Free Burn by Monica Hesse

coat.
    â€œMaria,” Gamb called from the kitchen. “I know you said you only eat strawberry Jello. Do you eat popcorn? I will win your heart with popcorn.”
    Lona opened her mouth, but nothing would come out. She couldn’t stop staring at the screen. At the doctors. At what they were wearing.
    Of course. In the Path program, Monitors like Talia wore black pants and shirts, blending in with the darkness of the control room and the bay. Touchers wore street clothes. Sweaters and jeans and comfortable shoes. Path doctors wore white. When they came to test Pathers on their motor skills and intellectual development, they wore long white lab coats that made them seem enormous to Lona when she was a child. Long white lab coats, and plastic nametags.
    Why else would Warren have been there? How else would this be tied at all to Lona?
    â€œMaria?” Gamb called again. “Lona? I’m just making popcorn, okay? Do you want anything else?”
    The scientist from her dream. Ned. He didn’t just work in a random lab. Lona was dreaming of the history of the Julian Path.

15
    The prisoner had begun to think of itself as an It. There was a time when the prisoner had another name, but the prisoner had had so many names since then, it was barely worth remembering.
    The room was familiar. Everything was laid out as it should be. The bed along the wall, the window beside the bed, the poster over the desk, curled around the edges. Could it be the same poster? No. Not even they could find the same poster. This must have been a reproduction.
    And maybe the room wasn’t familiar, anyway. Maybe it was false déjà vu, an implanted memory. They would know something about memories. If it wasn’t familiar before, though, it certainly was now. Spending twenty-four hours in a space makes it feel very familiar. It was twelve foot lengths to cross one corner of the narrow end to the other; fourteen foot lengths to cross the width.
    The window had security bars over it, but through the bars it was possible to see grass, a fence, beyond that an alley, maybe. The bars did not look strong. With the right tool or even the right leverage, it might have been possible to pry off the bars, but first one would have to break through the glass. It wasn’t possible to break through the glass. The prisoner had tried.
    The prisoner had also tried: yelling. Passing notes under the door. Eating the food. Refusing the food. Hoarding the food. Assaulting the person who came with the food, a man with a smushed-looking face, like his features took up too little space. He hadn’t been happy about that. He’d said he was some kind of doctor; he seemed to think that should gain automatic respect.
    None of these things made any difference, but it was useful to keep lists. Useful to approach things with the scientific method. Construct a hypothesis:
I could escape through the window, if I hurled this chair against the glass.
Test the hypothesis:
I can’t.
    There was a clock and that was helpful. Dinner was served at six, with a standard deviation of eleven minutes on either side. The sun set at five fifteen now, but it was getting earlier, which must mean that it was getting later in the year. Deeper into winter.
    The boy with the flaming hair came at random intervals, not tied to any particular time. Sometimes he brought the food, but more often he just wanted to talk. The others deferred to him. They left when he entered, and they gave him space, and when he talked to them, they looked down. He was beautiful. His hair was the color of bonfires in some light, of candlelight in others. His skin was pale; his movements were graceful and fluid. When he walked, he gave off the impression of a lit match floating across a smooth surface.
    Today he came after sunset but before breakfast. He knocked first, he always did. Knocking, smiling, sinking to the floor on his knees as easily as if there had been a chair there. The surest