The food isn’t delivered on a tray. Instead, it comes in the form of a man’s arm, depositing the slop directly onto the floor with what looks like an ice cream scooper.
Eren licks it from the ground. It’s cold and tastes like a mix of chalk and medicine. It had come from the middle slot late the next day, or what he guessed was late the next day. He had spent the better part of several hours in and out of consciousness. A cycle of passing out from exhaustion and pain and then waking up from the cold, and the pain.
This process repeats several times, three times a day, for what feels like a week, as there is no way to determine the passage of time. The lights are always on, so the only way Eren can guess how long it has been is the food delivery from the slot in the door.
Near the end of the first week, he counts the seconds for as long as he can for an entire feeding cycle, keeping himself awake with the pain that still torments his body.
His fingers are broken, and in an attempt to prevent them from healing irreparably wrong, he sets them each one by one. It’s an excellent way to stay awake, especially if he spaces it out correctly, he won’t pass out from the pain.
Eren counts all 172,900 seconds, only going over by 100 seconds, which is pretty good he thinks. From that, he determines that the food comes on a steady 24-hour rotation, with the first delivery happening at what he estimates to be 6am, the next delivery at noon, and the final delivery at 6pm.
Credit where it’s due, the people responsible for delivering his slop are timely—never going over or under by any more than three minutes.
After establishing when each food delivery comes, Eren times his “daily business” to be just after noon, figuring that will be the time most people would be awake. Regardless of the fact that time is hard to determine, a person’s internal clock shouldn’t deviate too much, and he doesn’t want to miss someone if they are an early riser or a night owl.
Eren figures that the camera in his cell doesn’t transmit any sound, only video. He tests this first by tapping out the Morse code for SOS. Morse code for SOS is pretty universal, and if the camera could hear the sound of his banging on the toilet, he would get another beating.
No beating came, so he concludes there is no sound.
Eren hopes his companion is picking up on his Morse code lessons. The tapping travels through the water just fine, though it echoes quite a bit. Given that, instead of using the taps themselves to transmit the dots and dashes, he uses the space between taps instead.
Thankfully the stranger is pretty damn smart, picking up on the lessons instantly. Eren starts by tapping out the Morse code for A and waits for a response. The stranger repeats the pattern for A in understanding. Then he moves on to B, so on and so forth. He does 5 letters in alphabetical order daily to ensure he wasn’t spending too much time on the toilet, lest he look suspicious.
When they have enough letters in their shared Morse code alphabet, Eren explains that he will do numbers next, and his neighbor responds that they understand with a simple Y-E-S.
At the end of the second week, they are able to communicate in brief sentences every day at noon. The stranger is quick, making the process much less painful with rapid responses as they both limited vocab to small words and simple grammar.
Eren learns that the person he is talking to is named Cris. Cris is 14 years old and lived in Texas, quite a ways from Eren’s home state of Washington. Cris was kidnapped much the same way Eren was. His family was killed in a “home robbery” conducted by several men in all black. The exact date and time Eren’s family was murdered.
“Name was Anna,” Cris taps out rapidly. “Was 6.”
“Sorry,” Eren replies, wishing that Morse code could convey emotion better. It felt strange hearing the taps and trying to place Cris’ voice to it. Was he crying when he told him? Eren had cried when he told Cris about his sister and parents.
“Why not us?” Cris continues.
“IDK.”
“Selling us?”
“Doubt, hurt bad, broke me, not good for money.”
“Tru”
“So what do?”
“IDK, still thinking.”
The conversation today had gone on for a while longer than usual, long enough to build a creeping anxiety in Eren’s chest, but being able to talk to someone about all of this is just too hard to ignore. It’s a risk, spending too much time tapping away, but the risk feels more and more worth it. It keeps him sane, or rather as sane as a person can be given the circumstances.
“Escape?” Cris asks.
“I want, yes.”
“How?”
“Food hole?”
“Too small.”
“No. NVM, talk later, 2 long here.”
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All things considered, using text lingo worked wonders for speeding up conversation. In a game of speed, saving letters is important.
“TTYL,” Cris taps.
Eren lifts himself up from the toilet after washing his behind. It’s incredibly disgusting, and feels horrible, but the cell doesn’t provide any toilet paper and he needs to get clean somehow.
He felt himself coming down with a fever a while ago, the infection had worked its way through his body, likely from the initial kidnapping, but whatever is in that food is helping fight it off.
With no clothes, feces in open wounds, and the toll of fixing broken bones, the fact that he didn’t die was a near impossibility without medicine of some sort in. Whoever these people were, they want him alive, but don’t care if he was broken…
Cris’s information had told Eren a lot, and confirmed his previous suspicions. This is a large-scale organized operation, conducted across many weeks, targeting a variety of children across the United States.
Eren hadn’t heard anything from any other cell neighbors, but Cris did. Someone to his left, a kid named Tony, had listened to the tapping and joined it. They didn’t pay attention to the initial Morse code lesson, but they picked up enough passively to communicate they were there. There’s no communication from Eren's right, which meant that his neighbor doesn’t know how, or is dead.
Playing a large-scale game of telephone would be nearly impossible, especially if each prisoner had to teach the person next to them Morse code, so Eren asked them to keep it limited for now. If someone already knew, then feel free to communicate, but otherwise it would be best to eliminate the chance of being caught. The last thing they need is someone not being careful and being caught taping away on the toilet and ruining it for everyone.
Eren can only take broad guesses, as the available information is too lacking to make any sound deductions. However the conclusion his mind keeps coming to is “government experiment”. A gut feeling really. After all, his data is inconclusive, but the scale and precision feels like it fits.
Who else had this many people in uniform performing a multi-state operation all on the same day? Who else could have the facility to house this many people within the United States? Given the distance walked and the corners turned, Eren could roughly determine that there had to be well over two hundred cells. Not all of them would be filled, but after some initial testing, Cris, Eren, and Tony could approximate at least 38 other children in this row, given sounds they had been able to hear between doors opening and tasers going off, as well as the timing of the food delivery.
The food delivery is the biggest tell. Eren determined early on that he is somewhere in the middle of his row given the number of steps it takes to get him here compared to the other halls they passed. It takes, on average, three minutes to reach his cell, and approximately five seconds to deposit the food, with an extra five seconds to reach the next door. These numbers are compared against Cris’s and Tony’s counting. Cris gets his food ten seconds before Eren and Tony ten seconds before Cris. Their numbers confirm that distance. It’s easy to assume they start at noon every day, meaning they had to deposit food to at least eighteen cells to Eren's right and an assumed eighteen cells to his left.
He can hear the sounds of the footsteps when the slide is open too. The guards aren’t in sync, and Eren can tell that a second guard was working opposite the one who deposited his food. 18 cells to his left, 18 to his right, including him that is 37 cells in his row, and another 37 cells across from him. He rounded two right-angle, right-hand turns to get here. If the building is a horseshoe shape, that means there is a total of 222 cells. He figures it isn’t a square because it would have been faster to take him to the right initially, as opposed to up and to the right.
It all comes down to logistics. Two staff members in each hall, the food required to feed that many people three times a day every week. The cameras, hell the plumbing and cost of water for every toilet and the electricity for every light. Something off-grid can’t support such an astronomical volume. Whatever this is has its own dedicated power transformer or is on the grid. Regardless, it means that it wouldn’t be “unknown”. Not to any law enforcement or power company or anything like that. It all came back to one idea—this was all allowed to happen. This isn’t a surprise, at least a surprise to anyone who has any say.
Truthfully, the reality that this is all likely being allowed crushes Eren's hopes for escape. He is fourteen, there is no way he can conduct a prison break, especially a prison break in the middle of the desert.
They assume it’s the desert after Tony had communicated to Cris where he came from. Tony was in San Diego, California, when he was kidnapped, and was able to tell they drove him northeast for approximately seven hours. Cris came from Texas and said he was taken northwest for well over twenty hours. Meanwhile, Eren had come from Washington and traveled southeast for around eighteen hours. That would place them somewhere in the Nevada desert, north of Las Vegas, if he had to guess based on his crude map of the US in his head.
Eren recalled some vague knowledge about a nearby military base, but he can’t quite pinpoint the details.
There is no mistaking that Chris and Tony are smart. They each had the wherewithal to approximate distances and directions, communicate with Morse code, Tony without ever actually learning it, and run the same numbers Eren had to compare findings and confirm data.
Maybe with these three, and probably the others, they have a chance of doing something. Eren has to assume he has been left to live for a reason. Maybe it’s because he’s smart, maybe because he’s the correct genetic code for their experiments, he never did trust those ancestry testing kits... should have said no when they all did it for Christmas. It’s hard to say, but the fact of the matter is, the situation isn’t good.
Too much time passes without a guard talking to them. No one comes to check on them, or to give Eren new clothes, or ship them off elsewhere. Maybe they are going down the line daily, and Eren is lucky enough to be placed at the end? That’s a terrifying thought.
Tony suggests they break the camera, force someone in for repairs, and then try and take them down. He’s a 9th-degree Judo red belt, which impresses Cris but means nearly nothing to Eren, who only knows Karate from Sophie. Eren talks him out of it though. Eren had broken the toilet and got beaten nearly to death for it. His ribs still aren’t healed, and his fingers and toes are still faintly crooked from the whole ordeal.
It does give Eren an idea, but it’s a risky one, and for that risk to pay off, he needs to find out a few more things.
“Just run thru desert? No food, water, plan. Just go?” Cris taps out a few days later.
“Better 2 die in outside than in cell” Tony returns.
“MayB they have guns?” Eren offers.
“No gun on guard.” Tony’s taps are sluggish, almost like mimicking a sigh.
“Maybe in locker, for riot?” Eren continues.
“MayB. we try?”
“More tests 1st.” Eren lifts himself up from the toilet after signing off. They are getting bolder, longer conversations, getting a few more people involved. Tony had spread the morse code system to at least three other people and kept them on a “listen only” basis.
If they are going to do this, having a few other people in on it will be good, but still, the risk is incredible and would require an insane amount of coordination and time, weeks more than likely.
Still, it’s the best they have, and Cris and Tony both like it. No risk, no reward, and they all need a reward right about now.
