They Sold Me For Rice

Chapter 8: Testing the Space

He woke at dawn with a crick in his neck and the taste of dust in his mouth.

For a moment he did not know where he was. Then the cold reached him, the smell of old concrete and rust, and it all came back in one flat rush. The lease. The ring. The white room with no walls.

The pen.

He sat up and closed his eyes and went in, quicker this time. The white light settled around him like a held breath. The apple floated where he had left it, and the pen floated closer to the center, exactly as he remembered. Nobody else was there. No sound. No breathing.

He took the apple out into his palm and turned it over. The bruise on its skin was the same size, the same brown, as the night before. Not a hair darker. He took a bite anyway, just to be sure, and it was crisp and cold and sweet, as if it had been picked that minute.

Time did not move in there. Or it moved so slowly that it made no difference.

He stood very still and let that sink in. Food that never spoiled. Medicine that never expired. Water that never turned. In three months, half the world would starve while rot ate through what little was left, and he would be carrying a pantry that never aged.

He finished the apple, core and all.

Then he got to work.

By the time the sun came up properly, he had a notebook open on the old desk and a list of questions. He tested them one by one, the way his father had taught him to test a bridge before crossing, with patience and a little fear.

First, range. He set a brick on the floor and stepped back and held out his hand. At three feet, the brick vanished at once. At six feet, it took a heartbeat longer and made his head throb. At ten feet, nothing happened. He tried again, and again, and on the fifth attempt he felt the faintest tug and the brick winked out of sight. His nose bled. He wrote it down. About ten feet, with effort. Arm's reach was easy.

Second, speed. He lined up twenty bricks in a row and counted how fast he could clear them. The first ten went in two seconds. After that the ache came back, and he slowed. He learned to breathe through it, to keep his mind on the white room instead of the pain, and by noon he could move thirty at a time without bleeding. It was like learning to run again, the lungs burning, the legs shaking, and then slowly, slowly, something giving way.

Third, weight. This was the one that scared him. He found a rusted generator housing in the corner, four hundred pounds at least, and stood in front of it with his hand on the cold metal. He thought: take it.

Nothing.

He thought it harder. Something inside him strained like a rope pulled tight. His vision narrowed. His ears rang. He felt the thing begin to give, just barely, a shiver in the steel, and then a hot wire of pain shot behind his eyes and he dropped to his knees and vomited on the concrete.

When the world came back, the generator was exactly where it had been.

He lay on his side for a long time, watching a spider cross the floor, waiting for his stomach to settle. A lesson, then. The space could hold a mountain, perhaps, but his body could not lift one. Not yet. He wrote down: Three hundred pounds, maybe. Do not try more until trained.

Fourth, and last, he had a quiet, uncomfortable idea.

A pigeon had been shifting in the rafters since yesterday. He found it now, sitting on a beam above the loading dock, fat and grey and utterly unbothered. He stood below it with his hand raised.

He did not want to hurt it. That was not the point. He wanted to know.

Take it.

The pigeon looked at him. Fluffed its feathers. Looked away.

Nothing had happened. He frowned and tried again, harder, and again the bird sat there, as if he had asked it nicely and it had politely declined. A wave of tiredness rolled over him. He lowered his arm.

No living things, then. Not even small ones.

He crouched down and scribbled it in the notebook, and in the middle of the line his pencil stopped.

He did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed. Relieved, because it meant no one could be dragged into the white room against their will, no one could be trapped there. Disappointed, because there would be nowhere to hide a person if it came to that.

And what if there was something in there already?

He shook the thought away. It was a stray. A trick of the dark, an overtired mind building monsters out of shadows. He had not slept properly in two lives.

He ate a protein bar from his duffel and drank from a bottle of water, and noticed with some surprise that the bottle, when he took it out of the white room, was still as cold as the moment he had put it in.

Around two in the afternoon, his phone buzzed.

He had turned it back on that morning, reluctantly, only because he needed it for the car sale. A string of missed calls waited on the screen. Vanessa. Vanessa. Richard. Derek. Vanessa. He ignored them and opened the one message that mattered.

A buyer. A man called Hollis Vance, who had seen the listing and wanted to look at the car that afternoon. Cash. He could be at the meeting spot by four.

Lucas read it twice. A cash buyer, in a hurry, at a good price. It was everything he had hoped for, and for that exact reason, something in the back of his skull began to itch.

He drove the car out to the meeting spot himself, a supermarket car park twenty minutes from the warehouse. He had parked it there the night before and taken a bus back, a precaution that now felt less paranoid and more like instinct. He arrived early, leaned against the bonnet in the thin afternoon sun, and watched the cars drift in and out.

At four exactly, a grey sedan pulled into the far corner of the lot and stopped.

Nobody got out.

Lucas kept his eyes on his phone, as if bored, and watched the sedan from the edge of his vision. Two shapes inside, large and unmoving. The windows were tinted, but not enough. He saw the passenger lift something to his face, a phone, perhaps, and glance across the car park at Lucas.

Then the shape lowered the phone, and Lucas's own screen lit up.

A new message, from an unknown number.

Nice car, Lucas. Richard says hello.