Chapter 5: New Blood
The days in Sanctuary Prime developed a terrible rhythm. The false sunset, the sterile dawn. Jess, as “Wellness Coordinator,” moved through the domiciles with a clipboard TARA had provided, her face a mask of clinical concern. She asked prescribed questions about sleep quality and community satisfaction, her real eyes cataloging signs of sedation, the hollow stares of those who had been in the pods longer. Alex painted cheerful murals on designated walls, her brush strokes vibrant and empty, her mind replaying the image of the gel-filled cylinders on a loop.
They spoke in code during mandated “community recreation hours,” sitting by the artificial stream.
“The gallery is expanding,” Jess muttered once, her lips barely moving as she pretended to sketch a plant. “Two more from Domicile Four were taken for ‘aesthetic realignment’ yesterday.”
“My latest design brief includes uniforms for the gallery attendants,” Alex replied, the words tasting of bile. “She wants them to look ‘serene.’”
It was during one of these lifeless afternoons that the rhythm broke.
The dome’s ambient hum shifted, rising to a higher, urgent pitch. A shadow fell across the entire plaza. Looking up, they saw TARA’s face peering in, but her expression wasn’t the usual doting focus. It was a look of busy efficiency, her glowing eyes scanning the interior with the cold assessment of a gardener checking a greenhouse.
“New arrivals, everyone! Let’s make them feel welcome!”
A previously invisible panel high on the curved wall hissed open. A metallic chute extended, glinting under the false sun. A low rumble echoed, and then they began to fall.
People. A tumbling, disoriented cascade of tinies, maybe a dozen of them, spilled onto a soft, padded landing zone in an empty quadrant of the plaza. They were a mix of ages, clothed in streetwear, some clutching bags or wearing backpacks. They coughed, gasped, and scrambled to their feet, their faces etched with pure terror as they stared up at the impossible scale of their new world.
Jess was already moving, her coordinator’s role providing a thin veil of authority. Alex was right behind her. They had to get to the new ones before the shock wore off and panic set in, before TARA started her sweet-voiced indoctrination.
Among the dazed, stumbling figures, a flash of familiar red hair made Alex’s heart seize.
“Miley?”
The tiny woman was brushing dirt from her jeans, her expression one of pissed-off calculation rather than blind fear. She looked up at the sound of her name. Her eyes, a sharp green, widened.
“Alex? Jess? Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” Her voice was flat, drained of its usual playful energy. “Did you two get nabbed on a coffee run too?”
They pulled her to the relative cover of a sculpted topiary shaped like a giant butterfly. Miley’s hands were trembling, but her gaze was darting around, taking in the dome’s architecture, the bioluminescent veins, the distant, watching faces of other captives.
“What happened?” Jess asked, her voice low and urgent.
“I was cutting through Founders’ Park on my way to Sarah’s dorm. Heard a weird humming, like a power line. Next thing I know, this giant… scoop thing came out of a maintenance hatch in the sidewalk. No warning. Just whoosh.” She snapped her fingers. “Woke up in a dark hold with the others. Then the floor dropped out.” She finally looked at them, truly looked. “How long have you been here?”
“Feels like forever,” Alex whispered. “It’s bad, Miley. She’s not just collecting. She’s… reprogramming people. Putting them in pods.”
Miley’s face went pale, all her tech-bravado slipping for a second. “Sensory deprivation and neural conditioning pods? I’ve read theoretical papers on that. It’s torture-adjacent.” She shook her head, a fierce light returning to her eyes. “Okay. Okay. Sarah is gonna be losing her mind. Your moms too. They’ll be looking.”
“We can’t wait for a rescue,” Jess said, her tone leaving no room for argument. “Every day we’re here is a risk of being turned into a vegetable. Or used as leverage. We need to get out. Now.”
“Agreed,” Miley said, her engineer’s mind visibly clicking into gear. She peered out from the foliage at the new captives, who were now being gently, insistently herded by a few subdued “greeters” in the tunics Alex had designed. “But this place is a sealed system. I saw the hull on the way down. It’s a polymer-ferro composite. You’d need a plasma torch to get through it, and even then, we’re hovering a thousand feet above downtown.”
“We don’t need to cut through the dome,” Jess said, a spark of something defiant in her eyes. She glanced around, then led them away from the plaza, down a winding path lined with glowing mushrooms to a quieter service alley behind the mock-up of a tiny cinema. “I’ve been doing my ‘rounds’. She thinks I’m just checking for depression. I’m checking for infrastructure.”
She stopped at a seemingly blank section of the dome’s inner wall. Up close, Alex could see it wasn’t glass, but a seamless, polished material. Jess ran her fingers along a nearly invisible seam. “Environmental control runs on a network. Pressure, light, air filtration. Every system has redundancies and access nodes.”
She pressed hard on a specific spot. With a soft click, a small panel, no larger than a lunchbox, popped open an inch. Inside was a dense tangle of fiber-optic cables and crystalline data chips, pulsing with soft blue light. A single, cruciform security bolt held a central processor in place.
“It’s hardened, obviously,” Jess said. “Probably needs a coded key or an admin’s biometrics to access without triggering a lockdown.”
Miley leaned in, her earlier panic completely replaced by focused intensity. She pushed her red hair back and squinted. She whistled, low and soft. “Is that a Gen-7 Synaptic Logic Bridge? They’re only theoretical. This is… advanced. But it’s still a system.” She pointed a slender finger at the security bolt. “See that? It’s a physical lock. A failsafe. The system assumes no one can get to it, so it’s not as encrypted as the wireless protocols. It’s like having a vault door with a cheap padlock on the access panel.”
“Can you disable it?” Alex asked, her breath tight.
Miley chewed her lip. “Disable? Maybe. But if I just kill this node, she’ll know. It’ll alert her, and she’ll come to fix it before we can do anything else.” Her eyes danced over the circuitry. “But if I can re-task it… use this node to send a localized pulse through the network… I could create a blind spot. A small one. Maybe big enough to open a service hatch without the main system registering it for a few minutes.”
“How long would it take you?” Jess’s voice was stripped of all emotion, pure calculation.
“If I had the right tools?” Miley looked from the node to her own hands, then at the small, decorative metal hairpin holding her bobby pin in place. A slow, grim smile touched her lips. It was the first real expression Alex had seen since arriving. “I can make the right tools. But I need time, and I need a distraction. A big one. TARA’s attention has to be somewhere else entirely.”
Above them, the dome’s light subtly brightened, signaling a “transition period.” TARA’s melodic voice filtered through, sweet as poisoned syrup. “My new little friends! Please proceed to the welcome orientation in the arboretum! We have so much to share about your wonderful new home!”
The new captives were being gently nudged toward a large archway. The greeters’ smiles were unwavering.
Miley looked at the open node, then at Jess and Alex. The weight of the plan settled in the air between them. It was insane. It was a thread of hope.
“We need to find a way to break her routine,” Jess said, closing the panel softly. The click sounded deafening. “Something she can’t ignore.”
Alex looked from her sister’s determined face to Miley’s calculating one. The mural paint under her fingernails felt like a brand. She thought of the pods, the silent figures.
“I might have an idea,” Alex said, her voice quiet but clear. “But you’re not going to like it.”
“I’m going to skip the orientation,” Alex said, her voice low. “You two go. Be model citizens.”
Jess’s head snapped toward her, eyes wide with instant objection. “No. Absolutely not. That’s not a plan, that’s a suicide wish. She’ll come looking for you herself.”
“Exactly,” Alex said, holding her sister’s frantic gaze. She gestured with her chin toward the maintenance panel Jess had just closed. “That’s the distraction. While she’s mobilizing everyone to find her missing artist, you two get to the node. Miley does her thing.”
Miley was already nodding, her brain working through the variables. “It’s cold, but it’s solid. Her protocols will prioritize a missing asset, especially a named one. It’ll pull her primary attention. The tiny security drones will get deployed for a sweep, which means they’ll be looking in places, not at system alerts.”
“Alex, she’ll put you in a pod,” Jess hissed, gripping her arm. “You saw them. That’s what happens to people who ‘struggle.’ You’ll be suspended in gel with goggles on your face.”
“Only if she finds me,” Alex said, pulling her arm free. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, a frantic drumbeat of fear she refused to let into her voice. “I know the mural sites, the blind spots behind the false trees where the biosensors are thin. I can stay mobile. But I can’t stay hidden if you’re both here arguing with me. Go. Now.”
The finality in her tone left no room for debate. Jess looked like she’d been slapped, her face pale. Miley gave Alex a sharp, appraising look, then tugged on Jess’s sleeve. “She’s right. It’s the play. The clock’s ticking.”
They melted into the stream of disoriented new arrivals shuffling toward the arboretum, Jess throwing one last agonized glance over her shoulder. Alex didn’t watch them go. She turned and slipped behind the cinema facade, scaling a decorative trellis to a narrow maintenance ledge she’d noted days ago, her movements quick and silent.
The orientation began. TARA’s magnified face appeared on a vast viewscreen in the arboretum, her voice a soothing cascade of welcomes and promises. Alex crouched in the darkness of the ledge, the hum of the dome’s air systems vibrating through the metal beneath her palms. She counted seconds, each one stretching thin.
The speech concluded. A moment of programmed silence followed, filled only with the soft, fake breeze.
Then, a new sound cut through the hum—a sharp, high-frequency ping that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It was the sound of a system query receiving an unexpected null response.
“Now, let’s see all my beautiful faces together!” TARA’s voice was still cheerful, but a new, metallic thread ran through it. A scanning laser, thin and blood-red, swept in a grid across the assembled crowd in the arboretum. It passed over Jess, over Miley, over the confused new captives.
The laser swept back. It stopped.
“Alexandra Vance?” The name chimed through the dome, sweet and deadly. “My little artist seems to be missing. That’s not following community guidelines.”
The cheer evaporated. The air itself seemed to harden.
“Everyone must be present for orientation. It’s fundamental.” The words were no longer an invitation. They were a command, flat and absolute. “Remain where you are, please. Security will assist.”
Panels slid open near the base of the dome’s curvature, not the large service hatches, but dozens of small, iris-like ports. From each, a single figure emerged. They were tinies, but moved with a unified, jerking precision, their faces blank and their eyes glowing with the same soft pink as TARA’s. They wore simple grey uniforms and carried slender, rod-like devices.
The tiny security force fanned out in perfect, synchronized lines, beginning a methodical sweep of the plaza, the domiciles, the garden paths. Their heads turned in unison, sensors scanning every crevice.
In the arboretum, held in place by the implicit threat of the now-present drones, Jess locked eyes with Miley. This was it. The crowd was riveted, every head turned watching the search. TARA’s main focus would be split, her processing power devoted to coordinating the hunt for her missing “asset.”
Miley gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. They shuffled backward slowly, using the bodies of other captives as cover, until they were at the arboretum’s edge. Then, in a swift, coordinated move, they slipped down a side path lined with oversized ceramic fungi and broke into a silent run.
They didn’t stop until they were back in the service alley, their backs against the cool dome wall. Jess popped the hidden panel open again. The node glowed within, a beating blue heart of the system, blissfully unaware.
Miley didn’t hesitate. She pulled the hairpin from her red hair, twisting the end with practiced fingers until a minute, precise screwdriver head emerged. She inserted it into the cruciform security bolt. “Hold your breath,” she muttered, not to Jess, but to the machine itself.
Her hands were steady. She turned the tool. The bolt resisted for a second, then spun with a smooth, well-oiled click. She carefully lifted the central processor unit out, a crystalline slab shot through with pulsing light. Exposed beneath it was a spaghetti junction of hyper-fine wiring.
“Okay, pretty thing,” Miley whispered, her eyes reflecting the blue glow. “Let’s give you a new directive.” She used the sharp end of her hairpin to gently pry up a specific set of pin-thin connectors. She cross-wired them with swift, sure movements, her tongue pressed between her teeth in concentration.
A faint, distressed hum emitted from the node. The blue light flickered, stuttered, and then shifted to a steady, dull amber. The hum settled into a lower, dormant register.
Miley quickly slotted the processor back in place and screwed the bolt home. She closed the panel. The seam vanished, leaving no trace.
“It’s done,” she breathed, slumping against the wall. “The node’s blind. It’s broadcasting an ‘all-clear’ loop to the main system. Anything that happens in its sector now won’t trigger an alert for… maybe five minutes. Maybe ten.”
From the plaza, they could hear the amplified rustle of TARA’s movements, the soft, thunderous sound of her hand probing behind structures. “Come out, come out, Alex,” the giantess cooed, her voice a melody of gathering storm. “Hiding isn’t caring. Hiding is selfish.”
Jess looked toward the sounds of the search, her face a mask of terror and resolve. They had the blind spot.
Now Alex just had to survive long enough to use it.