EDGE OF DAY

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The first few hours Day spent in the holding cell were hell. Claustrophobia built inside her. She'd never enjoyed small spaces, but being physically unable to leave, that was another thing. And then there was the documentary film playing on repeat about the orbit-camps. In one part, an interviewer spoke with a convict who had been in suspension for ten years. The gaunt ex-convict sat slumped in his wheelchair. His skin was cracked, his eyes distant and unfocused. The reporter said his conviction had been appealed four times, until finally, after a decade, his lawyer had proved his innocence.

"Look at this body!" the convict spat, picking at the flimsy cloth covering his bony arm, and glaring into the camera with disgust. "This crippled body, can only support me for two or three hours a day... it's a mirror..." He taped the side of his skull. "A mirror for the crippled prison of my mind. My mind isn't my own anymore. You wouldn't survive inside here with me. No one would. It's hell on earth!"

His words were electric fingers digging into Day's chest. He talked to the camera but it was if he talking directly to her. Her panic deepened as the voice distorted and turned into Will's voice.

"If you don't like what you see in the mirror," the man stared at her out of deep eye sockets, "how can you change your reflection?"

She covered her eyes with her hands and began humming to block out the noise. She tumbled over to the thin mattress on the metal bedframe and threw herself face down.

The cold leeched through the mattress into her body, making her shiver. She sat up, crossed her legs and avoided looking at the holo-screen. Apart from a pot in the corner, the bedframe and the mattress were the only furniture in the cell.

She closed her eyes and hummed a single note to drown out the documentary. She wasn't crazy. Her mind had been under a great deal of pressure with the implant operations. She knew perfectly well what was real and what wasn't. Didn't she?

But if she believed what Will told her, this was all a kind of illusion, shifting around to match her thoughts and feelings. So the more she felt trapped and alone, as she had done every day for the last three weeks with Ed, the more trapped and alone she'd become, until now she was literally a prisoner.

Day stopped thinking and concentrated on what she could sense with her body—the pressure of the mattress against her bum, the faint smell of detergent, the fluorescent light on her closed eyelids, her chest rising and falling.

There was nothing inherently awful about sitting there. Her body had no direct needs or complaints. She was warm enough, and she wasn't hungry. The lacerations on her back didn't hurt. She just was. If you took away the past and the future there was nothing to fight against.

Her thoughts quieted. Her mind became the distant tide of a sea that washes in and out, but she was paying no more attention to the seashore. She wasn't listening to the waves. She was the infinite sky above the sea.

Time lost it's meaning. She only knew the forms around her were still changing because of the meals the droids brought in. She ate; she slept; she sat.

And then everything shifted. A droid entered, ordered her to her feet and she was led back to Officer Rink. The droid pushed her into a metal backed chair facing the officer's desk. Rink leaned across it, fingers linked together. He stared at her expectantly. But the strange thing was, she didn't need to speak. She didn't need to do anything.

Rink pressed a button and a slideshow of holograms rose between them. Bodies crushed under piles of rubble. Buildings blown to pieces. A women lamenting over the body of a dead child.