost bald at the top. Liver spots dotted his scalp. Purple birthmarks encircled his eyes. Wrinkles pulled on his face. He stepped with a stiff gait, aided by a cane. No doubt he would head to the recycler soon.

“You’re quite the disappointment, John.” The old man pointed at John with the handle of his cane. “We had an eye on you for our ranks, but you couldn’t keep it in your pants, could you?”

John leaned to the side, around the handcuffs. “Who are you two? Because you’re not Labor.”

The old man smirked. “Your life doesn’t have to be a complete waste though.” Thick eyebrows press down over his eyes. He spun the cane in his palm. “There is a need for you in the game.”

“Now hold on one damn second.” John’s spine straightened in his chair. “Are you supposed to be some casteless?”

He raised his chin, maybe in pride. “We are beyond caste.”

The younger man lifted his chin, mirroring his boss’s gesture.

John shook the chain of his handcuffs. Heat flushed his face. “Police? Secret police.”

The old man put his terminal on the table. “The question you should ask yourself is, ‘will I content to have the nutrients in my body made into leaf fertilizer, to have what’s little left of me become nothing more than a high for some divorcee loser, or,” he pointed the cane handle back at John, “will I enter the game and become everything I should’ve been in this world?’”

Those eyes, darkened by the birthmarks, hardened. They focused on something deep in John.

“Enter the game?” John furrowed his brow. “What game?”

He turned the terminal toward John. The screen said, “Do you consent? If so, press your thumb to the screen.”

John was getting sick of these non-answers. “Do you have one of those things on your neck, too?”

He reached behind and felt it. “Some days,” his eyes looked off into the distance, through John, behind him, “I don’t even notice it’s there.”

“I want to see Frantzisca and Olympia.”

“Make no mistake, you made sure you’d never see them again when you laid your hands on your patriarch. As far as they know, you stuck your dick into a casteless hive of trouble. They think you got yourself stuck on the wrong end of a blade,” his hand dropped into his lap, “and we aren’t about to correct them.”

Something new broke inside John every time he thought about Olympia, her bawling after her favorite father didn’t come home, the endless hours of weeping from not knowing what happened to him. From his mind, to his ears, the wailing emanated. At some point, he had to seize the very sound of it with his very will alone. John forced himself to believe she would get over it someday—a lie he had to believe or he’d go mad.

And there was Frantzisca… John would never see the fragile beauty of her face again. Every time he thought there was nothing to shatter inside, he found another shard ready to depart the whole.

And it was all Paul’s fault. If it wasn’t for that divorcee, John would be with his family, bouncing Olympia on his knee, fucking his wives, making love to Frantzisca. If only these guys with the metal on the back of their heads weren’t watching, he’d have crushed Paul’s skull into a pulp in peace. But they were watching. They caught him, and now he was here.

“This game is the only way out?”

The old man shrugged. “Unless you don’t mind dying so divorcees can get high.”

“How long will I be in there?”

“You’ll die in a recycler or the game.” The old man puffed out his lips and let the air escape. “Which one is less painful? I’m not sure.”

They weren’t about to let John in on the big secret, no matter how many times he asked. He stuck out his thumb. “I can’t reach.”

The old man held up the terminal. “Allow me.”

John sent the sharp breath out of his nose. What else was he going to do? He pressed his thumb to the screen.

A hint of a curl rose on the ends of the brothel manager’s lips.

The old man pulled the terminal off the table. “You’re going to wish you chose the recycler, John.”