Zapville, four weeks after the twelve left
Josephine counted out her steps as she took them. Yong Jie trailed behind, reminding her whenever she repeated a number, as he had every morning since she'd started this exercise.
"Was this fewer than yesterday?" she asked.
"The number of steps is an inexact measure of the circumference of this camp," Yong Jie said.
Josephine put a hand to her face as she looked out over the greyness of Zapville, its increasingly lifeless, joyless morning colours. "I know. If Angharad or Jin were here they'd know how to get a better measurement, but I don't."
She remembered them arguing over things near the border of the camp, back when the border was a buzzing, electric reminder of the boundaries of their existence. Not for the first time, she wondered where they were, how they felt, what they were doing. Did they get home safe or disappear into nothingness, and would she ever see them again?
"You talk about your friends a lot," Yong Jie said.
"Sorry."
Josephine looked back at Yong Jie. He kicked at a piece of gravel and looked down at his feet. She could tell he was trying, too.
"It was fewer steps," he said. "Consistently fewer every day. Even as an inexact measure, it's helpful information."
She nodded. "It tells us something, even if we don't know what that is."
They slowly made their way back to the centre of the camp, and then wound their way between the buildings. Above them, the sky was dark, the lights not bouncing off the metal plates of the ceiling with the full intensity of the day before. Josephine felt like winter would never leave.
Yong Jie led her into one of the dormitory buildings. They passed Mr Huppert on the stairs; he nodded and smiled and tried to hide a wince as he grabbed at his shoulder, where the flesh had been broken in the robotic attack.
Dr Yeoh and Ibrahim sat in a room with the door open, talking in soft voices. Josephine tried not to hear their conversation. She wiped her damp palms over the thighs of her jeans and followed Yong Jie in.
Dr Yeoh looked up and smiled a kind of weird half-smile. "Any news to report?"
Josephine cleared her throat. "I believe that the size of this camp is consistently getting smaller."
"You've been very helpful," Dr Yeoh said.
Dr Yeoh stood up just in time to catch Yong Jie as he started to collapse. Josephine stepped back, surprised. Ibrahim, on the other side of the room, smiled and continued to sip his tea.
"Things should be fine now, Ms Liu, you needn't worry," Ibrahim said. "Yong Jie is still recovering physically from what happened to him."
If Jin and Angharad had been there, yelling and laughing, Josephine would have been distracted by their noise, even as she felt awkward, but as it was she couldn't help finding Ibrahim's manner kind of creepy. She knew Angharad had liked him and she wanted to trust that, but Angharad wasn't there.
Josephine stepped back and nodded. She saw the doctor helping Yong Jie into bed with efficient movements and took her chance to walk away before Ibrahim closed the door.
*
There was even less food in the cafeteria than the day before.
At one of the tables, Gemma and her boyfriend sat staring into each other's eyes. That they could do that made Josephine feel so much envy it made her ill. The stale bread in the food trays looked dry and unappealing. She averted her eyes and walked out.
The gymnasium, at least, had stale cookies and tea, and she could be alone in there.
When she reached the gym, its kitchenette was dark, the whole building empty. She fumbled with the switch for the overhead light and it did nothing, no matter how many times she flicked it. So she opened a window in the hopes that the outside light would get in and sat on the floor, trying not to feel too sorry for herself.
She left the building hours later to find Gemma waiting at the door, arms crossed.
"Look, you don't have to avoid us," Gemma said.
"I wasn't avoiding anyone," Josephine said.
"It looks to me like you were avoiding us."
Josephine breathed out a heavy breath and walked around her.
From the distance behind them came the sound of something crunching. Josephine turned around, trying to pinpoint the noise.
She couldn't see anything immediately wrong but the light from outside that had filtered into the kitchenette had turned off. She stepped back into the gymnasium to check, wishing she had a flash light to help her look through the dark. Inside, one window seemed to be broken.
Behind her somebody crunched the broken glass under their feet.
Josephine put a hand on the wall to brace herself as she leaned through the broken window. Was it just her imagination or was the wall of metal plates fencing them in even closer than it had been just hours before?
"There's nothing in here to explain the window breaking," Gemma said. "Whatever it was probably landed outside."
They rushed back out of the building. There was not yet a crowd waiting, but Ibrahim had nearly reached the gymnasium, his face rumpling with concern.
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"Something fell down behind the building," Josephine said.
"Weird as it is to say, it's probably safer if you come with us to check," Gemma said.
He nodded, and all three of them made their way around the side of the gymnasium to look for the mess behind it. A red light hit the dark gravel, giving only the slightest illumination. Josephine looked back to see Ibrahim's robot eye shining, and only realised at that moment that he could turn the light on and off.
The area behind the gymnasium looked like it was littered with a pile of junk.
Ibrahim wove past Josephine and picked up one piece of it. "This looks like part of a broken security camera. I suppose it must have broken off and fallen down as the barrier moved further in."
"Do you think the person in charge is giving up on this place?" Gemma asked.
Ibrahim shook his hand, scattering that red light everywhere. "I believe whoever it is has chosen to treat this place like a video game, moving parts around at will, and leaving us small people to scatter among the wreckage for their amusement. Of course, I have no evidence to back up this claim."
"Oh, maybe it's that the people in charge had their funding cut and can't afford the power for the outer areas," Josephine said. "That happened to a school I went to. They had to stop using the east building and the cafeteria ended up with mould on the ceiling."
"If it was like that surely the outer areas would be cut off all at once instead of slowly over time," Ibrahim said.
"We're all just speculating," Gemma said. "It's not like we know anything."
"In any event, I believe it would be useful to evacuate the outer areas and move everyone that lives and everything we use closer to the centre of the camp," Ibrahim said.
Gemma nodded, a vague blur in the dark. "I'll get Theo and Eleanor to help. You get everyone else on it."
*
While everyone else moved people's belongings, Josephine moved anything people might want from the gymnasium, with a large white sheet from one of the empty beds in her own dormitory building serving as a makeshift knapsack. The boxes of tea bags, the cups, the stale crackers, all went into the pile, before she tied the sheet up into a sack, just like Ken taught her to once on a camping expedition. He'd be proud of her, if he ever saw her again.
She took everything straight to the cafeteria where the crowd was gathering.
Dr Yeoh stood in front of the kitchen area, where the robots used to be, and waved her hands about, directing people in a low voice.
"Uh, I brought the things," Josephine said.
"You can put them in the kitchen here when Ibrahim is done cleaning it," Dr Yeoh said.
The robot woman entered the building and moved to Dr Yeoh's side. Josephine stepped back. The robot woman 1090 looked around the room, blinking with deliberate motions. "What are you doing?"
Dr Yeoh laughed. "Humans get bored if we don't give ourselves jobs and create a hierarchy with leaders to look to. We're all playing a game, just to do something with our time."
Rod Spark stomped in, saying, "Irene, I need to talk to you about... About that Star Trek episode, you know the one."
Josephine stumbled back out to where it was dark and quiet.
Gemma stood there in the dark, eyes up to their metal sky. Josephine didn't know whether to talk to her or walk around, so she just froze, awkward, instead.
Gemma cleared her throat. "We're not going to isolate you. You can still come to my wedding."
"Will you really get married?" Josephine asked.
"When you love someone and you live in a death trap, why wait? Anyway, I don't have to get why you would choose Angharad over Eleanor, even if I really don’t get it.. You have so much in common with Eleanor. I guess Angharad was a bit of a flake but she was nice most of the time."
"She wasn't a flake!"
"Oh, please. Sometimes she would forget entire conversations she had with you. She probably had brain damage from the coma but it was still kind of annoying."
Josephine clenched her fists. "Stop talking about her."
"You don't need to get so..."
Ibrahim appeared from between two buildings as if out of nowhere. "Please don't fight, ladies. We're all in this together."
Josephine looked down at her fists, all her energy going to making them unfold.
"At least I get why Eleanor would choose Mac," Gemma said. "She wasn't pretty but she was clever and nice. She even worked in a nursing home before she got here."
"That did give her easier access to her victims," Ibrahim said.
Josephine strode off, unwilling to listen further.
When she reached the dormitory building, she paused at the downstairs door and reconsidered. There was a sound from upstairs, the faint tone of a familiar voice. She turned and walked up the stairs, through the propped open door.