Summary:
They stole her at seven and taught her how to survive everything except her own heart. They stole her at nineteen and expected her to break. Instead, they put them in the same room.
Paige has no memories of freedom that are not wrapped in loss. Before the facility, there were three brothers, a wild stretch of country, and a mother who loved her fiercely until the day she disappeared. After that day, there was only concrete, cold routines, and tests that stretched her mind, her body, and her ability to endure. For twelve long years Paige has learned the rules of the government compound that owns her life. Never ask why. Never grow attached. And never, ever show how badly you want to be held.
Irie’s world is soft where Paige’s is sharp. She comes from Atlanta, from a cramped apartment that hummed with a grandmother’s stories, a little sister’s laughter, and a mother’s tired but steady love. Her hands are used to gentleness: braiding hair before school, changing sheets, stirring pots, tending tomato plants on a sunlit balcony. She knows how to clean wounds, calm fevers, stretch every dollar. She knows how to care. She does not know how to wake in the middle of the night with strangers in her bedroom, how to fight off hands twice her size, how to stop the van that carries her away from everything she loves.
When Irie is dragged into the same government facility that has owned Paige for most of her life, she is half asleep and wholly terrified. She is thrown into a blinding white evaluation room beside a tall, unreadable blonde girl with ice blue eyes and a body held like a shield. Paige knows this building, these questions, this kind of silence. Irie knows nothing except that her heart will not stop racing.
While a faceless evaluator asks them invasive questions, the air in the room thickens with fear and confusion. Irie’s instincts reach before her mind can catch up. Her trembling hand slides onto Paige’s inner thigh, seeking warmth, anchoring herself to the only living thing close enough to touch. Paige should pull away. She should glare, call attention to the contact, make it clear that she understands the rules. Instead, she looks down, then looks at Irie. She smirks, takes that shaking hand, and laces their fingers together like it is the most natural thing in the world.
In a place that studies the human heart as if it is a problem to be solved, one small touch becomes an act of defiance.
Paige has spent years being molded into the perfect subject. She knows drills, endurance courses, psychological traps. She knows how to camp in the woods that surround the facility and how to survive days without comfort or kindness. What she does not know is how to ask for help when nightmares tear her awake, or how to admit that she feels hollow whenever the tests end and nobody is there to say she did well. She has learned to be strong and silent, to protect herself even when there is nothing left worth protecting.
Irie is all the things Paige is not allowed to be. Soft spoken but steady. Afraid yet honest about it. She grew up learning to soothe a crying child, to cook a meal out of almost nothing, to braid her sister’s hair while humming under her breath. She knows the language of small, everyday tenderness that Paige has never been taught. Irie is not built for concrete walls, but she is exactly what those walls never expected: someone who refuses to stop caring, even when she is terrified.
Thrown into the same evaluation, they should clash. Paige is rough edges and guarded eyes. Irie is gentle hands and open emotions. Instead of repelling, they begin to fit. Paige anchors Irie when the panic threatens to swallow her. Irie softens Paige in ways that confuse her, peeling back layers of hardness without even trying. Together, they present a puzzle the facility never planned on solving: two subjects from opposite worlds who calm each other without direction, whose bond grows out of instinct rather than obedience.
The experiments are supposed to be about adaptation. About stress. About how far a human being can be pushed before they break. But when the evaluator leaves the room and Paige still refuses to let go of Irie’s hand, the test changes shape. When Paige pulls her close, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, and leads her quietly out into the night air of the facility grounds, something forbidden begins.
In the small park at the edge of the compound, beneath humming floodlights that pretend to be stars, Irie finally realizes what she is doing. Her fingers are tangled with a stranger’s. Her body is pressed warm against a girl she has known for less than an hour. Horror rises, then guilt. She stammers apologies and tries to pull away. Paige simply tightens her grip and says, soft and almost amused, that it is okay. For the first time in twelve years, “okay” is not an order she obeys, but a comfort she gives.
“Where They Took Us” follows Paige and Irie through a series of escalating trials inside the facility: joint evaluations designed to analyze their compatibility, grueling physical tests that expose how they compensate for each other’s weaknesses, and intimate domestic tasks that reveal just how deeply their lives can intertwine. Paige shows Irie how to survive the harshness of the compound, how to navigate the unspoken rules and avoid the worst punishments. Irie shows Paige how to exist in the quiet moments between alarms, how to treat wounds gently instead of ignoring them, how to cook a stolen handful of ingredients into something that tastes almost like home.
As the government watches through cameras and one-way glass, taking notes on every glance, touch, and heartbeat, Paige and Irie must decide what is real between them and what might only be another layer of the experiment. Are they allowed to want each other outside of the data? Can they protect each other without playing directly into the hands of the people who put them together?
Their connection becomes both their greatest strength and their most dangerous vulnerability. The deeper they fall into each other, the more valuable they become to the program that owns them. Paige’s fierce protectiveness, forged in childhood and honed by years of isolation, ignites fully for the first time. Irie’s quiet resilience, trained in long nights caring for her family, expands to include this tall, broken girl who has never been taught how to be cared for.
Within the concrete maze of the facility, love should be impossible. Yet in stolen midnight walks, whispered conversations on shared bunks, and fingers that keep finding one another in the dark, Paige and Irie begin to build something that is not part of any protocol: a home inside each other.
As secrets about the program surface and the tests grow more invasive, they must confront terrifying questions. If the facility paired them on purpose, does that make their feelings less real? If attachment is the outcome the program wanted all along, is their tenderness tainted, or is it the one thing that belongs solely to them?
“Where They Took Us” is a tender, aching romance set inside a cold machine that does not believe in love. It is the story of two girls from opposite worlds, stitched together by circumstance, choosing again and again to reach for each other instead of turning away. It explores what happens when survival skills and soft skills collide, when toughness meets gentleness, and when two very different kinds of strength refuse to cancel each other out and decide to merge instead.
In a place that measures heartbeats like data, Paige and Irie will prove that some bonds cannot be graphed, controlled, or contained. They were taken as test subjects, as numbers in a long line of experiments. Together, they become something the facility never anticipated: undeniable, unmanageable, and deeply, fiercely human.
