up with a razor blade. But he’s . . .” Barclay’s eyes widen and he lets out a bitter laugh. “They’ve set up their processing center right under IA’s nose on the Black Hole.”
“The Black Hole?” Please let this not be what I think it means. I am not up for space travel.
“It’s a world that was demolished thousands of years ago,” Barclay says. “Someone in IA found it when we were first making a map of the multiverse, but it’s got no sustainable plant or animal life anywhere. We even tried to set up a colony, but plants shriveled and died after a few days, and people would get sick. It’s like something happened to the atmosphere.”
“What does IA use it for?” Elijah asks.
“They built an underground prison there like fifteen years ago and stationed some IA guards there—you know, the guys who fucked up beyond repair. It’s where they send the worst of the worst, the criminals who are so bad, they want them on a different world.”
“Guys like Basil Razorblade?” I ask.
Barclay nods. “Guys who have a lot of ties to other bad guys, guys who IA is never going to let see the light of day outside a prison again. They exile them to the Black Hole and put them underground.”
It’s unfathomable to me that the IA would execute me in three days, but someone like Basil gets to live out his life in prison.
“Why not just execute them?” Elijah apparently has the same thought.
“A lot of these guys have big secrets, and if they die, whatever it is they know is going to die with them,” Barclay says. “If those secrets are information that could be valuable to IA or the government, then why not put them in a hole in the ground for ten years and then see if they’re willing to give it up?”
“But if it’s an IA prison, that can’t be where the base of operations is,” Ben says.
But I see where Barclay is going with this. If you were organized and had the technology to set up anywhere—get in and out of any world—which Meridian obviously does, it would be the perfect place to set up operations. As long as Meridian and his guys could come and go undetected, there’s virtually no risk. It’s essentially an unmonitored world—no unwanted IA agents are going to just drop in, and if you kill or pay off the guards, everyone else who’s there would be cheap labor. After all, Meridian can smuggle in things they want, make their lives better in almost every possible way, and maybe even offer them a way out after they’ve done enough for him. Talk about incentives.
Which means the prison has probably been converted to the processing center, and the inmates are probably now in charge of the slaves.
I look at Barclay. “This is bad. How many guys are in this world?”
He sighs. “I don’t know. The universe has been stripped from the records. It doesn’t even have a name. We just call it the Black Hole because that’s what it is, and you’ve got to call it something when you’re talking about it. There could be a dozen guys or there could be five hundred. I have no idea.”
“It’s more than a dozen,” Ben says. “As a guess, I’d say there are about forty guys who are working for Raze, and then twenty more who take turns smuggling the Unwilling in and out. At least, I think. There could be a few more, but I met twenty of them. They’ve only got eight of the devices that open portals. I got the impression they used to have a few more, but they’ve stopped working or something.”
So they’re working in shifts. “How many jobs did you do a day?”
He doesn’t look at me when he answers. “Anywhere between eight and twelve.”
That number makes me go cold, all the way down to my fingertips.
If he was there three weeks, it means he grabbed somewhere between 168 and 252 people. And that’s just Ben. If there are twenty guys bringing back that many people . . .
“Holy shit,” Barclay whispers, and I know he’s just done the math in his head too.
“What?” Elijah says, looking from Barclay to me.
I press my palm against my chest. Ben did this because of me and that makes those people he grabbed my responsibility. It hurts to say it out loud, but I do anyway. “That’s like an average of fourteen hundred people a week.”
02:17:01:14
“It’s