"Where is the Ice. Room?" she asked.
"Wherever you keep your worst nightmares," M'Lady Three replied. "Now get moving. You're wasting precious time."
"I can't imagine anything worse than what was done to us last night." Teal muttered. She is stupid. After what we told her, she goes and loses her temper. She could have gotten me into trouble again, somehow."
"I'm sure she's sorry now," I said.
Teal looked hatefully at Mindy. "I don't trust her either. I don't trust anyone." She glanced at me and I shifted my eyes away guiltily. "Anyone."
We marched back to the pottery room. Natani wasn't there, but we knew how to proceed. It took us the remainder of the day to produce five pieces of pottery our buddies approved. Just before they returned to inspect. Natani came in and without speaking helped us. Actually, he was the one who produced the finished products. He left before the inspection.
"All right," M'Lady One told us. "Return to the barracks. You have your schoolwork waiting. You have an hour to make use of before dinner. Every minute of time here is to be productive. Laziness is just as bad as anything else and is rewarded with demerits."
We found textbooks on our cats and sheets of assignments alongside them. There was work to be done in literature, science, math, and social studies. Everything had a specific deadline, the first being tomorrow.
"When do they expect we'll be able to do all this?" I moaned.
Teal shook her head. "This is crazy. She's giving us impossible things to do just so she can punish us with these sadistic things for not doing them. I don't care if I die out there. Tonight. I'm going to sneak some food away from the dinner, even if it's just a piece of chicken or something, and I'll find something to put water in. I'm leaving this place." she vowed,Ill get someplace where there is a phone and I'll call home. Once my parents find out how gruesome this is, they'll come get me. You can come with me or not." she concluded with a heavy note of definiteness,
"You can't sneak enough food out of there
, Teal. And you'll need more than a can of water. You don't know what direction to go in. At night you won't see anything. You could get terribly lost. It won't work."
She didn't reply. She sat on her cot with her back to me and then lowered herself to her side. I looked at her and thought. Was there any hope to an attempted escape? Could she be right? Should I go with her?
Mindy and Gia came in, glanced our way, then went to work on their academic assignments. I opened my math book and looked at the explanations and the problems. It might as well have been written in Greek. I thought. Maybe it was. I closed the book and walked to the doorway. Mindy glanced at me, then looked at her books. Gia never looked my way. Teal was still lying still. She had probably fallen asleep. exhausted. I didn't know what was keeping me awake and moving me.
I saw Natani come out of the cow barn carrying a pail of water that he dumped. Then he went back inside. None of the buddies were in sight. We knew that they lived in the hacienda, probably in the very rooms I had first thought would be ours. What a wishful dream that was. I thought now, and laughed at my naive optimism and innocence. We hadn't been here long, but to me at the moment, it seemed like months.
I gazed back at Teal once more, then left the barracks and crossed to the cow barn. Natani was adjusting the flow of water into the troughs. He looked up as I approached, then looked at the faucet again.
"I'm sorry my friend broke your plants," I told him.
"They are not my plants." he said. "They are yours. It is from these plants, from everything we do here, that you have what to eat and drink. Very little comes from anyplace else."
I jumped on what he said. "How far away is anyplace else, Natani? Really. How far away are we from anywhere?"
He stood up and wiped his hands on a cloth. "Many days, walking."
"But doesn't Dr. Foreman leave occasionally? There's a van, of course. The van they used to bring us here. There has to be a road that leads to places, a place to get gas, whatever. Where is this place?"
"The van comes once a month with food and other supplies. We have a big gas tank here for the van and the tractor. A truck comes and fills it once a month, and we run our electric generators on natural gas. That comes regularly, too.
"When the doctor leaves, she goes to a place where a small plane waits for her and takes her quickly to where she wants to be and brings her back. She doesn't go very often."
I looked around. Perhaps microphones really were secretly placed everywhere. Would Natani tell them whatever I asked him or said? Was he someone to trust? Did he fool us by helping us? I had to know as much as I could. I had to risk asking him questions. Teal sounded so determined. What if I did decide to go with her? Would it be madness?
"Do you like working for Dr. Foreman?"
"I don't work for Dr. Foreman." he replied.
"What do you mean you don't?"
"I work for what grows. I work for the animals. I work for the sun and the moon and the stars. My people were here long before Dr Foreman or anyone else. Signs, houses, papers, don't change the way things grow, the sun's rising and falling. I do what I have always done."
"She doesn't pay you?"
"The earth pays me."