A scream builds inside me. There are dozens of items of clothing . . . maybe hundreds, all packed into these containers. And this is just one room. The woman who I can no longer hear sniffling was in another. Each of the items represents a person. The quality of the clothing from one item to the next is wildly different. The people who wore them must be as well, yet they were all forced to leave these pieces of themselves behind to be collected by people who don’t care who they are or why these things mattered.
Hands shaking, I fold the girl’s colorful shirt and place it gently atop the haphazard pile of wrinkled garments. Then I slide the camera out of its hiding place and use it again.
“Hurry up!”
Quickly, I secure the recording tracker into the knot and set my own clothing atop the sparkly T-shirt. Then I close the bins and walk through the door, taking the memory of that girl with me.
The medication I was told would kick in has dulled the pain from its original agonizing fire to a dull ache by the time Marshal Melissa and her bright red smile escort me down the cement corridor. Our footfalls on concrete mix with the sounds of clanging metal, hopeless weeping, and the slamming of what I believe are car doors, until once again we are back to the large cages I first saw when I was led off the elevator and into this waking nightmare.
More uniformed officials than I remember seeing before are peering into the cages or punching buttons on their handheld screens. A bunch hover over a table on the far side—beyond the cages. Three trucks are parked behind the cages—near what appear to be loading dock doors. The vehicles are parked with their rear sides to me, so I can’t see any distinctive markings. But they remind me of the moving trucks I have seen all my life—with the back doors open, ready for the loading to begin.
An older official points to a cage at the end and instructs Marshal Melissa to “Put her in there. We’ll start loading up the trucks soon.”
“Good.” Marshal Melissa nods and grabs my arm. “I want to be home in time to do breakfast with the kids before they go to camp.”
Believe. I repeat the word from the girl’s glittered shirt to myself as Melissa swipes her ID card on the lock pad and opens the iron-bar door. I will record these images and get out of here, I tell myself as the Marshal shoves me and I stumble inside.
The door shuts behind me and my determination shudders at the hollow, metallic clang. I place my hands on the cold steel bars and grip them tight as I watch Melissa jangle the door to confirm it is locked. Melissa doesn’t spare me another glance before she strides away.
She doesn’t care that I am a person she helped tag and put in a cage. What does she tell herself in order to make this okay? To make it possible for her to go home to the children she just told someone she was going to meet for breakfast? How can anyone willingly be a part of this?
I wait until Melissa disappears from view before I release my grip on the bars and fumble under the coat for the knot at my waist.
Believe, I remind myself as I confront the space that is my new, horrible reality. I can do this.
“Get the supplies loaded up, then start with holding pen number one,” a slightly distorted male voice calls through a loudspeaker. “Less than two hours until the end of curfew, so let’s get moving.”
It’s sometime after four in the morning. I had no idea how little sense of time I had until now. Knowing just that small fact makes me feel more tethered to the person I was before the Marshals pulled me off the street. I hold on to that feeling and study the others being held with me all the while pressing the camera button on the device. I hope the lens can capture what I am seeing even as I attempt to keep it hidden from view.
There are over a dozen people scattered throughout the rectangular cage that I’m standing in. Another thirty or forty people are imprisoned in the other connected cells. Maybe more. It’s hard to tell in the dim light.
The smell and the state of attire of the people in my cell make it clear some of them have been here for some time. The man who checked me in seemed to suggest that if I wasn’t transported today, it could be a while until I was moved. If it has been weeks since the last transport, Isaac could still be here. Maybe Atticus, too.
Adjusting my shirt, I slide the device back into hiding, then pull my jacket tight around me.
“Move! Move! Move! These trucks have to be out of the city before the sun comes up.”
Uniformed officials pick up the pace carrying boxes into to the trucks and I walk deeper into the cage, trying to look at every face that I pass. When Atlas and I were arguing about my choice to get captured, Dewey told him I would have a better chance of staying under the radar. He had a list of reasons—but Atlas’s resemblance to his father was at the top. The few photographs of Atticus I had seen told me he was right.
I straighten my shoulders and take a deep breath of the rancid-tasting air. So many of the people in the cages sit alone on the hard cement. Some are curled atop their black jackets or are wrapped in aluminum foil–looking blankets. Eyes follow me. None have Isaac’s sharp cheekbones and deep-set eyes.
I step around smears of rotting food and keep walking toward a curtained-off area in the back corner of the cell where two men stand, backs to me. Their heads are bent close together. As I approach, one with unkempt red hair, a scraggly beard, and a build like a slightly out-of-shape football player glances over his shoulder and snarls, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I go still as the other man turns to face me. He has a long scar running down the length of his forearm. His oily black hair is slicked back into a ponytail, which gives me clear view of the ripped, partially scabbed-over skin at the top of his right lobe. The metal barcode cuff is embedded in the left.
“She’s a new bird,” Ponytail Guy says. “Not worth getting bent over.” He glances toward a uniformed official strolling by the bars.
The red-bearded guy takes a deliberate step in my direction. “She should know better than to listen to other people’s conversation.”
“I wasn’t,” I say.
“I’m supposed to believe you?” The red-haired man advances. I step back and glance around. A few of the others in the cell are watching. Most, however, keep their heads turned away, but the tension in the way they sit or stand says they are aware of what is happening and if I’m attacked, they will not do anything to stop it.
“Transport one is ready for loading!”
The two men in front of me swing their heads toward the trucks as several uniformed officials approach a cell on the far side of the garage. There are rattles and metallic clangs as an official opens the door to one of the other cages and shouts for everyone inside to get moving.
The order draws pleas from those inside.
“I haven’t done anything.”
“Please.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“My mother needs me.”
The officials don’t speak to anyone as they herd the dozen or so people in their dirty, washed-out pink-gray matching outfits and black jackets out of the cell. Some keep pleading—saying the names of their wives or mothers or father or children. One woman screams. Most move like they are sleepwalking as they are prodded and pushed onto a ramp and up into the first truck.
“The girl is a nobody,” Ponytail says to his friend. “Forget her. The guards will be coming for us soon.”