Chapter Three
Dahlia studied a sample under the microscope, didn’t bother to look up. “Yes?”
“You aren’t leaving for lunch?” Cassandra stood in the doorway.
“I’m behind.” Dahlia sighed, pushing back from the desk at last. “There’s some sort of allergic reaction occurring, but I can’t tell how serious it is from this sample. I don’t want to send it to trial if it’s going to send someone into anaphylactic shock. Want to look?”
Cassandra shrugged, moving into the room. “I’m not sure I’m qualified.”
Dahlia smiled. “Well, you could at least tell me it’s not cancer.”
Her friend sent her a dark look before bending to look at the microscope. “It doesn’t look like too bad a reaction. Has that happened on all your samples?”
“Ten percent,” Dahlia said. “Significant enough not to dismiss, not common enough to warrant stopping the trial.”
“So why are you worried?”
“It’s nice to know how dangerous something is before testing it.”
Cassandra nodded. “Are you off this weekend?”
“I have a couple clinic hours to finish up Friday night. Other than that, they’ve basically relieved me from OR duty.”
“Lucky.”
“Means they think I’m better at theory than application, I think.” Dahlia smiled.
“I’d rather be in your position. I’m just stuck messing with people’s psyches and doing clinic hours. Like I’m a GP with some counseling skills.”
“Should have picked a better specialization.” Dahlia slipped the slide into its holder.
Cassandra rolled her eyes, moving to another stool in the room. “Heard you were late coming in today.”
“Indeed I was,” Dahlia admitted.
“Finally have a good night?”
“If you mean a good night of sleep, yes, yes I did.”
“Oh, Lia.” Cassandra frowned at her.
“Can we please go one day without talking about this, Cass?”
“You really should try it at least once.”
“I know we used to talk about something before we turned twenty.” Dahlia rolled her eyes.
“We mostly gossiped about the other girls then.”
“Come on. We discussed some philosophy, world events...”
“Yeah.” Cassandra nodded with a grin. “Claire’s problem with Mackenzie was so much more interesting than those most of the time.”
“True.” Dahlia smiled, but the smile faded quickly as her eyebrows furrowed. “Have we seen Mackenzie lately?”
“I think she’s on maternity leave,” Cassandra said.
“Ah, she’s procreating.”
Cassandra nodded. “You can check it out in the pedigree room. I think she’s due any day now. They’d likely have it up there by now. If it’s a girl, anyway.”
“I’m sure she’ll let us know when she returns. If she doesn’t, it was a boy.”
Cassandra didn’t argue.
* * * *
The authorities had built the camp in the middle of nowhere. Well, as close to the middle of nowhere as they could make it without sacrificing ease of transportation too much. Ben didn’t know what the natural landscape around the camps had once been, but it appeared they had carved out a space in the middle of a forest. Or maybe they had planted a forest around the camp so they blocked the view of the tall concrete walls until you were practically on top of them. It may have been to hinder escape efforts or that the stark grey walls weren’t aesthetically pleasing enough to be seen by the “new society.” It might insult the artistic sensibilities of women after all, but decoration would be wasted on a group of heathen men. They, of course, would be happy just to have shelter from the elements.
The new government had built all the camps in haste right after the Dumas murder—or so their verbal history told them. They first filled them with the men in power, men who would fight the then insurgents. Once that was done, they opened more camps for the rest of the men and filled them until no one realized the difference. Until no one realized men had ever lived anywhere else.
The brilliantly orchestrated takeover by a militant group claiming to support universal peace used the most non-militant, docile woman as a figurehead for their cause. It had been simple enough for her to calm everyone and appear the victim when anyone tried to question the process. Nobody seemed to notice the change until enough people “disappeared” to make resistance futile.
The first gate opened, admitting the car into the camp. The guards let Ben out, walking him into the imaging equipment used to detect anything metallic the men might be tempted to smuggle into the camps. Ben stood in the man-sized box without complaint, waited for the beep that showed he was clean, and moved through the final set of doors into the camp.
Like the walls surrounding it, the camp was dreary to say the least. Men were something dangerous, something to be contained, but the women worried most about keeping them inside the walls. In the camp men were all but left to their own devices.
Ben skirted the main yard and moved to his barrack near the far wall.
Jude looked up from some homemade cards he appeared to be playing with. “Have a good time?”
Ben shrugged, rolling his pant leg up so he could get to the inside pocket he had had sewn into all of his pants.
Jude just waited, watching him pull out a sheet of paper and stick it under the mattress of his bunk situated on the far wall near the window.
“Who’s winning?” Ben motioned with his head at the cards.
Jude shrugged, not acknowledging the joke.
Ben sat down. “So...”
Jude glanced at the door, lowering his voice. “She anyone important?”
Ben took a second to respond. “Doctor.”
“Not that important then.” Jude looked back at the cards.
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “She has a book filled with hundreds of plants and what they do. Some are poisonous. That could be helpful.”
“She just left that sitting around?” His friend raised an eyebrow.
“Well, as far as she knows I’m illiterate.”
“Ah. Right.”
“A pretend lack of knowledge is power.” Ben rested against the wall.
“Dan ZD just got assigned to a politician of some sort.”
“Anyone we need?” Ben asked.
“All I know is it’s some forty-year-old who has a taste for younger men.”
“Well, I got lucky there. Pretty twenty-year-old.”
“Nice.” Jude didn’t look up from the cards.
“Are you back in rotation yet?”
“No, but there’s another lottery coming up. I’ve got some of the younger guys tickets lined up for that.”
Ben nodded, glancing back at the door. “Where’s everyone else? You chase them out?”
“They’re having a rugby match in the yard,” Jude said. “I didn’t feel like tackling people today.”
“Any issues with Eli and his boys?”
“Things have been pretty quiet.” Jude shook his head. “What’s going on outside?”
Ben moved a card for Jude without thinking. “Nothing big as far as I can tell.”
“Thrilling. We’re looking to get you reassigned again, I take it.”
“I don’t know.” Ben shook his head. “I think there’s some potential with this one.”
“What? She can get you meds?”
“I think she might become a convert.”
Jude raised his eyes slowly, quirking an eyebrow. “Are you serious?”
“We have some women working for us,” Ben said.
“Yeah, but the guards are easy. They’re treated only marginally better than we are.”
“I bet I could get her,” Ben replied. “She’s just ignorant, not misanthropic.”
“What if you don’t? You can’t just go up to her and say, ‘Hey, we’re a men’s rights group, want to join? No? Oh well, have a nice day.’”
“So little faith in me.” Ben crossed his arms, amused.
“You’re so confident?”
“She’s a novice, just turned twenty. How hard can messing with her mind really be?”