The Forbidden Zone by Victoria Zagar Page B

they always had. I could out-think Little Sister or any other computer.
    She fell silent, which I took for victory. "I'm right, Little Sister. I usually am. You'll see soon enough."
    We fell back into the silent routine. I hummed a tune to avoid the deafening silence and ran my hands along the walls to get a sense of the space I was in. I felt a door handle and tried it. Locked, of course, but it felt familiar. The shape of the room, the pod I almost tripped over in the darkness. It wasn't a prison cell, but my room: the room I'd been living in. Knowing that made me feel less afraid. I was in familiar territory, instead of a random prison cell.
    I was still tired, but I didn't dare climb into the pod, lest Little Sister decide to close the lid and not let me out, so I lay on the floor and slipped into a light sleep.
    *~*~*
    It was hard to keep track of time in the darkness. Several days might have passed, two weeks at most, or maybe just a day or two. I had no way of knowing, and Little Sister didn't talk to me again. My eyes hurt from straining to see, and sleep was difficult to obtain when I seemed to be getting entirely too much of it. Little Sister dispensed one bottle of water every now and then, so I started to consider those my "days." I carefully rationed the water. The shower didn't work, but at least I had access to the waterless toilet, which automatically sucked my waste away with a sound that hurt my ears.
    Rarely, I would find a protein bar with my water. I struggled to eat them after Little Sister's mind games, but my stomach growled with hunger, and I forced myself to swallow them down, thinking of the finest Earth lab-grown synth-steak. I didn't want Little Sister to know that her twisted words had affected me. I tried to keep my mind on math problems, but it would often drift to Saidan. I tried to focus on the positive: I was sure he was alive, and somehow, I was going to find him and get us out of the mess we were in. I wasn't so sure about the second part, but I forced myself to believe it.
    I was caught by surprise when the red light on the camera went off. The door opened, and strong light blazed in from outside. I covered my eyes as a shadow walked into the room and half-slid the door shut.
    "Listen, and don't ask questions. We don't have much time." It was One's voice. "Saidan is alive."
    I had known, hoped, believed, but to hear those words almost made me break down in tears. I had never so much as cried a single tear in my life, but to know that Saidan was all right nearly made me break down for the first time.
    "I heard everything that transpired inside your ship. You've managed to accomplish in a matter of weeks what I have not in three hundred years. I now know the truth of the matter. Little Sister rules now, but she is not what her sisters were. She is unstable, and struggling to process as much data alone as the three cores of the Sisters. She cannot keep surveillance on everything all of the time, and that's how I'm here now, without her knowledge. Others have started to notice that she doesn't see everything. The other Valerians have started to play games. It started at Feeding Time, when they started to rebel against the protein bars. I'm trying to focus that anger against Little Sister. This morning we had a full-blown riot at Feeding Time. Everyone in the Science Building has been locked in their rooms for today, but tomorrow, something else will happen."
    "You're on our side?"
    "Little Sister must be stopped. Valeria will die if the creation of synthetic people continues to suck the life from the planet. Furthermore, her instability is speeding up the process. Valerians have been getting loose from the facility and wandering into the city. She then makes surplus replacements underground, speeding up the entire process of death and rebirth. We may only have a few years left."
    One shook her head. "This is all unimportant and not why I came here. Saidan is being transferred to the