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  “Th… thirty-five A has to be in the last row.”

  Oh, God. Their voices came closer and closer. Please, if there is any good in the universe, let me have some now.

  The talking was now no more than five feet away. Jason caught sight of an arm—he supposed it was Dexter’s, given the height and slim build of its owner. And then Dexter’s eyes were looking right into his own.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dexter was temporarily unable to speak. His mouth fell open. The shock in his eyes met the fear in Jason’s for a long moment.

  “Where is the darn thing?” the other operator grouched.

  “I th…ink it’s back the o…other way. Let’s go back.”

  Dexter hustled his companion back the way they had come.

  Jason’s heart started to beat again. His knees almost gave way. He allowed himself to slide slowly to a crouch, despite his kneecaps now being outside the cabinet. How was a sweaty impostor supposed to get out of this place unnoticed?

  The two computer experts located the faulty servers—both in other rows—and worked on them for what seemed like an eternity. Eventually, they left the room. Now, to just walk out casually and hope for the best? Or wait until the next shift change? To try and don the janitor’s rags again, or leave them, knowing they would be discovered later?

  Jason weighed the options again and again. Eventually, he decided on the quick, casual exit, leaving the bucket and rags behind. He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself by breathing slowly. A few minutes later, having mopped his face and forehead dry, he began to walk. As Jason reached the end of the server racks, he noticed a desk holding up a disorganized stack of papers. And one of them was blue! He pulled it from among the others. It was nothing other than the blueprint of the entire pod! Holy Christ. To read it then or steal it to read later?

  Jason opted to spend another few stomach churning, heart-pounding minutes in the server room. In the back row, he unfolded the paper. At five feet by five, it was awkward to read in the confined space. Each floor was shown as a separate diagram, like slices through an apple. He started at the bottom. There it was, on the northwest corner: DOOR. He quickly traced the route to get there: it was a staircase leading down from the west side of level six. Bingo.

  There was no time to revel in his success. He quickly folded the paper and put it back, hoping nobody would notice the slight rearrangement of the stack. After calming himself down again by conscious breathing, Jason strode purposefully out, back into the office. There were now ten people at their desks, all facing him. It was very hard to resist the urge to look at them. A few seconds later, Jason was back at the inner lobby. He kept right on going, not acknowledging the pair of guards. Don’t look back.

  The elevator was agonizingly slow to arrive. Eventually the doors pinged open, and Jason pushed a button for some floor above—he didn’t care which one. Only when the doors closed did he allow himself to breathe a massive sigh of relief. He now owed Dexter any favor he could possibly ask for.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We can live tonight or we can die this way. Jason recalled a line from an old song, one of the few hundred available. Never was a there a more apt lyric. The death wouldn’t be a physical one, but a slow crushing of his soul over the decades spent inside the pod. It would be the longing of looking outside, knowing all the while that they were being lied to, and it was safe to go out. Leave tonight. Jason mulled this over as he trimmed back the plants in their pods of clear liquid, under the blazing lights. Everything was in place now, including the secret sauce: a distraction so big he was almost guaranteed not to get caught.

  After work, Julia invited him to meet her for dinner in the cafeteria. As he walked to the long table with his tray, Jason looked out of the window. It was already dark. Night would be just one of the foes he would soon face.

  “I know you’re still planning to escape,” Julia said, matter-of-factly, despite it having been weeks since they had last talked about it.

  “Oh yeah? How?” Jason said, playing dumb.

  “I know you’ve been up to something, disappearing at odd hours. I mean, where could you have possibly been last night, our usual movie night?”

  Jason opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything.

  “What do you think there is for you out there?” Julia said, sweeping her hand towards the window. “There might be people out there, but I bet they don’t have three hot meals a day given to them. They might not even have somewhere warm to sleep. I don’t think you’d survive more than a week, honestly.” She softened her tone. “Besides, if you were gone, I’d miss you terribly. And I know your mother would too.”

  Jason continued chewing rapidly and looked straight ahead, trying to internally deflect her body blows to his carefully constructed world, in which he was a caged animal whose actions had no effect on anybody else. He remained silent for the rest of the meal. I have to escape. I’ve come too far not to.

  * * * *

  After seeing Julia to her apartment door, Jason sighed. He couldn’t go home; not yet. He walked along two corridors, past the elevator lobby, and found the stairs. He walked down, not to escape—yet—but to think. What Julia had said had thrown a wrench in the wheels of his carefully-crafted plan. And why did he think it was carefully crafted, anyway? His escape from the pod might have been brilliantly engineered, but nothing else was. His preparations for life on the outside consisted of nothing more than taking all his clothes and some food he’d stored at home. There was also the small matter of crossing hundreds of feet of water. Swimming across the delta, even with inflated plastic bags to use as flotation devices, wasn’t without its risks, especially for someone who could only guess at how swimming was meant to be done.

  Jason was now at level nine, a symbolic point as it was halfway between his home and level six, where he would take the final trip down to the exit. He paused, mid-flight, holding onto the banister. He had to face facts: life in the pod might be boring, but it was safe. And the question of never seeing Mother or Julia again had hit Jason hard. He would miss them both, but he had to face something else: he loved Julia. Though they had never dated, Jason felt something for her that he’d never felt for anyone before. Julia needed him. So this was what it was like.

  Jason sat down on the hard, cold white step and buried his face in his hands, exhaling loudly, and tried to make sense of it all.

  * * * *

  “Thank you, dear,” Mother said, on receiving the breakfast Jason had brought back from the cafeteria. She sat at the small around table in the living room, picking at her scrambled eggs.

  Jason stretched and yawned—the last night had not provided him much rest. The screen came alive with Malvern’s nasally voice. “Chairman Stromdahl has mandated that cameras will be installed to monitor external access to the pod, for the continued safety and security of all residents.” The voice faded, leaving the words in white on a black background.

  Jason’s stomach churned. He tried not to let Mother see his discomfit. He had known from the blueprints that there were cameras outside, but they looked out at the horizon instead of down. Their blind spot would soon be gone. It was now or never.

  * * * *

  Jason tried to push away the image of Julia’s perplexed face when he’d said he didn’t want to eat with her after work that night. He left a note on the living room table for Mother to find the next morning and pass on to her, before gathering two bags of food and two bags of clothes. It was late, but he still couldn’t take the chance of anybody questioning why he was carrying all this stuff, so he took the stairs. Each step brought with it the chance of an encounter with a Guard. Jason’s nerves were taut and his senses on high alert as he traversed the seemingly endless chain of switchbacks.

  He soon passed the point where he had sat the previous night on level twelve. A few heart-pounding minutes later he was at level six. This was a place few ever visited apart from maintenance crews, as it consisted purely of air handling units and electr
ical transformers in large, locked rooms.

  Taking a left from the stairs, Jason headed along a white corridor that went due west. No wonder there aren’t any signs, he thought. They wouldn’t want people knowing that such an innocuous passage led outside. A minute later, the passage ended at an anonymous white door. He opened it to reveal the top of a concrete staircase, which went down further than he could see. Jason set his bags on the top steps and then stood, thinking. He’d been lucky so far. But, to be caught escaping would be a death sentence. He would have to use his planned distraction.

  He headed back to the stairs, and down one floor to level five—the power plant. He exited the staircase and found himself on the corridor with the windows looking into the control rooms, where he had begun his search for the exit several weeks ago. It seemed like a lot had changed since then.

  Jason recalled his guided tour of the power plant with Neil. The second control room was the main one. He walked as casually as he could along the corridor, peering in the windows. There was one operator on duty in the main room. Dammit. He would have to wait.

  Jason headed back to the stairwell. There was nothing he could do until the room was clear. He sat on the bottom step, resting his chin on his hands and propping his elbows on his knees, hoping that when room two cleared, the tech wouldn’t head up the stairs. Had anyone living in the pod ever been outside? How cold would the air be? What about the water? What would it sound like? Would he meet the people he’d seen out there? How had they done such a perfect job of making a self-contained biosphere that nobody had to venture outside for decades? Unless they did… Maybe Rex and his cronies came and went regularly, visiting people or places he could only imagine. There could be a vast, opulent city just out of sight, or a wasteland that was home only to hardy nomads who led short, brutal lives of scavenging.

  On his third trip back to peer into the control room window, Jason found it to be empty! Neil had explained that it was automated and only required an attendant to make sure it was running properly. Hence, they could and did take breaks.

  Jason punched 22442 into the keypad on the door, having memorized the numbers as Neil typed them. The space was about the size of a living room, with a gray console along one wall. Above this were windows into the reactor hall. Several operator chairs faced the screens, which displayed charts and meters showing various readouts of the state of the plasma. However, Jason was only after one thing. In the center was a large red button labeled EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN. After a last scan of his surroundings, Jason walked over and slapped his palm on it. Everything became an altered landscape of low red light and blaring klaxons.

  Jason dashed the fifty feet back to the stairwell and ran up. He imagined the entire pod awakening to the alarm as he made his way along the deserted corridor back to the top of the exit stairs. He grabbed his belongings and made his way down.

  This was very different to the main staircase. It was bare concrete on all sides, now lit only by a dim red glow. There were no landings or side doors. It seemed to go on forever. Jason’s heart pounded with each step. He pictured the first pod dwellers coming up, whoever they were. Rex couldn’t have been one of them; even he wasn’t that old.

  After a long slog, the stairs took a ninety-degree right turn. Jason had expected this, from his frantic fear-soaked reading of the blueprints. He was descending into the bowels of the pod. It was eerily quiet.

  Another sixty feet brought Jason to a level passage. Another forty feet, and there it was! A small room, centered around a large iron trapdoor. On the door was a wheel, which was presumably the handle. Next to that was a window, roughly the size of a dinner tray, facing down. Jason crouched and pressed his face to the glass. His heart sank on seeing that it was completely dark below. He had hoped there were lights of some sort on the underside of the pod, but alas not. The blueprint hadn’t shown how one was supposed to get to the ladder. He would have to go by touch alone.

  Jason used lengths of cord to tie his bags into two separate bundles, linked by two feet of the thin rope. He then stood up and tied the ends around his waist, making sure to fasten it very securely. This would leave his hands free for climbing.

  Jason’s stomach was wrung tighter than a spring, and he felt like his heart would pound out of his chest as he took hold of the wheel and turned it—or tried to. It wouldn’t budge. He inhaled, crouched lower, and twisted counterclockwise with all his might. Still nothing. He exhaled loudly. His eyes were now adjusted to the dark, and he noticed something on the bulge that accommodated the locking mechanism: a large keyhole. After all this, the trapdoor was locked.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “How long left on the carrots?” Jason asked, as he wiped his green-stained thumbs on his ragged apron.

  “’Bout two days,” Julia replied.

  Jason nodded. “What’s next? Cabbages?”

  “Aye.”

  He drank in the scent of the greenery all around him. It was life. The animals living on level eight were life. It was all around him—right there in the pod. After scanning around to make sure no-one was looking, Jason tapped Julia on the shoulder. She turned around to see his arms spread wide, inviting her into an embrace.

  “What’s that for, love?”

  “Just because.”

  The pair hugged tightly among the rows of plants.

  Jason had everything he needed right there in the pod. He could be with Julia, look after Mother for the rest of her days, hang out with Neil, Dexter, and anyone else he wanted to. Life outside was all very well, but Rex was right. It was dangerous and unpredictable. Jason would content himself with looking at it through the windows. Inside, he was safe.

  Sometimes the darkness we fear is our own…

  Despite his reputation as a brilliant and dedicated space engineer, John Rees is certain he is not the man everyone thinks he is. Haunted by the death of his father and one fatal decision that questions his morality, he doubts he will have a chance to redeem himself for a past he cannot escape.

  But when 100 colonists go missing on an alien planet, he sees his chance to prove once and for all that one decision doesn’t create a monster. With only a skeleton crew chosen to lead the rescue mission, and John not making the cut, he struggles to find any way possible to help save them.

  Can John find a way to get on board the vessel bound to find the lost colony, or will he be forced to watch from the sidelines as his destiny is snatched from him?

  Strap in for Missing, the first book in Andrew Broderick’s new sci-fi adventure, The Lost Colony series!

  Click here: http://andrewcbroderick.com/missingbook