The Hourglass Read online

  “You’re sure I don’t need to stay here?” asked Finn. “The pain is pretty bad.”

  “Nope,” said the doctor with a confidence that broke no argument. “You’re perfectly able to sit on a stool and look at metal stuff all day.”

  “What if one of my ribs punctures my lung? I could die, right?”

  “Then you better let someone know quickly so they can bring you back.” The doctor was starting to get exasperated. Gragur took this as a cue to get going.

  “C’mon,” he said, “up you get.” He leant down and wrapped a strong, beefy arm around Finn’s shoulders, helping him stand up. Finn did so, gritting his teeth. It would have looked suspicious to argue too much, and he didn’t want to lose the privilege of coming back twice a day for his painkillers. It would give him more time to scope out the place.

  “Hey,” called back Finn. “What’s going to happen to him?” he nodded at Justin.

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. “How about you focus on getting yourself better.”

  Sarah hurried around to Finn’s other side and together the three of them left the room. As soon as the guard and Sarah had deposited him back at his usual seat in front of the conveyer belt, he returned to his usual level of function.

  “So that didn’t quite work out,” he said, “but at least I’ve got an excuse to go back there twice a day, maybe I’ll be able to pull something off.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” replied Sarah with a forced smile, trying to be optimistic.

  “Justin, though…”

  “Yeah,” replied Sarah sadly. “He doesn’t look too good.”

  They passed the rest of the day in a despondent mood. Finn returned briefly that afternoon to the infirmary to collect his pain killers, but as soon as he returned Sarah knew that nothing had come of it. It wasn’t until later that night, just as Sarah was about to fall asleep that an idea hit her, forcing her awake like a bolt of lightning. For the first time since she had arrived on the ship she was looking forward to her cell opening in the morning. When the gates slid back she headed straight to the Queen’s cell. The Queen had just jumped down from her bunk when Sarah appeared. A startled look spread across her face but she covered it quickly. Sarah figured that she was probably wondering where her bodyguards were. Without turning around, Sarah felt the presence of one or two of them now appear behind her back. She stiffened automatically, ready for a confrontation, but the Queen waved them away. Sarah doubted that anyone had ever been this eager to see the Queen before.

  “I want you to get me a job assisting the doctor in the infirmary.”

  The Queen blinked. “What?”

  Sarah was now starting to wonder about her approach. The Queen probably wasn’t used to demands, especially not from the little people. “If you want to get out of here in seven days,” Sarah said, lowering her voice, “then I need to spend more time in the infirmary. We can’t get in through Finn, which just leaves me.”

  “And how do you expect me to do that?”

  “You’re the Queen. You have connections. Whisper in ears or whatever it is you do. It won’t look that strange. I assisted him the other day so people will just assume that he was impressed with me and wanted to keep me on.”

  Without changing her expression the Queen disappeared into the ensuite. She came out a minute later, wiping her hands on a soft, fluffy bath towel, the kind that definitely was not in Sarah’s bathroom.

  “I’ll see what I can do, but don’t count on it. Don’t make this you’re A plan.”

  Sarah nodded in reply and left the cell. She hoped that the Queen could make it work, because not only was this her A plan, it was also her, B, C and D plan.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The A Plan

  She heard nothing for the rest of the day, nor the day after. Finn came and went to the infirmary twice a day to pick up his pain medications but nothing ever came of it. The doctor was always in the front room attending his patients, and he always had Finn’s drugs on hand in one of his numerous pockets. The drugs would get popped into Finn’s open palm and he would get sent back to the factory floor.

  On the morning of the third day, with only four days left until their deadline, Sarah was escorted from her normal seat at the conveyer belt by Gragur.

  “Looks like you impressed the doc,” said Gragur as he led her towards the infirmary. “Word is that he asked for you specifically.”

  Sarah smiled back briefly. She didn’t mind Gragur. Unlike some of the other guards he didn’t go out of his way to beat up any of the prisoners, but he also didn’t try to help them either. He just did his job. She wondered how the Queen had done it and if it had cost her anything to do so. She hoped it had. Gragur guided her through the front door of the infirmary. The doctor was bending over Justin, who looked like he hadn’t moved since she had last seen him. The doctor straightened up and turned to face her. She could tell from the glance he gave her that he didn’t remember her.

  “My new assistant, right?” he asked, turning back to his patient and tightening the blood pressure cuff.

  “Yup,” replied Gragur.

  “Great. You can go.”

  Gragur pulled a face but didn’t object. Without so much as a goodbye he left Sarah standing near the first pair of beds. The doctor finished checking Justin’s blood pressure.

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Well Sarah, you can go grab a bucket and mop from the storage room back down the corridor. I expect to be able to eat off these floors.”

  Sarah sighed and headed out into the corridor to collect what he said. She could hear the other two infirmary inmates, the ones with their limbs in plaster, chuckling as she left. For a moment she almost missed being on the factory floor. She shook her head. That was craziness. The factory floor involved unending tedium and the threat of a possible beating if you somehow managed to annoy a guard. There was no Finn here, however, she caught herself thinking. Then she shook herself out of it. She had four days to find and steal a document or her life and the lives of her friends would be in danger. A little bit of cleaning was acceptable. She returned to the infirmary, mop and bucket in hand and got to work. The doctor had by now retreated back into his office. The infirmary was actually pretty clean to begin with. She couldn’t picture the doctor mopping the floor each day though, so she wondered whose chores she was taking over.

  “I remember you.” Sarah turned around. It was the boy with both his arms in plaster. “You came in the other day, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said the boy in the other bed, “you came in with that tosser who only cracked a few ribs.”

  “He’s not a tosser.”

  “Ooo, seems liked we touched a sore spot there, hey Talbot.” The boy with the broken arms grinned at the boy with the broken leg, evidently called Talbot.

  Talbot grinned back. “So who beat him up?” he asked.

  “Didn’t you hear,” replied the first boy sarcastically, “he fell over a stool.”

  “Shut up Dalton, I was talking to her,” he flashed a sweet smile at Sarah. Sarah rolled her eyes.

  “Tell me what happened to you two first,” she said.

  “Ah, a bargain!” said Talbot enthusiastically.

  “Well?” prompted Sarah.

  Talbot shrugged. “We were working on one of the machines. The one pressing out those thick pins? Anyway it got jammed and stopped working. The bloody guard came over and told us to fix it.”

  “And we were like, ‘how do you expect me to do that? We didn’t make the bloody things!’” added in Dalton, unable to keep out of the story.

  “And he told us to just stick our hands in and find out where it was jammed.”

  “Bloody dickhead.”

  “And we told him that he had to turn the machine off first, ‘cause there was no fragging way I was sticking my hand in there while it was still on. So he signals to some other guard on the far end of the factory, who goes and presses a button on the wall.�
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  “Yeah, the wrong fragging button!” raged Dalton. Talbot shot him a look as if he was ruining the story.

  “Only we didn’t know that,” continued Talbot. “So Dalton goes and sticks his arms into the machine.”

  “Thinking it was off,” added Dalton, just to make it perfectly clear that he wasn’t being stupid.

  “Meanwhile, the guard has this great idea that maybe something is lodged underneath the machine, so I go down to swipe my leg underneath it. At the same time Dalton finds the pin that’s buggered the whole thing up and wrenches it free. The machine starts working again, Dalton’s arms are trapped in there, my leg is underneath. A large piston thing that goes up and down when the machine is on crushes my leg. Meanwhile Dalton’s screaming to high heaven ‘cause the machine is chewing up his arms. I drag my leg out the next time the piston rises, grab Dalton by the waist and pull him back onto the floor, where the bloody dolt lands on me.”

  Dalton shrugged. “You were softer than the floor.”

  “And the stupid frag-head idiot of a guard is just standing there with his mouth open. Didn’t even try and turn the machine off.”

  Both Talbot and Dalton were shaking their heads in disbelief at the guard’s idiocy.

  “And then,” added Dalton, “the guard vomits all over the place because he’s grossed out. We’re lying there, a mangled pile of blood and bones, and he’s having a moment.”

  “Absolute frag-head.”

  There was a pause while they both reflected on the event and Sarah stared at them, horrified.

  “So,” said Talbot, “what happened to that other guy?”

  “Ah, he got beaten up by the King.” It actually sounded tame compared to the boys’ story.

  “How come?” asked Dalton.

  Sarah shrugged. “Because he has white hair, we think.”

  The boys nodded their heads philosophically. “The King is a prick,” said Talbot, surprising Sarah. “He doesn’t cope well with different.”

  Dalton snorted. “Like you would dare say that out there.”

  “’Course I wouldn’t,” replied Talbot sensibly, “I’m not suicidal.”

  “So how come he has white hair?” asked Dalton.

  Sarah shrugged again. “How come you have brown hair?”

  “Because I’m damn sexy.”

  Sarah snorted in a mixture of amusement and disdain and Talbot laughed. Sarah, who had been mopping steadily throughout the conversation as she knew the doctor could see her through the windows, had by now made her way over to Justin’s bed.

  “Hey Justin,” said Sarah gently, not really expecting a reply but hoping for one anyway, “remember me? Sarah? I came across on the boat with you.”

  “He’s not going to respond,” said Talbot, sounding uncharacteristically sombre. Sarah knew he was right, but she didn’t like it.

  “Why not?” asked Sarah. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

  “We don’t know,” said Talbot at the same time that Dalton said, “cabin fever.”

  “Cabin fever?”

  “Happens all the time,” said Dalton, ignoring Talbot’s expression. “Basically if you spend too long cooped up inside, without feeling the wind or the sun or anything, you go mad. People start acting all kinds of crazy.”

  Sarah looked at Talbot. “Yeah, that’s true,” he conceded, “but he’s not crazy like the others. The others would babble to themselves and see things, but he just sort of… shut down.”

  Sarah shivered. What if that had happened to her? How could you prepare for that?

  “How come everybody on this ship isn’t crazy then?”

  “Every couple of weeks they take us up to the deck and let us enjoy the sun and wind for a bit. It’s a bit random when they do it though and for some people that’s just not enough.”

  Sarah remembered the tingling sensation she got every time she walked under the stairwell that led outside. She wished she could be up there again. “Have they taken him outside? After they bought him here, I mean?” she asked.

  “Every now and then they take him up for a bit. I think he’s a bit better when they bring him back, but it’s hard to say.”

  She had finished mopping by this point. After returning the mop and bucket to their place in the cupboard she found the doctor waiting for her back in the main section of the infirmary.

  “The sheets are changed every two days, today is one of them. We’ll start with Justin,” he walked over to Justin and gently guided him off the bed and onto the bed next to his. Justin didn’t resist in the slightest. As soon as he climbed onto the spare bed he returned to the same rocking position. Sarah stared at him. It broke her heart. They made the bed quickly and efficiently. The doctor returned Justin gently to his usual bed and then they went over to the other two boys, assisting them as they moved into wheelchairs so that they could make their beds. They finished quickly and the doctor returned to his office, leaving her the task of wiping down the room with alcohol to kill the germs.

  “What do you know about him?” she asked Talbot once she was sure the office door was firmly closed behind the doctor. She gestured through the window at the seated doctor who was busy at his desk. She had noticed that Talbot and Dalton never spoke when the doctor was in the room unless he asked them a direct question. To her surprise Talbot’s face became guarded and closed off.

  “Leave it alone, Sarah,” he said.

  Sarah looked at Dalton, her eyebrows raised. She had expected him to mock Talbot’s attitude and give her some information, but he too looked guarded and closed off.

  “He’s right. It’s none of your business. Nothing good will come of it.”

  “I don’t understand. He doesn’t seem that bad. You guys seem ok for being here.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re not what he’s after,” said Talbot.

  “What’s that?”

  “We told you to drop it.” His tone was dark, violent. It was so different to his previous light-hearted, friendly tone that for the first time Sarah wondered what they had done to be put on this ship. She returned to her job of wiping down the shelves with alcohol. She hadn’t been entirely convinced about the horrors of the infirmary until now. If anybody knew what was really happening, it would be the people who had been there, and Talbot and Dalton seemed terrified.

  Finn walked through the doors ten minutes later and the doctor came out to give him his painkillers. They didn’t bother trying to pretend like they didn’t know each other. Everyone in the room had seen Sarah bring him in the other day. It would have looked more strange if they ignored each other completely. They exchanged greetings and then Sarah excused herself to collect more rubbing alcohol from the Doctor’s room while he was pre-occupied with Finn, who had started to quiz the doctor on the drug’s side effects. The doctor nodded distractedly and she passed quickly into the room. He kept the rubbing alcohol in his room deliberately. He had mentioned earlier when he had tasked her with wiping down the room that there had been incidents in the past where some of the patients had tried to drink the whole bottle, so now he kept it in his office. This was the first time she had been inside. Sarah quickly grabbed the bottle and then, with a glance over her shoulder to make sure that the doctor was still chatting, she went straight for the bottom drawer of the cabinet and eased it open. The safe was firmly shut and locked, like she had expected it to be, but she still felt slightly disappointed. If the doctor had only been lazy then half her problems would be over. She closed the fake cabinet drawer that hid the safe and went back out into the room just as the doctor had turned away from Finn and was heading back, apparently having tired of answering Finn’s questions. She exchanged a glance with Finn before he left to join the guard who had been waiting for him outside. At least she knew the safe was definitely there now. She hadn’t enjoyed depending solely on Winter’s word that the safe would be where she said it was. It gave more credence to the rest of her story as well. The remainder of the day was uneventful and she had no further
opportunities to check out the office. Talbot and Dalton didn’t talk to her much, apparently having decided that she was trouble. The doctor hardly left his room. A kitchen supervisor bought him his lunch and he ate at his desk. Occasionally he would leave the office through a side door, which Sarah assumed led to his living quarters, but he always returned within a matter of minutes. Finn appeared again in the late afternoon, but this time the doctor got rid of him before he could ask any questions. She had spent most of the afternoon reading a book she had found in one of the cupboards to Justin. He never responded but she liked to think that he was listening anyway. At about five in the evening a guard came and collected her, returning her to the cafeteria for dinner. She had eaten lunch with the patients. There hadn’t been much in the way of conversation.

  The guard had barely left Sarah’s side when the Queen’s subjugates came and collected her. They led her over to the Queen’s table and then retreated to a distance where they would have trouble overhearing what was said.

  “Well,” demanding the Queen, “any progress?”

  “I have confirmed that the safe is there,” offered Sarah.

  “That’s it?”

  Sarah wanted to scream at her that the task was impossible. That she had picked the wrong person, that she had never stolen anything in her life. Instead she said, “the doctor practically never leaves his office and I have no idea what the code it.”

  “You’ll work it out,” said the Queen, her eyes narrowed slightly. “You know the consequences if you don’t. Three days.” She waved a hand in dismissal and Sarah left feeling hopeless.

  Marland and April sat with her at dinner that night. They were particularly nice and stuck to safe conversation. It was almost like they were treating her as if she was on her deathbed.

  Chapter Twenty-Two