Being trapped in a vast, indifferent place was not a foreign experience. After all, children don’t choose the parents they were born to, and so they are left to the whims of their parents’ desire to live at a particular place. Or their incapability to escape it. My parents didn’t have a particular affinity for London, but they didn’t have any disaffinities for the city either. They were indifferent. As one might be to the fact that there were twenty-four hours in a day. The reason for their stasis was obvious, but as a young boy who was still losing teeth, I loathed the city. Not because I had some inherent dislike of the sprawling suburbanness of outer London, but because of what the city had felt like to me as a child; constraining. Like a layer of viscosity up to my knees. I didn’t have the means to get around. I didn’t have any money to buy the things on display behind glass facades. I didn’t have a working knowledge of the concrete hive of which I inhabited, nor knew how and why it existed. For each friend I had, there was an abyss of mammals who looked like me, but was no more relevant to me than the distant stars in the rare cloudless nights. It seemed that twenty years later, I had, in essence, returned to that city. Nevermind the lack of a sun and atmosphere.

  I had slept well enough to not dream. Or perhaps I had but merely forgotten. Since returning to this apartment the previous so-called late afternoon, I hadn’t left. I had sat at the chair in front of my desk and stared out the window at the alien sight. For the first dozens of minutes, I tried to extract as much information out of the view as possible. The bridges had traffic every now and then. The traffic abided by familiar wave-like patterns. Sometimes, there were people in the windows of the other buildings, but they could be doing anything and I wouldn’t be able to tell. My mind tried to conjure hypotheses about how the city worked, but in the end it didn’t matter. This was just another London. And I was no less constrained than a young boy. And so my gaze became unfocused. Absent. As if trying and failing to find the horizon that I so dearly missed. At some point I laid on the bed to muse about nothing and everything. And I must have dozed off for an hour or so. Sitting at that chair and taking that view again, it appeared that the city was no less lively at night than it was during the day. The bright, wide lighting system that beamed from the ceiling was a discomforting sight to behold. It was as if the sun’s intensity had reduced to a fraction, but the Earth had flown right up to it. Light was only meant to come from distinct sources, not from everywhere at once. It gave the disorientating sense that all the monolithic structures existed in an office space. I had a kinship with the shadows here. They were as constrained as I was.

  By the time the interface on the wall of my room suggested it was early afternoon, I had realised that I needed to leave the faux safety of this apartment. It was a life or death matter. I had thoroughly rummaged through the refrigerator, every cupboard, cabinet and drawer twice. There was no food. I could perhaps call Irene, but this felt like it would be a humiliating admission of defeat. I needed to act on my own. To exercise what little autonomy that I still had. The city wasn’t appealing to me at all. It was strange and unfamiliar and dangerous—if my kidnapping was anything to go by. But I did not intend to go down starving. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself so I settled for the grey long sleeve and trousers in the wardrobe. The one with the single white stripe above the heart. And I brought the gun.

  The corridor was empty. I didn’t know how things worked around here, but if it was anything like the surface, then it would currently be the middle of a work day. I did my best to retrace the route that Irene had taken me on yesterday, but I was certain I had deviated. There were simply too many corridors and turns. Nevertheless I found an elevator. When it had arrived, I was alarmed to find a couple of other passengers inside. A man and woman, wearing similar grey attire that clothed my own body.

  I suppose it makes sense, I thought. It is an elevator after all. And I’m definitely not the only person here. After an awkward moment, I walked in and pressed the same level that Irene had taken me through yesterday. Several floors above. As the elevator began ascending, I saw their amused eyes on me.

  “So. New?” the man said. He was barely suppressing a grin on his face.

  “I guess?” I responded uncertainly.

  “Must be like heaven here, eh?” he said.

  The woman must have seen the confusion on my face. “Too early to tell, then,” she said slyly. The elevator door opened. I took the opportunity and left. Conversing with these people—cultists?—wasn’t something I wanted. The less the better. Or maybe I’m going about it the wrong way, I realised. Maybe I should pretend to be more friendly. Get on their good side so they’re less inclined to brutalise me.

  The setting was familiar, but the angle was different. This was the same floor that Irene had taken me through yesterday, the one that looked like a city block. There were dozens of people walking through the street. I felt like an imposter who risked cruel punishment if discovered. My legs began taking me in a random direction. There was a food court somewhere. In front of me, the boundaries of the street gave way to a square. There were people sitting on the benches, talking animatedly about something. There were young children playing by the fountain. There were a few people in solitude. One teenage boy sat at a bench reading something. It caught me off guard just how normal this scene looked. It took effort to remind myself that it couldn’t be.

  Several minutes later, I managed to rediscover the food court I had peeked into the previous day. Entering through the sliding doors, I saw dozens of people scattered across the many rows of tables, each with a tray of food in front. They took up less than half of the capacity. Most ate with someone else or a group. Only a few were by themselves. Despite the spaciousness of the interior, there were only two food vendors. One on either side of the area, but each was large enough to take up almost the entire length of the wall. There was a large screen above each vendor. One displayed Salazar’s Salvation In Sanctuary. The other had Northern Chinese Hand-Made Noodles. Naturally, I gravitated towards the one with the less terrifying name.

  I took a few steps towards the noodle shop before stopping. Shit, I don’t have any money, I realised. Once again, this was a problem that in theory, I could solve by calling Irene. She would probably tell me to wait where I was in her patented flat tone and before giving me food vouchers. Or perhaps she would tell me that I didn’t have the privilege of being able to participate in the consumerism of Sanctuary and taunt me with the familiar ham sandwich and sausages feed. But that was out of the question. I wasn’t interested in depending on Irene, to donate another weapon into her arsenal. No. I would beg from other people if I needed to. Surely someone in this city would have an ounce of empathy for the poor mathematician who had been kidnapped and forced to remain in this overengineered prison. And so I marched onwards.

  “Hello,” I greeted the bored looking young man behind the counter. At first I didn’t think he looked Chinese, and I was slightly put off by this. But studying his face up close, I realised that he was. But he also had features that I recognised in Eastern Europeans.

  “What’d you like?” he asked.

  “Uh. Before we get to that, I must tell you that I have no money,” I admitted sheepishly.

  The young man looked at me like I had just spoken nonsense. “Sorry?”

  “I have no money,” I repeated. “I wasn’t given any by my—” captors? I can’t say that. Who’s to say that everyone here isn’t in on it?—“by the people who brought me here.”

  The young man’s gaze flicked to my heart. I instinctively followed. A single white stripe. When I met his light brown eyes again, there was a fascination in them. Like one might have when looking at a flock of pink flamingos in an enclosure.

  “Ah okay. Well, we don’t use any money here. Just pick whatever you want.” It had only occurred to me that his accent was a mixture of English and American.

  “Oh, so everything is free?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Free?” he looked confused for a second, before seemingly reaching some kind of understanding. “Yes, free.” The tone in which he pronounced the word made it clear that it wasn’t a part of his vocabulary, at least not in this context. The way that a student of a foreign language might produce a permutation of words that are grammatically and semantically correct, but still feel off to a native speaker.

  “Huh. Then can I have the—” I squinted my eyes at the screen behind the young man—“biang biang noodles?” I had positively butchered the pronunciation.

  “Sure,” he said. “Scan your handheld here, please.” The young man gestured towards a small interface on the counter. A tone played when I placed my handheld near it.

  “Your handheld will tell you when it’s ready.”

  I muttered thanks and took a seat at an empty table nearby. The kitchen behind the counter was open. A few kitchen hands were at work, including one that was stretching impossibly long ropes of noodles. The young man joined them. He said something to the group and they laughed. A couple of the other staff turned their heads towards me. I looked away in embarrassment. I was the naive tourist who committed an innocent faux pas that I couldn’t possibly have known about. I didn’t even ask to be here! The young man returned to the counter to take orders from a few other customers who had entered after I did. Some customers returned their trays back to the restaurant as they left.

  It wasn’t long before my handheld played a sound and lit up. My tray awaited me at the counter. It smelled heavenly. I gave yet another thanks as I picked up the tray and took it closer to the centre of the seating space. I didn’t want to feel the eyes of the young man and his coworkers on my back. The table I settled at didn’t have any patrons in any adjacent table. Noticing that I hadn’t been provided with any beverages, I looked around and saw drink dispensers along another wall. I briskly walked over—as if walking leisurely would risk losing the food I had gotten for free—and filled a glass with water. There were other beverages, among them included orange juice and pear soda, but I didn’t feel particularly bold at the moment. When I returned, to my great dismay someone else had decided to settle at a table adjacent to mine. A girl. She couldn’t have been older than fifteen. The tray in front of her had a single taco and a salad of impressive variety. I paid no further thought as I dug into my own meal. Like a savage animal, once I began devouring I couldn’t stop. I hadn’t eaten in more than eighteen hours, but I had been taste starved for far longer. The lack of variation in the meals I had been served by my captors had reduced my taste buds into believing that the world was monochromatic. The innumerable spices and ingredients in this bowl of thick noodles had reminded me that there was joy in nourishment. That it could be more beautiful, more moving than a song or painting.

  “My mum would scold me for eating like that,” came a youthful, melodic voice. I turned my gaze towards the girl. Her voice was deeper than I had expected. She wore a frown, but there was a hint of curiosity behind it. I looked down at my bowl of noodles. It was more than three-quarters finished. But the tray—and to a lesser extent the table—looked like a crime scene.

  “Mine too,” I said as I wiped my mouth with a napkin. For an infinitesimal gap between the seconds, my mind wondered what other aspects of my life my mother would disapprove of, before sending the thought into the place that discarded thoughts went. “I guess I was just hungry. And these noodles are the best thing I’ve had for a long time.” I wasn’t exactly sure why I felt the need to justify myself.

  The girl nodded vacantly. “So. What’s the surface world like?” she asked. Ah, so that’s what she wanted to actually talk about, I realised.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “How did you know I’m from the surface world?” I asked. The phrase “surface world” felt strange to my tongue. It wasn’t long ago that that was just the world.

  “You stick out like a sore thumb,” she said with a prideful smirk as she folded her arms on the table. “You’re constantly looking around like you’ve never been here before. You’re always looking behind you like you’re being followed or something. See—” She points at my face—“you’re doing it now!”

  I didn’t even realise I was turning around to see if anyone was in earshot until she mentioned it. “I suppose you’re right,” I admitted.

  “And,” the girl said with a finger in the air, as if she was delivering an irrefutable deduction against me, “you have the white stripe.”

  I looked down at it yet again.

  “You don’t even know what it means, do you?” she asked rhetorically. I was beginning to get the impression that she liked pointing things out to her peers. And perhaps even to her teachers too.

  I stared at her. She wanted me to admit my ignorance. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. And she was going to explain it anyway.

  The girl sighed after a moment of silence. “It’s the transient insignia,” she explained. “That you’re new, but you might only be here for a short time.”

  I leaned in. “And what happens after?” I asked earnestly. “Do I get to leave?”

  The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s not up to me,” she said. “Maybe you can leave. Maybe you’ll get shot.”

  My face paled. “Are you serious?”

  The girl grinned mischievously. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  She stuffed a forkful of salad into her mouth, chewed for a few seconds, before, “Maybe not. But it’s not like it matters. Whatever happens, happens.”

  I felt frustrated with this girl. I sighed and sipped from my glass. “What about your insignia?” I pointed at the single aqua blue stripe above her heart. “What does that mean?”

  The girl looked at me disapprovingly and slowly shook her head. “Nope. You need to answer my question first,” she said firmly. “I’ve been very patient.”

  “What question?”

  She rolled her eyes. “The surface world?”

  “Oh, right.” I leaned back into the chair. “It’s a lot more open, that’s for sure. The sky. Sun. Grass. Wind. Rain. Beaches. Birds. All that stuff. It’s much nicer than this place.”

  The girl looked offended. “That sounds awful.”

  I was taken aback. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh I’m sure you know,” she said. “All the pollutants in the air. Best case scenario you get asthma. Worst case scenario you get some kind of cancer. I hope you have asthma and not cancer.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure on a statistical level you have a point. But have you ever been on the surface before?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Then maybe you won’t ever understand. You can read all the facts and measurements about being on the surface, but the appeal of being out in the open is beyond a list of numbers. I bet you’d feel something you’ve never known before if you stood on the surface even for a second.”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna have to pass on the skin cancer,” she said. “I just don’t see it. Down here, the air is filtered. There aren’t any bugs. The temperature is perfect. You don’t have to worry about the weather.”

  I shrugged. “To each their own.”

  “Anyway. I’m a student,” the girl said. “That’s what this colour means.” She pointed at her aqua blue insignia.

  “What do you study at school here?” I asked boredly. I wasn’t too interested, but this girl was the first person I could have a conversation with without wondering whether they were going to kill me or not.

  “We have schools for all sorts of things. I’m studying energy engineering myself,” she said proudly.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen. Why?” the girl asked suspiciously.

  “No reason. If I’m being honest, apart from how you look, nothing about you is like a fourteen-year-old out there.”

  “What were you doing when you were fourteen?” she asked.

  “Growing up too fast,” I answered.

  “What does that mean?”

  “So why do you want to be an energy engineer?” I asked.

  The girl must have heard something in my voice or seen something in my expression. “Well. It’s interesting and important. Humanity’s not gonna survive in the long run unless we improve our sustainable energy solutions.”

  “That’s commendable.”

  “And the algorithm said it was one of the things I’d be good at.”

  The conversation paused for a few moments as we mutually remembered that our food was only getting colder. As I chewed on yet another long, oily noodle, I reflected on the familiar education system that I knew. The kids in my high school who seemed to disappear. Those who didn’t do well, who wore shoes that were held together by cheap glue. There were even high achievers who were desperate for scholarships. I didn’t know whether I was lucky for landing one, or unlucky for needing one in the first place. I never found out what happened to the ones who were unlucky in both aspects.

  “So,” the girl interrupted my introspection. “What do you think of this city?”

  I thought for a moment. “Creepy.”

  “Creepy?” The girl looked positively scandalised.

  “It’s the perfect descriptor,” I said. “There’s no sky. Looking outside always makes me realise how oppressive the buildings look. And there’re so many of them. It all makes me feel creeped out. And your society too. Some of it feels dystopian. Other parts sound too good to be true. And that’s before even accounting for my experience with some… Receiverists over the past few weeks. So yes. Creepy.”

  The girl looked thoughtful for a moment. “Interesting.”

  “Interesting?”

  “Is that why you carry a gun?” she asked innocuously.

  For a moment I was confused. Until I remembered the cold weight pressing against my lower back. There was a slight embarrassment at the fact that a schoolgirl had just nonchalantly asked why I had a gun on me, in the same way that one might ask why someone was bringing fish feed to a swimming pool. She wasn’t even supposed to know that I was carrying.

  “It’s to make me feel safe,” I said.

  The girl looked perplexed. “But shouldn’t you not feel the need for it?”

  Nothing about what she just said made sense to me. “What—”

  “I guess it makes sense,” she muttered to herself. “You’re not from here. You probably think differently.”

  “Sure…?”

  I was going to ask her what she meant by that, when she checked her handheld and abruptly stood up.

  “Crap, I lost track of time,” she said as she picked up her tray.

  As she began walking away, I called out, “Hey, I’m Alex by the way. What’s your name?”

  She turned around briefly. “Charlie.”

  After finishing my meal, I brought the tray along with the napkin and empty glass back to the noodle shop. I stepped outside of the food court, back onto the street outside. Now what? I wondered. I had accomplished what I had set out to do. And it wasn’t even three according to my handheld. With a shrug, I decided to stroll around this floor. It seemed like a public area. Like I wouldn’t get into trouble for exploring this space. I walked past a clothes store that had a mannequin wearing a grey top and trousers, and another wearing a beige dress. I recall seeing a couple of women wearing dresses on the way to the food court. Peering into the store, there were variations of colours on the garments, but they were desaturated and patternless. There were also stores for electronics, mattresses and furniture.

  Two realisations had struck me, and they both had to do with things that weren’t there. The first was the absence of ostentation. None of the stores were colourful. They didn’t advertise. No branding or slogans or the year-round bargains. It was so bland that they couldn’t have been in the same category as stores that I was familiar with. Secondly, there were no banks. Nor ATMs. Foreign exchanges. Accountants. Law firms. No fashion stores consecutively lined up against each other. It was the absence of anything that announced contemporary society. This place felt naked without them. It was like seeing your favourite pop star without makeup—none of the larger than life extravagance, only the shockingly unimpressive and normal human beneath it all.

  General Grocer. I walked towards it. Besides my curiosity about what a grocery in this city looked like, I needed supplies if I was to survive this week. Entering through the sliding doors, it didn’t seem like there were many customers at this hour. I grabbed a basket and began walking down the aisles. The packages were barely branded. They all had “General Grocer” in black font stamped on top of white packaging. The terseness was evidence that it had more to do with identifying the origin of these items than establishing customer loyalty. It was surreal to see the section for every item to contain only a single, bland brand. What if I didn’t like this brand of butter? I wondered. Having stuffed my basket full of white packages and a handful of vegetables and fruits, I walked to the counter. The machine I approached instructed me to scan my handheld, before scanning my items. At the end, it thanked me and confidently proclaimed that it looked forward to seeing me next time. Rather threatening, I thought. I didn’t see any grocery bags anywhere, so I quickly hunted for reusable bags in one of the aisles and scanned it as well. I also realised that having a gun in my waistband wasn’t effective concealment. After all, if I couldn’t fool Charlie then I couldn’t fool anyone who I needed to fool. I look around, before hurriedly transferring the gun to the bottom of the bag then burying it with the other items.

  As I left the grocer, I realised an important fact. I was ignorant. I had plausible deniability if I was caught somewhere I shouldn’t be. I was even holding a bag of groceries filled to the brim. I was the picture of someone who didn’t know where they were and what they should be doing. Because that was exactly how I felt. And with this perfect cover—as long as they didn’t search through my bag and suspected that I had mens rea—I could search for an exit to the city. But where would I even start? I wondered. The bottom level? No. The surface is up. So I should try to get as high as possible.

  After a few minutes of walking, I found an elevator. It wasn’t an elevator I had taken before. When it had arrived, I got in and pressed the highest level—seventeen. Nothing happened. No visual indicator to acknowledge that it had been pressed. It occurred to me that the top levels were, for whatever reason, special. The top two and bottom three levels were highlighted in grey. Yesterday, Irene had to scan her handheld before going up to the sixteenth floor. I placed my handheld to the panel. A soft tone played. I tried once again to press seventeen. No response. I tried sixteen. No response either. Then fifteen. That one was highlighted in light blue—just like every third floor from three. The button lit up and a moment later, the doors closed. When the elevator doors opened, I saw yet another city block. Perhaps that was what the light blue floors meant. This place seemed similar to the previous floor I had been on. One clear difference was that it had a lot more bars and pubs. Are those clubs? I wondered as the screen above the venue proclaimed live music. There was even a sizable theatre. At the centre of this floor was an empty stage.

  I looked out from the bridge. This place was tall enough to give me vertigo. I was never one for heights. Looking above, indeed this building had connectors to the ceiling above. But that wasn’t unique. Every single building did. And these tubes, while certainly large enough for an elevator, in no way guaranteed that they were feasible exits. For all I knew, they could be delivery systems for energy, water, air, or anything, really. And even if one turned out to be the exit, I would need to solve the problem of getting to the top level. Confronted with the vastness of the view in front of me, I felt discouraged. I was merely a clueless speck of dust in this metropolis.

  I got lost a few times, but eventually I found my way back to the apartment. When I entered, I was surprised to find Irene sitting at the dining table. I didn’t know what to say, so I entered the kitchen area to sort through the groceries. She wordlessly watched as I did so. I approached her only after the only thing that was left in the bag was the gun.

  “I hope you’re enjoying your exploration of Sanctuary,” Irene said.

  “So you’ve been watching me?” I asked as I took a seat at the other end of the table.

  “Well,” Irene started with a shrug, “only a little. You’re my responsibility while you’re here. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you. That would reflect poorly on me.”

  “Ah. Well that’s nice of you,” I said sarcastically.

  “Of course. And so I’ll tell you charitably that you looked stupid carrying that gun around all day,” Irene said. There was a tinge of embarrassment as I unconsciously gazed towards the bag. “And also, it’s pointless trying to search for an exit. Calling it a needle in a haystack exercise would be a gross understatement.”

  “Yeah. I think I’ve realised that.”