The morning injection burned less than the secret burning a hole in Maya's chest. She went through the motions—smiling at the nurse, thanking the kitchen attendant for her oatmeal, stretching on the yoga mat that had been placed in every villa as part of the "wellness protocol." Her body moved like a puppet's, but her mind was a hive of static.
Vera was already seated at the breakfast counter, spooning yogurt into her mouth with studied nonchalance. Maya caught her eye and tilted her head toward the bedroom. Vera nodded almost imperceptibly.
They waited until Ruth and Tamika had finished their meals and the cleaning drone had vacuumed the common area. Then Maya pulled the smartphone from the hollowed-out copy of a romance novel she had hidden it in. She laid it on the bed, screen down.
"Clara gave me this," she whispered. "It's eighteen months of recordings. Transcriptions. Medical logs. Maybe enough to sink Veridian if we can get it off the island."
Tamika's jaw tightened. "Let me see." She swiped through the files—audio clips labeled by date, PDFs of lab results, blurry photographs of surgical trays and vials. One file was a video: Dr. Henrik Voss, his face half-shadowed, speaking to a man in a suit about "shipments" and "client preferences" for eye color and IQ percentile.
Ruth covered her mouth. "Oh my God. They're not just matching—they're designing."
Vera took the phone and scrolled to a text document titled "Spears_Deposition_Redacted." She read aloud in a low murmur: "'I was administered Lupron without informed consent. At week sixteen, I was told one of the twins had a "suboptimal" marker and would be reduced. I refused. They sedated me anyway. I woke up with a single heartbeat.'"
Maya felt her own stomach clench. She was at week eight herself, her first ultrasound scheduled for the next morning. What would they decide about her embryos without asking?
"We need to copy this," Tamika said. "If we lose the phone, we lose everything. Can we upload it to a cloud?"
"Signal jammer," Maya said. "Clara told me. No data out, no data in. The only connection is the satellite uplink in the admin building, and that's behind a biometric lock."
Ruth wrung her hands. "Then what do we do? We can't exactly walk onto the supply ferry with a thumb drive."
Vera stood up and paced the narrow aisle between the beds. "The ferry is searched, but not every box. The kitchen gets dry goods from the mainland every Thursday. Flour, sugar, canned vegetables. I've seen the delivery man—he's local, from Port Argent. He doesn't look like he's in on it."
Tamika snapped her fingers. "We hide the phone inside a bag of rice. Seal it back up. He takes it off-island, and then we need a contact on the outside who can receive it."
Maya thought of her sister in Flint. But her sister was barely scraping by, and she had no legal know-how. She thought of Esther, the case manager—but Esther worked for Veridian. She thought of the lawyer who had filed the original Spears case—but he had withdrawn, likely intimidated.
"There's a pro bono legal clinic in Port Argent," Vera said. "I saw it on a map once, before I came here. St. Jude's Legal Aid. If we can get the phone to them, maybe they can refile under a different statute. Maybe they can get a restraining order against the Dominion."
Ruth looked doubtful. "And how do we get the delivery man to cooperate? He'd be risking his job—maybe his life."
Tamika cracked her knuckles. "We don't ask. We pay. I have emergency cash stashed in my hygiene kit—five hundred dollars. It's not much, but it's enough for a man who earns minimum wage to look the other way."
The plan took shape over the next hour. They would wait until Thursday—three days away. On that morning, during the chaotic unloading of the ferry, Tamika would create a distraction near the dock—perhaps a fake fainting spell, or a loud argument with a guard. Meanwhile, Maya would slip the phone—wrapped in plastic and tucked inside a half-empty bag of quinoa—into the dry-goods crate that the delivery man always carried to the kitchen's pantry. Vera would follow him and whisper the address of St. Jude's, along with a plea.
It was risky. Every step depended on split-second timing and the guards' inattention. But it was the only chance they had.
The next day, Maya attended her ultrasound with a mask of calm. The probe was cold and invasive. Dr. Voss—she now knew his face from the video—studied the monitor with clinical detachment. "Two gestational sacs. Both viable. Excellent endometrial lining. We'll transfer a third next week to maximize success."
Maya's breath caught. "Three? But I signed for a maximum of two."
Dr. Voss didn't look at her. "The contract allows for medical discretion. Your uterine capacity is above average. We are optimizing outcomes for the intended parents." He gestured to the nurse, who typed something into the tablet. "You'll begin progesterone shots tonight. Report to the Wing at 6:00 AM."
Maya lay still, the gel cooling on her skin. She thought of Elena, the woman who had carried triplets. She thought of Clara's deposition. She forced herself to nod and say, "Thank you, Doctor."
That afternoon, she found Vera in the garden, pretending to read a magazine. "They're putting a third one in," she said, her voice barely audible. "I have to stop it."
Vera lowered her sunglasses. "If you refuse, they'll sedate you and do it anyway. Or they'll label you non-compliant and send you to the 'de-escalation' wing—which is just a nicer name for the basement. We've seen it happen."
Maya felt a cold fury rise in her chest. "Then we move faster. We can't wait until Thursday. Can we?"
Vera thought for a moment. "The ferry comes tomorrow, not Thursday. I misremembered—it's Wednesdays. Tomorrow morning at dawn. We have less than twenty-four hours."
The news hit like a wave. Maya's mind raced. She needed to alert Tamika and Ruth. She needed to prepare the phone—charge it, back up what she could to the phone's internal memory, and find a waterproof bag. She also needed to distract the guards during the unloading.
That night, they met in the bathroom again, the shower running. Tamika had a plan for distraction: she would fake a seizure in the dining hall at exactly 7:15 AM, when the ferry was docking. Ruth would cause a commotion by screaming that a snake had crawled into her bed—there were harmless garden snakes on the island, a known nuisance. The guards would split their attention between the two incidents, leaving the pantry unmonitored for a crucial five minutes.
Maya would be the one to plant the phone. She had already picked the bag of quinoa—it was still half-full, and she had carefully opened the seam, inserted the wrapped phone, and resealed it with a heated spoon. The bag looked untouched.
At midnight, unable to sleep, Maya crept back to the maintenance hatch. She needed to tell Clara about the plan, to give her hope, and to ask if there was anything else she knew that could help.
The tunnel was darker than before. One of the bulbs had flickered out, leaving long shadows. She found Clara sitting upright, her eyes wide in the dimness.
"You came back," Clara said. She sounded surprised, almost disappointed. "I thought you'd have run by now."
"Nowhere to run," Maya said. "We're sending the phone out tomorrow. A delivery man—"
Clara shook her head violently. "No. No, you can't. I know who you mean—the Port Argent supply guy. He's Veridian's informant. He reports every irregularity back to the security chief. It's a test. They let women try, and then they round them up."
Maya felt her blood chill. "How do you know?"
"Because I tried it, eighteen months ago. I wrote a letter and gave it to him, along with a hundred-dollar bill. He took it, thanked me, and the next morning I was dragged to the de-escalation wing. I only escaped because the door lock malfunctioned." Clara clutched Maya's arm. "You cannot trust him. There is no outside help. The only way is to get the phone to a federal agent—someone who comes with a warrant, not a delivery schedule."
Maya slumped against the tunnel wall. "We have no agents. We have no warrants. We have nothing but a phone and five women."
Clara's eyes glinted. "Then you need to make them come. You need a visible, public incident—something that forces the Coast Guard or the Dominion's own regulators to intervene. A fire. A hunger strike. A broadcast that they cannot jam."
"Broadcast? The jammer—"
"Can be disabled," Clara said. "The jammer's antenna is on the roof of the admin building. It's guarded, but it's also fragile. One well-placed rock, one cut cable, and the signal goes down for thirty seconds. Long enough to send a single message to a known frequency. I have the emergency channel for the Dominion's own maritime authority—they're required by treaty to respond."
She handed Maya a scrap of paper with a frequency and a call sign. "If you can get to the roof, and if you can throw that rock, and if you can type a few words on that phone's messaging app—something like 'Asteria, human trafficking, medical abuse, request immediate intervention'—the Dominion's own law enforcement will have to respond. They can't ignore a distress call from their own territory."
Maya pocketed the paper. "And who guards the roof?"
"Two men, shift change at 2:00 AM. There's a fifteen-second window when both are looking away—they check their phones, because even guards get bored. That's your window."
Maya looked at her watch. It was 1:45 AM. She had fifteen minutes.
She sprinted back through the tunnel, emerged into the garden, and ran toward the admin building, keeping to the shadows. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She had no rock—she grabbed a decorative stone from a flowerbed, heavy and jagged. She climbed the fire escape on the east side, her sneakers silent on the metal grating.
At 1:59 AM, she reached the roof. Two guards stood near the antenna, their backs to her, chatting in low voices. At 2:00, one of them pulled out a phone. The other leaned over to see the screen.
Maya drew her arm back. She aimed for the cable connecting the jammer box to the antenna dish. She threw the stone with all her strength.
It struck the cable dead-on. Sparks flew. The red light on the jammer flickered and died.
She dropped to her belly, pulling out Clara's phone. Her fingers flew across the screen—typing the message, selecting the emergency frequency, hitting send. The app showed a spinning wheel. Two seconds. Three. Four.
A green checkmark appeared. Message sent.
The guards spun around, startled by the noise. One drew his weapon. Maya rolled behind an air-conditioning unit, her breath ragged.
The guards ran toward the antenna, shouting into their radios. Maya slid down the fire escape, landed hard on the grass, and limped back toward the villas. Her ankle screamed in protest, but she didn't stop.
She burst into Villa 7, panting. Vera was awake, sitting up in bed. "What happened? What did you do?"
"I sent a distress call," Maya gasped. "The Dominion's own channel. They have to respond. We just bought ourselves maybe an hour before they trace the source."
Vera's face went pale. "Maya. The trace will lead to this phone—Clara's phone. They'll know it came from inside the island. And they'll know someone climbed the admin roof."
Tamika and Ruth stumbled out of their beds, groggy. Tamika grabbed Maya's arm. "We need to hide that phone. Now. Not in the quinoa, not anywhere obvious. Somewhere they'd never look."
Ruth whispered, "The incinerator. They burn medical waste every morning at 6:00. If we toss it in there right before the burn, the evidence is gone—but so is all our proof."
Maya held the phone against her chest. Her fingerprints were all over it, her message in its memory. But if she destroyed it, they lost everything. If she kept it, they would be found.
A knock pounded on the villa door. Three sharp raps. A voice: "Security check. Open up."
Maya looked at Vera. Vera looked at the window. The ocean was dark and cold, but it was the only way out.
Maya shoved the phone into her waistband, pulled off her sneakers, and slid open the window. The drop to the sand was ten feet. She landed, rolled, and started running toward the water's edge.
Behind her, she heard the villa door splinter open. Shouts. Flashlights sweeping the beach.
She waded into the surf, the phone held high. The water was icy. She swam toward a cluster of rocks fifty yards out, her limbs numb, her lungs burning.
The flashlights swept past her. For a moment, she was invisible.
She found a crevice between two boulders and wedged herself inside, her teeth chattering. The phone was still dry, still intact. She typed another message—the name "Clara Spears" and the word "tunnel"—and tried to send it to the same emergency channel. The signal was weak, but it went through.
Then she heard the drone. A small quadcopter buzzed overhead, its camera light scanning the water. It was only a matter of time before it found her.
She pressed herself deeper into the crevice, the cold seeping into her bones. She could not stay here forever. But she also could not go back.
The drone's beam swept across the rocks, paused, and moved on. She had seconds to decide: swim further out, risk hypothermia, or surrender and hope the distress call had already triggered a response.
She chose the water.
She pushed off the rocks and swam into the blackness, the phone clutched against her chest, her only anchor to a truth that might drown her before it ever saw a courtroom.
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