A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(18)

Jane 23 thought about it. ‘We could do it without getting punished.’

‘They wouldn’t let us go there during the work day.’

‘We could go at night.’

Jane 64 shook her head hard. ‘We’re not allowed out of bed,’ she said, her voice high and shaky.

‘We are if we’re going to the bathroom.’

‘We aren’t going to the bathroom. They know where the bathroom is.’

‘We could say . . . we could say we were going to the bathroom, and we heard a weird sound outside the bathroom, and thought someone might need some help.’

‘Who?’

‘Someone. One of the little girls. We could say we heard one of the little girls and she sounded scared,’ Jane 23 said. Her own scared feeling started to go away, and in its place was something kind of hot and loud and good. They were talking about bad behaviour, but she wanted to do this. She wanted to do this a lot. So she did. Right then. She got up, put on her shoes, and walked away. 64 whispered something, but Jane 23 was already too far away to hear. She could hear her come quietly tap-tap-tapping after her, though.

‘This is a bad idea,’ Jane 64 said. ‘If we see a Mother, I am telling her it was your idea.’ She said it, but 23 knew it wasn’t true. 64 would never let 23 get punished in her place. Only bad girls did stuff like that, and 64 wasn’t bad. She was the most good.

The bathroom was cold. They moved through it real quick. Jane 23 stopped when they got to the hallway door. Maybe it was a bad idea. They could go back. They could go back right then and no one would ever know. They could just go back and sleep and have a good on-task day tomorrow.

She stepped through the door. 64 went with her.

The hallways were weird all dark, but it was easy to find their way. One time, they thought they heard a Mother, so they ducked behind a stack of bins. There was nothing, though. They were okay. They were okay all the way to the sorting room. The door was closed, but it wasn’t locked. Why would it be? Girls never went anywhere without Mothers watching.

‘I don’t think we should,’ Jane 64 whispered.

They shouldn’t, Jane 23 knew. She looked around the hallway. No one else was there, but that could change real fast. She knew how fast the Mothers moved.

‘Come on,’ Jane 23 said, taking her bunkmate’s hand. She went through the door. Jane 64 followed, not tugging back or anything.

Even in the dark, Jane 23 could see that the sorting room had been cleaned up. There was still a mess, but not a wet kind of mess. The blood and bits were gone, and the exploded stuff had been swept into piles. The scrap was gone from all their benches, too. Jane 23 was scared, even though the room was quiet. The room didn’t look like it had the last time she’d seen it, but in her head, she still saw it the old way. What if there were pieces of girls in there? What if there was a girl stuck under a desk and she grabbed them when they walked by? Jane 23 pressed close to 64. 64 pressed back.

The hole in the wall was covered with a tarp. There was stuff next to it, some kind of . . . Jane 23 wasn’t sure. There was stuff in buckets, and tools, too. She thought of the glue she used on broken good scrap sometimes. Maybe the Mothers were trying to glue the wall closed.

A corner of the tarp waved at them, pushed back and forth by air from . . . somewhere. The other side.

‘Let’s go back,’ Jane 64 said, but she said it quiet, like she wasn’t sure. She was staring at the waving corner.

Jane 23’s heart was beating so hard she thought she might break. She grabbed the corner in her hand. The air pushing it was cold. Real cold.

She pulled the tarp aside.

The stuff on the other side of the wall hadn’t made any sense before, but it made even less now. The huge huge piles of scrap were still there, but the ceiling that wasn’t a ceiling had changed. It wasn’t blue any more, and it wasn’t bright – at least, not in the same way. Before, it had been bright all the way through, but now, it was real dark, except for three big round lights and a whole bunch of little specks and something kinda smoky running across it. The not-ceiling was big. So, so big. Bigger than the sorting room, bigger than the dorm. It went on so far Jane 23 couldn’t see any edges. It went on for always.

Jane 64 wasn’t saying anything, just breathing real hard and heavy. Scared, probably, but she wasn’t talking about going back to bed any more, either. Jane 23 understood. She felt the same way.

Jane 23 stuck her hand out beyond the edge of the broken wall. It was real cold, for sure, but not cold like metal was cold or the floor in the bathroom was cold. It was just cold, everywhere. Her skin got tight and made little bumps. It wasn’t a very good feeling, but she liked it anyway, just as she liked it whenever she got to taste soap or blood or anything that wasn’t a meal. It was different. The cold felt different.

‘Twenty-three, don’t,’ 64 whispered.

But Jane 23 was listening to something else now – that hot, good feeling pushing all through her chest. She stepped past the wall. She took another step. Two steps. Three. Four.

The scrap went on as far as the not-ceiling did, piles and piles and piles of it. No wonder there was always scrap to sort. You could have girls sorting this stuff for years and they’d never be done.

She looked down. The floor outside the wall was dusty, powdery. There were little hard bits all over, too, and all of it sloped down toward the piles of scrap. She looked up again at the not-ceiling. It made her head hurt, and her stomach, too. Maybe if she got closer, it would make sense. Maybe if she could touch it—