The Forsaken

asks.
    “I’m sorry. I do not understand.”
    I leap in. “Is there a boat? A bridge? Anything? ”
    “I’m sorry. I do not understand.”
    Gadya yells and kicks at the wall with her good foot. Her boot leaves a dark smudge on the white surface. We stand there, freezing and dirty, not sure what to do next.
    “Hey, what did it mean by ‘specimens’?” Gadya finally asks me. “It said that earlier. Did you hear?”
    The voice decides to answer before I can. “All specimen test subjects are flash frozen in a cryoprotectant solution, and held at minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit, to minimize cellular decay.” It pauses. “Do you wish to view the specimens?”
    “Yes,” Gadya and I say, at the exact same moment.
    The fluorescent lights start dimming again, and our horseshoe-shaped room grows darker until there’s barely any light at all.
    “Please step forward to the observation window,” the voice instructs.
    Finally, as the lights in our horseshoe fade to total blackness and the ambient light beyond the window begins to rise, I’m able to see through the glass.
    “This facility is currently running at ninety-three point seven percent capacity.”
    I ignore the voice for a moment and struggle to make sense of the strange shapes emerging from the darkness. The glass is as cold as ice. Way too cold to touch. I feel it trying to burn the tip of my nose when I lean forward.
    “The specimen archive is the heart of this facility,” the voice continues. “More than one hundred test subjects are processed here every day. That includes harvesting, freezing, and transportation to their position in the grid. The specimens are then held until they get recalled to Mexico City Three in the UNA, for clinical tissue biopsies and live dissection . . .”
    Live dissection? Tissue biopsies? I’m still just trying to figure out what I’m looking at. Then, as the lights within the massive black space are adjusted more precisely, I finally realize what is being held inside it.
    “No!” I gasp.
    My legs turn to jelly as the air is sucked out of my lungs. I get a strange floaty feeling, like I’m about to faint.
    Gadya claws at me, clutching onto my arm. I grab her back, holding her close. I literally cannot believe what we are seeing beyond the glass.
    “The archive currently houses more than ten thousand specimens,” the voice burbles, oblivious to our horror. “Our efficiency rate is the highest of any station. We are proud to be the number one processing plant on Island Alpha, for the second consecutive year.”
    “Burn in hell!” Gadya suddenly screams, kicking at one of the monitors, splintering its glass screen.
    “I’m sorry. I do not understand.”
    Tears run down my face. I know that Gadya is crying too, racking sobs that make her shoulders shake.
    “Don’t look,” I whisper. “We don’t have to look.”
    “No, I want to.” She leans back up to stare down through the glass. I do the same, because I can’t help myself.
    What I see are human bodies.
    Ten thousand of them, hanging on vertical metal beams inside an incredibly vast subterranean space, descending hundreds of feet deep.
    The bodies are strung up inside semitranslucent pods that appear to be made of metal and plastic, stretching into infinity. Only the people’s heads are visible through small portholes. The pods are filled with fluid, circulated by plastic tubing that flows back into the beams that support them. Catwalks and metal stairways run beneath each row of bodies, like internal scaffolding.
    I know these frozen bodies are alive, but they have the gray pallor of corpses. It’s like a nightmare cemetery, one in which the bodies are denied any respect or grace.
    These are the “specimens.”
    They’re just kids from the wheel. Kids like us. Exiles.
    And given what the voice said about it being the number one processing facility, there must be other places like it on the wheel.
    “How—” I begin. “How did this happen?”
    “I’m sorry. I do not understand.”
    I want to kill the repetitive blandly innocuous voice. Want to find whatever computer controls it and smash it into a million pieces.
    But we need answers, and right now this voice is the only hope we have of getting some. “How did these kids”—I can’t bring myself to say “specimens”—“end up here?”
    “All specimens run free-range on this island. Each one has been individually acquired by our automatic UNA-51 High Altitude Selection Units, with