The Circle

corridor she hadn’t
     seen before. It was unlit, and as they stepped further, the light from Stewart no
     longer penetrated.
    “Now I’m scared,” Mae said.
    “Almost there,” he said.
    And then there was the creaking of a steel door. It opened, and revealed an enormous
     chamber illuminated by weak blue light. Kalden led her through the doorway and into
     what seemed to be a great cave, thirty feet high, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling.
    “What is this?” she asked.
    “It was supposed to be part of the subway,” he said. “But they abandoned it. Now it’s
     just empty, a strange combination of manmade tunnel and actual cave. See the stalactites?”
    He pointed down the great tunnel, where stalagmites and stalactites gave the tunnel
     the look of a mouth full of uneven teeth.
    “Where does it go?” she asked.
    “It connects to the one under the bay,” he said. “I’ve gone about a half-mile into
     it, but then it gets too wet.”
    Where they stood, they could see black water, a shallow lake on the tunnel floor.
    “My guess is that this is where the future Stewarts will go,” he said. “Thousands
     of them, probably smaller. I’m sure they’ll get the containers down to people-size
     soon enough.”
    They looked into the tunnel together, and Mae pictured it, an endless grid of red
     steel boxes stretching into the darkness.
    He looked back to her. “You can’t tell anyone I took you here.”
    “I won’t,” Mae said, then knew that to keep this promise she would have to lie to
     Annie. In the moment, it seemed a small price to pay. She wanted to kiss Kalden again,
     and she took his face again, down to hers, and opened her mouth to his. She closed
     her eyes, and pictured the long cave, the blue light above, the dark water below.
    And then, in the shadows, away from Stewart, something in Kalden changed, and his
     hands became more sure of themselves. He held her closer, his hands gaining strength.
     His mouth moved from hers, across her cheek and onto her neck, pausing there, and
     climbing to her ear, his breath hot. She tried to keep up, holding his head in her
     hands, exploring his neck, his back, but he was leading, he had plans. His right hand
     was on the small of her back, bringing her into him, where she felt him hard and pressing
     against her stomach.
    And then she was lifted. She was in the air, and he was carrying her, and she wrapped
     her legs around him as he strode purposefully to some point behind her. She opened
     her eyes, briefly, then closed them, not wanting to know where he was taking her,
     trusting him, though knowing how wrong this was, trusting him, so far underground,
     a man she couldn’t find, whose full name she didn’t know.
    Then he was lowering her, and she braced herself to feel the stone of the cave floor,
     but instead she felt the soft landing of some kind of mattress. Now she opened her
     eyes. They were in an alcove, a cave within the cave, a few feet off the ground and
     carved into the wall. It was filled with blankets and pillows, and he eased her down
     upon them.
    “This is where you sleep?” she asked, in her fevered state thinking it almost logical.
    “Sometimes,” he said, and breathed fire into her ear.
    She remembered the condoms she’d been given at Dr. Villalobos’s office. “I have something,”
     she said.
    “Good,” he said, and he took one from her, tearing the wrapper as she pushed his pants
     down his hips.
    In two quick motions he pulled her pants and panties down andtossed them aside. He buried his face in her stomach, his hands holding the back of
     her thighs, his fingers crawling upward, inward.
    “Come back up here,” she said.
    He did, and he hissed into her ear. “Mae.”
    She couldn’t form words.
    “Mae,” he said again, as she fell apart all over him.
    She woke up in the dorms and first imagined she’d dreamt it, every moment: the underground
     chambers, the water, the red boxes, that hand on the small of her back and then the
     bed, the pillows in the cave within the cave—none of it seemed plausible. It was the
     kind of random assemblage of details that dreams fumbled with, none of it possible
     in this world.
    But as she rose and showered and dressed, she realized that everything had happened
     the way she remembered. She had kissed this person Kalden, who she knew very little
     about, and he had led her not only through a series of high-security chambers, but
     into some dark anteroom, where they’d