Prisoner of Glass Read Free

Instantly, her mind became fog.   Her limbs were heavy as if she were on Jupiter.   The world tilted.
    “She’s a lanky one, isn’t she?” one of the women said.   “We might have trouble finding clothes that fit.”
    And that was the last thing Doctor Elspeth Lune recalled before warm darkness took her completely.

TWO: ARRIVAL

    ELSPETH LUNE OPENED her eyes slowly.   The world was a wash of grey.   She wasn’t quite sure where she was, but she did not panic: she assumed it was yet another hotel room.   As her eyes adjusted, she knew it would all come back to her …  
    And in a stab of panic, it did.
    Where —?
    She had been with the TSA Agents.   They had been questioning her when …
    That was the last thing she recalled.
    Elspeth sat bolt upright.   Her vision snapped into clarity with the force of a punch.   She was in a cell of some sort, some kind of a jail.   The walls were stone and the air was sharp and cold.   She saw her shuddering breath in puffs of vapor.  
    There was noise — a lot of noise.   Something playing on a loudspeaker or bullhorn … she couldn’t make it out.
    She looked down at her lanky body.   She was not wearing her own clothes.   Instead, she was wearing ragged burlap or canvas pants, tied at the waist.   She wore a long sleeve shirt made of the same material, drab blue in color.
    Someone had changed her clothes!  
    Had she been raped?
    A quick check reassured her.   No.   That, at least, had not happened.
    She was on a bed, a rough metal bed with squeaky springs and an old mattress.   Brown wool blankets laid on it.   She snatched one up and threw it around her shoulders to contain her shivering.  
    A slap of adrenalin caused her mind to focus.   Her physician’s training took over.   She was used to emergencies.   She could function even if part of her wanted to scream.
    With the cold clinical detachment of a triage, she observed her surroundings.
    A toilet in the dark corner.   A desk and chair.   Two beds on either side of the room.   A game — chess? — Something like chess on a table.   The place was Spartan, but relatively clean.   And stone ceilings, stone walls, she was as enclosed in stone as a sarcophagus.   Scrawling of all sort on the walls in multi-colored chalk or marker — but she read none of it yet.  
    And bars — vertical black bars on the front of her cell instead of a wall.   So.   A prison or holding pen of some sort.  
    And beyond those bars …  
    She rose to her feet and went to look out.   A gash of fear flooded in her belly.
    Her cell was one of many lining the inside of a massive sphere.  
    A vast open space yawned in front of her, like being on the inside of a hollowed out moon.   There were walkways at each level, circling around the circumference of this strange prison like lines of latitude articulated in granite.  
    In the center of this hollowed-out sphere was a massive black cylinder.   It was supported from above and below with black metal column that ran through it like a rotational axis.   There were lights on inside the cylinder, she could see that clearly.  
    There was someone home.
    At various points on this central structure, several massive circular screens were attached, each pointed and angled in different ways such that all the cells of this prison could get a view that worked for them.   The same movie played on each.   It seemed to be a nature film: there was cut after cut of exotic insects crawling and then eating each other, then birds and lizards eating the insects.  
    The soundtrack to this film — music, mostly, with a man’s voice matter-of-factly describing something — blared out of loudspeakers.   She couldn’t tell exactly what he was saying, his voice was muffled and echoed to the point of inscrutability.
    Thrumming shook her temples.   Where was she?   What was this?
    The place had the electricity of a sports arena.   Random howling punctuated the dark — she pictured