OneI woke up first. There was no particular significance to it, only that I have always slept poorly and generally wake early in the morning. I had no way to tell the time, but I thought that I had slept a while: my limbs were heavy and stiff from a long, motionless sleep. The room was dark and windowless, with only a small skylight directly above my bed, though it didn’t smell of sleep, or musk: it smelled fresh and airy, as if it had recently been cleaned. I thought I could detect the slightest trace of air freshener, citrus-scented, or maybe pine. There were ten beds, though only one aside from my own was occupied. The girl in the bed across from me was slowly emerging from sleep. She sat up and looked at me. She was beautiful, but that was to be expected.
“Hello,” I said after a few seconds. “I’m Lily.”
“I’m Jacintha,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”
I put my feet on the floor, feeling newly born. I stretched, arms high above my head, and heard my joints pop. There was air conditioning whirring, but I could feel the heat that lurked behind it, thick and cloying. When I looked over, Jacintha was standing. She was wearing underwear and a tank top. Looking down, I saw that I was wearing something similar.
It might have been awkward, but she smiled at me. “Will we find the others?”
We made our way through the house, exploring as we went. The house was at once familiar and entirely new to me. On either side of the bedroom were the dressing rooms: the boys’ to the left, ours to the right. The boys’ room held no interest for us, and we went directly to our own. It was enormous, much bigger than the bedroom. It was where we could keep all of our things, once we had them. The room was mostly composed of storage space: built-in wardrobes, chests of drawers, cupboards, and some glittery boxes, similar to one I had used to store my dress-up costumes as a young girl. Running through the center of the room was a gray laminate-covered table, with a bench on each side. Along the table were lighted mirrors and the little screens. I touched one, but the screen remained black.
While the bedroom had been clean, the dressing room was distinctly untidy: there were clothes strewn across the floor, and makeup stains along the table, with the lingering scent of feminine products still hanging in the air. Jacintha and I looked through the drawers and storage spaces and found mostly clothes, the majority of them cheap and worn: swimsuits that had been stretched to the point of translucency, stained dresses, and tired-looking T-shirts. There were a couple of nice pieces, possibly designer—a few dresses, a skirt, and a jacket. They were stiff and creaseless, and I thought that they likely had never been worn.
Down the hallway was the bathroom, tiled and pristine. There were two toilets, a urinal running along the length of the wall, a shower, and a bath, large and inviting, shaped like an oversized canoe. There was a sleek gold bar on which towels hung, matching gold knobs on the cabinet doors, and a similar gold bar over the mirror by the sink. The taps were a fine brass color, with an impressive number of soaps lined along a shelf, and an artfully arranged stack of toilet paper. On the wall beside the bath was a painting, large and abstract. It was the only piece of art I had ever seen in the house. I knew that the place had changed drastically over the years, but the same piece of art stayed, unmoved. The bedroom and dressing rooms had been nice enough, but they were designed for practicality. The bathroom was pure luxury: perfect, except that it had no door.
Jacintha and I went downstairs. There were a number of empty rooms, perhaps four or five. There were some empty boxes left in them, and I thought that the rooms must have been used for storage. There were two more bathrooms, and though they were nice enough, they were clearly the lesser bathrooms.
We came to the living room and paused uneasily in the doorway. While the dressing room had been messy, this room had been trashed. There was no sofa, but there were folding chairs that lay in one corner. There was a mirror on the ground, shards of which reflected the mess around it: a dented wall, a legless coffee table, a shattered vase. Nearly everything in the room had been broken or destroyed, except for the big screen, which hung on the wall, untouched. Like the little screens, the big screen was blank. Neither Jacintha nor myself commented on the mess, but we stayed standing in the doorway for a minute or so, waiting to see if the big screen would turn on.
Then there was the kitchen, large and mercifully well stocked. There were granite countertops with the usual appliances, and a small island with three barstools. The kitchen had an industrial feel to it, designed to accommodate several people cooking at the same time, or cooking in large amounts. Jacintha and I spent a while there, rooting through cupboards and drawers. There was enough food to last for a long time—weeks, at least.
Although it was well built and well supplied, it was incredibly messy; bewilderingly so. There were eggshells on the ground, splashes of sauce on the wall, and dishes in the sink. The floor was dirty, the counters sticky. The bins were overflowing and smelled of rotting meat.
“There’s no freezer,” Jacintha said.
“The fridge is huge, though,” I said. I opened the chrome double doors, admiring its wingspan, and smiled at her. She looked at me like she wasn’t sure about me yet.
There was a large window above the sink that stretched almost the length of the wall. It had a nice effect, though it meant that the kitchen was uncomfortably warm, almost pulsing with heat. Through it, I could spot the swimming pool in the distance. It was only when I saw the blue-tinted water, glinting in the sun, that I fully came to terms with where I was and what we were doing.
“Look,” Jacintha said. It took me a minute to see the girl, curled up as she was, sleeping on the ground at the lip of the pool.
We went out to inspect her. When we approached her, she didn’t move. I wondered briefly if she was dead. Jacintha crouched down and shook her by the shoulder. For a second, looking down at her, I thought that she looked a lot like myself, and felt a pulse of worry. Then the girl woke, and I could see that she didn’t actually look like me: she was just thin and blond too. She was faintly pink all over from lying in the sun. The girl looked up at us, adjusting her hair.
“Hey, guys,” she said. “I’m Susie.” Jacintha and I introduced ourselves, and Susie smiled and nodded. “Those are great names,” she said with energy.
We looked at each other, trying to think of something to say.
“Isn’t the pool incredible?” Susie asked.
I said, “I was just thinking that.”
“I don’t know how I woke up here. I don’t remember going to sleep, but that doesn’t really matter now, does it? Oh,” she said, looking around her. “There’s so much sand. Wow. It’s warm, too. I’ve only just woken up, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so warm in my life! Where did you two wake up?”
“We both were in the bedroom,” Jacintha said. Susie looked a little thrown, so I said, “You’re the first we’ve found.” She looked happier, and we set out to find the others.
As we wandered, we were able to take in, for the first time, the scale of the place where we would be living. The compound spilled out, varied and brilliant: red-brown earth, yellowed grass in some places and startling, vivid greenery in others; pebbled paths, small bits of vegetation and amenities, and surrounding it all, separated from us by a ring of bushes, the desert stretching endlessly to the horizon. Toward the back of the compound, the grass and vegetation bloomed, and an irrigation system spat lazy drizzles of water, the light casting rainbows through the droplets, a casual sort of beauty that contrasted almost garishly with the monotonous plains that lay beyond. The sight of the desert gave me pause; I had seen it before on the television, of course, but it was a different thing entirely to see it before me. The pale gold sand and the flat, barren land seemed as though it had never been tempered by human feet. It was from there that the boys would come, and to there that we would be banished, if it came to that.
While the sheer size of the compound was incredible, it was distinctly run-down. It looked a lot like the home of a billionaire, if the billionaire’s staff had gone on strike.
Directly in front of the house was a patio, wrapping around the side. To the west of the house the grounds were lush and attractive, with long paths intersecting pretty flower beds. There was a pond glimmering in the distance, and gates and walls that led to nowhere as though someone had started to section off parts, but had given up. At the furthest western point sat an immense maze, green and imposing.
The west was picturesque, while the east was functional. There was a tennis court: no net or equipment, but the ground had been properly marked. There was a small outdoor gym with a bench and a step machine. A little farther beyond, there was a ping-pong table, which looked fairly new, and a trampoline with rusted springs and tired, sagging canvas.
Copyright © 2025 by Aisling Rawle. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
