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wasn’t even wired. If that door didn’t open in the next few hours, she would suffocate.
    “I have some good news, Jessshhica. We can actually pay you a little more. One thousand dollarsshh for your time. How does that sssound?”
    So the box would be on a timer. And these techs probably didn’t have any control over it; they probably just knew when it was scheduled to open. Which meant there would be safety margins. A little time for everyone to get settled, which she could use.
    “Think about what you might do with that thousand dollars, Jessshhica. Ssssomething pretty great, I bet.”
    She went to the video cameras but found nothing unusual. She carried them to a corner one by one and left them in a pile with their red eyes pointing at the concrete. Whatever happened here, she wasn’t going to be in a show. She wasn’t going to be watched and analyzed and used to improve procedures. She went back to the chair and circled it. But it was just a chair.
    “Jussshht another minute, Jessica. Almossst there.”
    She knelt in front of the box. She touched it. Nothing terrible happened, so she ran her hands around it. It was warmer than she expected. She found a tiny seam in the steel but couldn’t get so much as a fingernail into it and wasn’t sure she wanted to. She didn’t know what she was looking for. Options. But there weren’t any.
    She stood and paced. The only other thing was the speaker, so she went to that. To her surprise, it had a little compartment. Inside were red pills. She looked at these for a while. She did not think they were helpful.
    “All right, Jessshica. It’s time to open the boxsssschhh.”
    “Gahh,” she said. She began to walk toward the box, but her heart failed her and she retreated back to the chair. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something mechanical purred. The seam she had found cracked open and the top of the box began to rise. She squeezed shut her eyes and groped her way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging her ears with her fingers. That song she’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; she used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before she learned card tricks. It was how she’d met Benny: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Benny said, so that was mainly what she sang. She must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first she liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go without it running across her brain or humming on her lips, and God knew she tried; she was smashing herself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Benny played the opening chord and she just couldn’t do it. She could not sing that fucking song. Not again. She broke down, because she was only fifteen, and Benny took her behind the mall and told her it would be okay. But she had to sing. It was the biggest earner. She kind of lost it and then so did Benny and that was the first time he hit her. She ran away for a while. But she came back to him, because she had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like they had a truce: She would not complain about her bruised face and he would not ask her to sing “Lucy.” She had been all right with this. She had thought that was a pretty good deal.
    Now there was something coming out of a box, and she reached for the most virulent meme she knew. “
Lucy in the sky!
” she sang. “
With diamonds!
”
    • • •
    Time passed and she did not die. She did not lose her mind. In the spaces between song words, she heard things. For this reason, she kept singing. Shrieking out the words. Then she caught a burst of static and realized it was just the tech, talking to her through the speaker. She didn’t think she had to fear the tech. Only the box. So she lowered her voice, a little, and eventually unplugged one ear.
    “
Ssscchtand
on one leg,” said the speaker.
    She removed her other finger from her ear. She didn’t move for a while, in case the box was going to talk and she needed to replug her ears. But they had said they wanted her to
look
at something, hadn’t they? Not listen.
    “Toussscccchh your left elbow.”
    She began to feel her way across the concrete. When she reached the box, she felt her way up its side. Above the seam there was no more steel. She slid her hands over the lip and felt something cool and rigid. Plastic, maybe. She pressed against it. It