Lark checked her name on the assignment board: edges again. This morning, she resolved, she would finally work up the nerve to talk to Giles about it.
       She secured her long, ash-blonde hair in the soft elastic band that was part of her allotment. Straightened her grey cotton smock and pulled up the elastic waist on her pajama-like pants. She had lost a few pounds lately. Walked past her designated workpod until she reached his office, atop a slightly elevated platform from which he oversaw the puzzlers' workpods.
       "I've been on edges now for four months, Giles," she pleaded, standing in front of his desk. "I'm ready to try something new."
       Giles leaned back in his Aeron chair and looked at her. "I understand, Lark," he said in that patronizing drawl of his. "But consider it a compliment on your ability. You know you're my best girl on edges, best in a long time."
       At twenty-seven, she cringed inwardly at the 'girl' label, but tried not to let it show, lest it alienate Giles. She could submit to his condescension if it meant she'd get what she wanted. It wasn't like she had a lot of other bargaining chips, at least not any that she wanted to cash in. Her cellmate, Astrid, had taken that route, earning a cushy position on Giles's office staff in exchange for letting him do the unspeakable several times a week in the supply closet. Once in a while, Astrid would be gone overnight, then unusually quiet for a few days after.
       "Edges are important," Giles continued. "Foundational. For most people, a jigsaw puzzle can't proceed until they put the edges together. So, the edge pieces must present the user with a challenging yet manageable entrée into the puzzle."
       Lark nodded, sighing quietly in resignation. She'd heard this lecture from him before.
       Lark knew she was lucky, in a way. Lucky to be serving her time in Wakokee Correctional Center, a privatized MinSec prison in rural Florida for nonviolent first-offenders like herself. She'd been caught stealing virtual reality headsets from her former employer and trying to resell them. Wakokee was contracted out to Get Jiggy, a puzzle company that paid Lark and her fellow inmates a fraction of the hourly wage their law-abiding counterparts would have been paid.
       Lucky to be moved, after her first month, from the mind-numbing Separation table, where everyone at Get Jiggy started, but not everyone left. One woman, obviously on Giles's shit-list, had spent the last three years separating edges from non-edges, sending the two bundles to their respective stations, over and over and over and over.
       Lucky to be assigned to User Experience. Of course, she was locked in a workpod, subject to electronic monitoring and 'reinforcement.' Still, UX was, by countless orders of magnitude, safer and more pleasant than the cutting factory, where your metal soles were magnetically locked to the floor during your shift. Lark's first cellmate, assigned to one of the slicers that cut through the puzzle boards, had promptly lost her pinky finger the first week.
       And lucky that UX required a human mind. An AI-controlled automaton could assemble puzzle pieces in a fraction of the time it took a human to do so. But an automaton couldn't engage in a think-aloud protocol as it went through this process--the crucial step that allowed Quality Control to gauge the skill level needed for a particular puzzle. When the richest ten percent of the population spent their ample leisure time and disposable income on puzzles, virtual reality, and simulations, they demanded precision in how those pastimes were marketed. Whether Get Jiggy certified a puzzle as 'suitable for ages 4 to 6' or 'specially designed for advanced adult puzzlers,' it had better be exactly as advertised.
       So, Lark and the other UX workers spent their days enclosed in individual workpods, surrounded by soundproof glass, each inmate articulating her thought processes into a microphone as she assembled puzzle pieces. Early on, Lark had fantasized about breaking the glass and using a shard as a weapon to escape. Soon after, though, she learned of a previous inmate who had tried exactly that, only to discover that the glass broke into harmless rounded pebbles. Rumor had it that said inmate was now housed at a MaxSec facility in Iowa, under contract to a poultry conglomerate, where she spent her days pulling the necks out of turkeys.
       The problem was, edgework was just so damned boring. All Lark ever got to see were the edge pieces--no complete target image--so she could only imagine what the rest of the puzzle looked like. At least half the puzzles appeared to be landscapes or other outdoor scenes, like a harbor in a tourist town, with a predictable pattern. North edge: sky, blue with maybe a little greenery or mountain interspersed. South edge: water or grass. East and west edges: sky for the first third, segueing into town stuff or landscape stuff in the middle, then grass or bricks or roads or water across the bottom, something the people in the image could walk, drive, or sail on. Lark could almost do edges in her sleep.

       Her big break out of edgework came unexpectedly, the day that Malia disappeared. Lark first heard rumors about it at dinner, as she sat her tray between two other inmates at one of the long tables with bench seating. She picked at her tofu loaf, a tan slice bookended by lukewarm collard greens and a piece of cornbread, its bottom soggy with renegade collard juice.
       "I heard Malia didn't come back from lunch," the woman on her left said quietly.
       "Two of the guards were talking about it," the woman on her right confirmed.
       They focused their attention on their trays as a guard walked behind them, but their scuttlebutt resumed as soon as the guard was out of earshot.
       Back in her shared cell that night, Lark heard a little more from Astrid before lights-out. Malia had been in her workpod that morning. No one exactly remembered seeing her at lunch, but she must have been there, since the workpods for the 12:15 lunch cohort didn't unlock until that time. The CCTV footage was being reviewed, but Malia's workpod was only partially visible from the camera. Meanwhile, drones in the air and dogs on the ground were searching for her throughout the facility's exterior, even into the surrounding swampland.
       Lying in her sleeppod, Lark thought more about Malia. Like Lark, she had arrived at Wakokee around five months ago. Malia was one of the few women who retained her sense of humor, despite the boring work and sterile surroundings. She and Lark, close in age and both gaming nerds in their pre-prison lives, had often sought each other out at lunch, sharing a muffled giggle about Giles's pomposity or the bovine guards or the institutional food. Malia was definitely the adventurous and creative type, so Lark could easily imagine her attempting an escape. She just couldn't figure out the 'how' of it.
       The next morning, Lark entered her workpod, adjusted her headset, and began the think-aloud process for a new puzzle. "Okay, I'm going to start by finding my four corner pieces. I'm guessing the top pieces will form a sky, so I'll look for blue." She took a minute to segregate the pieces for the north edge. A tiny electrical jolt reminded her she had gone too long without speaking. "I'm still looking for the other piece of this cloud . . . ."
       Suddenly the loudspeaker blared: "LS-0617, report to Operations. Immediately." She heard a click as her workpod door unlocked. She glanced at her wrist tattoo, confirming it was, indeed, her ID number that had been called, then took off her headset and walked down the grey aisle, catching side-eye glances as she passed the other puzzlers. No doubt they wondered what she had done, or what Giles wanted her to do. Jocelyn, a greasy-haired guard whose uniform strained at the seams, smirked slightly as Lark walked by. Lark kept her eyes pointed straight ahead, not taking the bait.
       She mounted the steps to Giles's office, stopping in front of his desk. "You wanted to see me, sir?"
       He continued staring at a screen for a moment before turning to her. "Lark, it says here you had two years in a pre-architecture program before you switched majors. Is that right?"
       "Yes, sir. I switched to game design and virtual reality in my third year."
       "Okay. I'm moving you to a new project this morning. On a trial basis for now, but it could become permanent, depending on how you do." Giles pushed a buzzer on his desk.
       The smirking guard appeared in his doorway.
       "Jocelyn, we're taking Lark to Malia's workpod."
       "Yes, sir." The guard waved her Taser wand, signaling Lark to walk ahead of her. "This way, LS-0617."
       The three of them stopped at an empty workpod, and Jocelyn unlocked the glass door.
       The desk inside held a partially assembled 3D puzzle filled with vibrant colors--some sort of wintry cityscape, with a snowy night sky and lots of people bundled in outerwear. Lark had never worked on a 3D puzzle, but suddenly understood Giles's interest in her pre-architecture studies. The 3D specialists in UX were essentially building a structure, so they had to be strong in spatial relations and manual dexterity. Fortunately, her pre-architecture classes had enhanced her skills in both areas.
       This was her chance to get out of the dreaded Edge rut.
       "Lark," said Giles from behind her, "stay out here for a minute. Jocelyn, go in and break it down." Lark watched with dismay as the guard began clumsily dismantling the puzzle.
       Giles regarded Lark with a mixture of contempt and pity. "We can't get a true reading on the user experience unless you start the puzzle from scratch, Lark. I've probably biased the process by letting you see a partially finished product, but this one's a rush job, so it can't be helped." Once Jocelyn finished the breakdown, Giles motioned for Lark to sit at the desk.
       Giles turned to the guard. "Jocelyn, go get TS-5908." Jocelyn returned a few minutes later with a sullen-looking inmate in her forties. Giles nodded curtly at her. "Give Lark a quick lesson in how to do a 3D."
       Giles and Jocelyn hovered outside the workpod while TS-5908 stood over Lark's shoulder, muttering barely coherent instructions. "Start by sorting the pieces." Obviously, thought Lark. But into what categories? "Look at the target image," the woman said, pointing to the screen in front of Lark's desk. Lark was thrilled to realize that 3D puzzlers at least had a picture of the final product they were trying to construct. "Sort the pieces into smaller groups. Like this one has a sky, the cobblestones, and a bunch of stalls. Then start assembling the smaller sections into a bigger structure."
       Giles broke in, clearly impatient. "Okay, that's good for now. Jocelyn, take TS-5908 back to her station. Lark, remember to reset the timer to zero when you start work," Giles reminded her, locking her into her new workpod and walking away.
       Lark examined the target image in more detail, enthralled by what she saw. It looked like a Christmas market in Austria or Germany, judging from the language on several signs in the image. She'd spent the holiday season in Austria during her gap year in Europe. She examined the image further: a cobblestone square lined with stalls, each selling food, drink, or handmade crafts. Dozens of shoppers filled the square, some strolling, some standing at stalls, others enjoying mugs of Glühwein--'glow wine,' Lark recalled from her time there--and traditional treats like sausages and pretzels. Tart saliva filled her mouth as she remembered the rich flavors of the mulled red wine, simmered with orange, cinnamon, and cloves. Looking at the background, Lark recognized the setting as Stephansplatz, the large square surrounding St. Stephen's Cathedral in the heart of Vienna.
       A subtle buzz from her chair, a pre-jolt, reminded her to get to work, so she started thinking aloud. "I'll start by finding the base pieces, the ones that look like cobblestones. Grayish pieces with a rough appearance." She sorted through the pieces on her desk, unaccustomed to having so many to work with--easily over a thousand. "Now I'll start assembling the edge of the base," she continued. She spent an hour building the pieces into something resembling a foundation, talking periodically into her headset as she worked. "I'm going to set the base aside and work on some of the other sections. I think I'll start working on the stalls on the left side of the square. So, I'll need pieces that look like brown wood."
       Lark worked for the rest of the morning on the cobblestones and stalls, gradually getting the rhythm of the new task. By lunchtime, she had managed to construct a few small upright sections: a wooden stall offering elaborate angel ornaments, one displaying tiny candle-powered windmills, yet another selling iced buns the size of a man's hand. Checking the stalls in her target image, she saw everything on offer from blown glass to bratwurst. The roof of each stall was topped with a large decoration in golden lights. The magnificent façade of St. Stephen's loomed in the background.
       She finally stopped at 5:15, when her workpod unlocked and made her way to the cafeteria. She fell in line behind Astrid, and they took their filled trays to one of the long tables. It was maddening to work on a puzzle featuring pictures of delicious food and drink, only to face the cafeteria's offerings: lukewarm tofu chili, leftover cornbread, and a glass of water.
       They got an hour in the recreation yard after dinner. The air was comfortable enough, the usual mild Florida weather for December, but security seemed especially tight, no doubt due to Malia's disappearance. A few extra guards with dogs lined the periphery of the yard, and drones circled overhead.
       The showers were open from 7 to 9 each evening. Lark went in early and washed her hair, then crashed in her cell to let it dry. She tried to read a little from a tattered prison library copy of Pride and Prejudice, but her mind kept wandering back to the 3D puzzle and the world it depicted: bright colors, crisp air, smiling people in warm clothes, stalls filled with tempting food and artisans' creations.
       She had stared at the target image so much that day that some of the people in it seemed imprinted on her retina. One guy in particular, a tall, blonde, German-looking type in sturdy jeans and a sweater with a Nordic design, carried two mugs of Glühwein, clearly on his way to meet someone. Lark fell asleep thinking of the slight smile on his face. Jane Austen slipped from her hand, landing softly on the concrete floor.
       The next morning, Lark donned her daytime uniform, ate some powdered eggs and dry toast, and settled into her workpod at 8:15. A few minutes later, she heard the glass door unlock.
        "How's it going?" asked Giles. He leaned over her shoulder, his coffee-tainted breath against the back of her neck. "It looks like you're, what, maybe halfway through? We're behind deadline for this one. Try to finish it up by this afternoon."
       "I think I can do that. It took me a while yesterday to get the hang of things, but it should go faster today."
       "See that it does. Depending on how you do on this one, 3D could be your new permanent assignment." He gave her shoulder a pat and a light squeeze.
       She turned back to her desk, determined to get more systematic. She turned on her think-aloud mic and started recording. "I'm going to finish the stalls on the right side this morning, then start assembling the smaller sections into a larger unit. Then I'll build the aisle that leads to the cathedral." The main entrance to St. Stephen's formed the back wall of the puzzle, its double doors recessed in a large, intricate entryway. Lark remembered from her time in Vienna that the portal was called the Riesentor, or Giant's Door.
       By late morning, Lark was well into the final stages of assembly. She found herself working to a comfortable rhythm, with the construction proceeding exponentially faster as she got further into the process. Smaller pieces came together into larger chunks, as if they almost understood their final resting place, pulled toward each other with a kind of inevitability. Lark was no longer a solver, but merely a conduit for the joining together of sections.
       The structure's 3D quality came easily to her as she secured corners and middle sections to the base, and the Christmas market metamorphosed into a unified whole. Stalls lined each side of the structure, with shoppers filling the long aisle down the middle that led back to St. Stephen's Cathedral. She needed to finish only the Giant's Door, and all would be done. She'd be able to report the good news to Giles at her lunch break.
       There was only one problem: the last piece she needed for the Giant's Door was nowhere to be found.
       She ran her fingers over the desk, checking that she wasn't overlooking it. Had it slid under the structure? She searched carefully, but nothing turned up. As a last resort, she even got down on her hands and knees and crawled under the desk, feeling around for the missing piece that would fill the final gap in the puzzle.
       Nothing.
       Was it hidden behind the puzzle? Lark got back in her chair, leaned forward, and reached toward the Giant's Door, sticking her finger through the opening in it, hoping to feel the missing piece. Oddly, she felt only a rush of cold air, followed by sudden darkness and a pulling sensation as she was lifted from her chair...

       Lark stared, slightly dazed, at the dark spots slowly appearing on her gray cotton smock. Rain? No, she realized, studying them more closely. Melting flakes of snow. But was that possible in Florida, even in December? Not with the mild weather this week.
       Slowly her eyes moved from her smock to the snow-dusted cobblestones beneath her feet, and then beyond--to the wooden stalls of the Christmas market. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered as a wintry breeze blew over her.
       Someone tapped her on her shoulder, breaking her reverie with a question: "Is this what you're looking for?"
       Whirling around, Lark found herself face to face with a smiling Malia, who was bundled in a puffer jacket, jeans, and Ugg boots. Lark looked down at Malia's outstretched, mittened hand, which held a small, jigsaw-shaped piece of wood, then gazed around in amazement.
       Just past Malia, the guy in the Nordic sweater approached, his smile growing as he offered Lark a warm mug of Glühwein. She wrapped her hands around it silently, grateful for the warmth but too stunned to take even a sip.
       "Let's go find you some winter clothes," said Malia. "But first, take care of this." She took the mug from Lark and gently pressed the wooden puzzle piece into her hands. "I think you know where it goes."
       Lark turned and faced the fabled Giant's Door of St. Stephen's, her eyes immediately finding the tiny opening. As she walked toward it, she heard the faint sound of Giles's agitated voice from the other side. His shouts died away as she gently pushed the final puzzle piece into the door and felt it lock into place--not forced, just fitting with the ease of something that belongs.