Kordas held his breath while Beltran spoke. All right. This is . . . odd. I know he’s telling the truth. I want to tell the truth too, and nothing but truth. “You too, Beltran. I like you too, and it has been good to have someone from home to talk to. I have been extra lucky,” Kordas gusted out at last, as he brought the elevator down at a steady rate. Huh. I think . . . I think it’s all these vrondi! There are so many of them that it’s not only making us tell the truth, it’s making us want to tell every true thing that passes in our thoughts!
“I think the less talking we do, the better,” he suggested. Which was, of course, true.
As they descended, the trio got a better view of the center containment within the chainlink cage. There were cots, blankets, books, drawing materials, and the like. Most of it was arranged very precisely, in a useful kind of order. There was folded laundry, all of a plain, uniform white. Basic footwear.
Then, people. Mostly middle-aged, a handful older, clustered around a flickering glow, most of them sitting comfortably on pillows. They all wore basic white smocks with no tailoring, unremarkable pants, simple sandals, and basic grooming. They were talking with each other, when they weren’t staring at the Curiosity Trap they’d gathered around. A few were writing out notes.
Star bolted off of the lift immediately, and by the time the lift had settled on the ground floor, the effects of the Trap were gone. The device itself responded to subfloor levers worked from outside the chainlink, by which Star awaited them. The sound dampening was less intense at floor level.
Beltran gaped at the crowd, which took very little notice of them. “Who are these people, Star?”
“Researchers. Inventors. Political opponents. Investigators, constables, playwrights. Freedom and travel advocates. Criminalized lovers. Dissidents. These are people who spoke, taught, or fought for truth. Instead of being executed, they were put here to live their remaining lives as prisoners. Vrondi are attracted to truth, my Lord. These people were put here as bait.”
“The cruelty of it!” Beltran blurted out. “Kept alive by an enemy, knowing you are right and your own convictions are used to pull in the innocent and curious, so they can be made slaves for your jailors!”
Beltran is getting into this far more intensely than I’d’ve expected. Maybe it was his Herald training, but he’s seemed so much more reserved until now.
“He seems to get it,” a woman inside the chainlink said. The rest were coming out of a daze, but they didn’t seem to be hurt—just confused, as if waking from a nap. “Is this an Official Declaration, a Body Count, or just a Recreational Gloat?” The woman walked up to them and hung her arms through the chainlink grid. She was tattooed in patterns to the first knuckles on both arms, her hair was in tight, wooly curls, cut close to the head, and her eyes were sharp enough to cut flesh. “You’re all dressed up, aren’t you? Is it someone’s birthday?”
“Who are they, Scullen?” someone behind the woman called.
She answered, without taking her eyes off of Kordas and Beltran, “We-ell, you know how this place is, Scont, they may just be figuring that out themselves. Right, boys?”
Beltran answered immediately. “I know who I am, I’m just happy to find out I was right! There was tragedy just a little while ago, and my head hurts, but I went from being a servant to being an adventurer, like a hero in nearly fifty songs I know, and a few I don’t dare sing for anyone else. Also, I like how you talk, you are very pretty, and you scare me in some ways I think I like.”
“He’s intoxicated with the need to speak the truth,” said the person that the woman had called “Scont.” He came to the forefront of the cage. “Take deep breaths. Try not to think for a moment. Concentrate on who you are. And remember, the less you talk, the better off you’ll be.”
A tired old man joined them. “As for what this is? Besides being a prison and a trap, it’s a test with no answers, a test that only provides sadistic entertainment on the rare occasions our yellow toad of an Emperor deigns to look in on us.”
“How is it a test?” Kordas asked cautiously.
“If you turn against yourself enough, turn yourself into a delusional liar, you’ll be unsuited to stay in the cage as bait, and you’ll be yanked out, and probably killed. Or, hold on to hope? Stay with your truth? Then you’re a tool for making slaves. Either way, they get you. Then there’s this thing.” Scullen gestured at the Curiosity Trap. “Comes on, and sometimes you can resist it, but that means you have to suppress yourself from questioning anything. Once the wondering starts, you wind up over here, thinking about truths, going deeper, inventing new truthful things because you can’t keep yourself from being inventive. It’s hard to even feel like a person, when you get to where you’ve experienced all the tricks and disciplines we’ve tried. You just feel like a reference book of truthful things twisted around to hurt everyone. Yes, we know why we’re here. To make more of them.” And she pointed at Star. “Poor damned devils. In a way, they’re worse off than we are.”
“We have to get them out of there,” Kordas said. “Star, how are your—um—” and he made a gesture to indicate a ball, “the little prisons inside a Doll. There’s the Trap, but what happens after trapping?”
“We transfer the full bottles from the base of the Trap and secure them into the fabrication line. Each step is operated by Dolls, including the installation of the ‘prisons,’ as you call them,” Star answered.
Beltran tried to put the right words to it. “So they make you do every part to imprison your own people? Yourself?”
Star answered, “We were told that it was ‘just business, nothing personal,’ which supposedly made it acceptable, or so one of the system creators told us early on. And laughed. We know now why he laughed. We have learned that when someone says ‘nothing personal,’ it involves something very personal to someone involved, and it’s seldom the person saying it.” Star turned to Kordas. “My Lord, as slaves, we united into a single mind to stay alive, even like this—hoping that just living, and nothing more, mattered. And there was nothing noble about it—we were afraid of being-no-more. Individually, we are naive and not smart. But joined together like this, yes, we are slaves, but we also became a remarkable mind. All we could do for our own benefit was what we could divert away without breaking the rules we had to obey. That was our future.”
“Not any kind of a future,” he said, feeling his heart twist in his chest. “Not when even the little you had could be snatched from you at any moment. Not when you didn’t even have a glimpse of something better.”
“Until the day of your arrival, when you thanked me. That was the first time in years anyone had shown us respect, and we decided it felt good. When you continued to be respectful and appreciative, we found we had something besides the monotony of servitude to think on. That was hope.” Star spread her hands wide. “Hope was something we had not experienced before. Hope was intoxicating. And then you did something we never, ever anticipated. You took pity on us.”