Prisoner of Glass Read Free Page A

madmen in straightjackets.
    She smelled smoke.  
    Far, far below in several cells across the inside of the hollow prison-sphere, there were small licks of fire.   Somebody trying to keep warm.   There must be other fires nearby, she reasoned, fires she could not see because of the curvature of the cell block.  
    She shivered: it only reminded her of how cold she was.  
    Nearer to her cell, she now noticed several cameras.   She was being watched.   The tiny cameras were everywhere: red lights steadily on, living electronic eyes.  
    What in the fuck was this?
    “You’re quite a tall woman, aren’t you?” said a voice, coming from behind her.   She whirled.  
    A man sat on the other bed, dressed much like she was in drab olive burlap.   He was fortyish, and wore his ink black hair in a short, clipped cut.   He was smiling.  
    “Who are you?” she snapped.  
    “A prisoner, like you.”
    “A … prisoner,” she swallowed the words.   They stuck in her mouth, saying them out load like that.
    “Yes.”
    Ok, Elspeth.   Calm down.   But she chewed copper panic.   Visions of Locked Up Abroad skirled through her mind.   But she wasn’t abroad, she reminded herself.   She had been at the airport, in Los Angeles.   In America .
    But this place did not look like anything American.  
    “Is this Homeland Security?”
    The man shrugged.   “Nobody knows.   It’s somebody’s government, that’s for sure.”
    She was a prisoner, she breathed.   Imprisoned.   Locked up.  
    Why would anyone want her imprisoned?   She had done nothing wrong.   This was a mistake.   Someone had made a mistake …  
    Unless this had something to with her missing husband?
    “Who’s in charge here?”
    “They are,” the man said, nodding towards the black cylinder that hung suspended from the metal shaft that pierced stone moon like a rotational axis.   “The men in the Panopticon.   They have line of sight all around — they can see every cell from the center.   Like they need it with all the cameras.”   He snorted a laugh.
    “And who are you?”
    “Your cellmate.   My name is Titus.”   He held out a hand; she declined to shake it.   She went back to her bed and sat, facing him squarely.
    “Well, Titus .   I want to know what the hell I’m doing here.”   She spat her words like they were laced with venom.
    Titus smiled wanly.   “We’d all like to know that.”
    Elspeth blinked.   He wasn’t getting it.   “Listen.   I was just at LAX.   There was plane crash on the runway.   There was a man —”   A strange man, in a suit, his face tattooed with hieroglyphs.   He’d said, Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.   They always have been.   “I tried to warn them, but they wouldn’t listen.   Then TSA took me away for questioning.   The next thing I know, I’m here.   I guess they think I was involved or something.”
    Titus shook his head.   “No.   I don’t think so.   There are prisoners from all over the world here.”
    “So what, it’s like Gitmo?”   Had she be rendered to a foreign location?   She’d read about things like that happening since 9/11.   “Is this the CIA?   The NSA?   Are they trying to say I’m an ‘enemy combatant’?”   Enemy combatants didn’t have Constitutional rights.
    Titus laughed aloud at that.   “No.   It’s not the CIA.   At least, I don’t think so.”
    “What do they —”   She stopped short, seeing her right hand for the first time.
    Her pinky — the one that she’d lost in the accident — was there.   Or at least, something like it.  
    It looked like it was growing back .   It was about two-thirds done.  
    She gaped at her own hand.   She wiggled her new finger.   “That’s impossible.”   Severed fingers did not grow back!   She was a physician.   She knew.   Medical science had no way to regrow lost fingers or toes!   She touched it with her other hand, horrified that she could