Page 112 of Into the Fire

The age-old choice fired his lizard brain: move or die.

His thoughts weren’t functional, so he relied on muscle memory. Through the black-and-white speckles clouding his visual field, he made a series of split-second calibrations. Top bunk. Casper standing. Leaning in. Firm grip. Punch imminent.

He seized Casper’s wrist and, rather than fending the hand off, pulled it in tighter, throwing Casper off balance. Casper’s right arm flailed to prevent him from toppling, so he couldn’t land the strike.

Evan flicked a hand at the bridge of the big man’s nose, shattering it. Holding the left wrist firm to keep Casper’s arm locked across the lip of the bunk, Evan spun up and around, flying off the bunk sideways so his knees struck the top of Casper’s braced elbow.

The impact carried the force of Evan’s momentum and his full falling weight.

Elbows prefer to bend the other way.

The snap was loud enough to awaken Monkey Mouth in the next bunk.

Both men hit the floor, Casper on his back with blood spurting from his nose and his arm flopping loosely, Evan on his feet.

Evan’s knees buckled, and he had to grab Monkey Mouth’s bunk to hold himself upright. His brain seemed to jog in his skull, streaks of light and nausea crowding in on him.

He looked down at Casper, watching him writhe. He tried to talk, but his words came out a slur. He cleared his throat, shut his eyes against the pain, and tried again. “If you get to the medical bay quickly and tell them about how you slipped and fell, they can set that and avoid permanent damage.”

It took everything Evan had to reach down, grasp Casper’s good hand, and haul him to his feet. Mewling, Casper cradled his shattered arm and stumbled out.

The instant he cleared the cell, Evan collapsed. One hand on the concrete floor. Static bugs poured across the room, a sheet of movement. He crawled to the toilet and vomited, then vomited again.

He sat with his back against the wall, palms pressed to his skull, trying to fight down the throbbing. He imagined his brain inside, swelling, creaking the junction points of the plates.

“You should go,” Monkey Mouth said. “To the infirmary with Casper. It’s no good getting hit in the head like that.”

But the last thing Evan could afford was for anyone to take a closer look at him and see that he wasn’t Paytsar Hovsepian.

Which meant he had to muscle through the pain. Or die here on the cell floor.

Right now it felt like it could go either way.

A half hour later, an electronic bleat announced breakfast, sounding like an air horn going off between Evan’s temples. It took him a solid thirty seconds to stand. By the time he did, Monkey Mouth was gone.

Evan took Casper’s beloved plant from the Styrofoam cup, shook the clod of damp soil into the toilet, and flushed it. Then he tilted the miniature fern back into the cup, slid it to the other edge of the sill to absorb the direct morning sunlight, and staggered out.

Downstairs he joined the herd of inmates assembly-belting toward the metal picnic tables. His balance was terrible, tilting him into an inmate beside him and earning him a violent shove in return. But he kept his feet.

He scanned the mob of faces all around, searching for Bedrosov, but his blurry vision made it near impossible. The pod leaders circulated carts among the tables, serving the prisoners a few sad items each.

Evan took a seat at a table with other seeming outsiders, including the gray-haired inmate who’d sold him the newspaper section, and hunkered down over his tray. Powdered eggs, biscuit, three breakfast sausages. To repay his debt, he gave one sausage to the older inmate, who received it with an appreciative grunt. Then Evan arranged the food neatly, aligning the sausages so they were parallel. Set the rubber spork on the left edge of his plate. Unfolded his napkin and rested it in his lap.

The old guy across from him watched his preparations with wry amusement. “Nice picnic, fish. That’s some Martha Stewart shit.”

Evan heard the words as if underwater. When he looked down at his tray, his vision doubled, a spork doppelgänger springing into existence. He tried to stare it back into one utensil but failed, so he reached somewhere between the two images and came up with the actual object. He pressed the flimsy spork against his tray, but it had too much give to be useful as a weapon, so he set it back down.

With great effort he picked up his head and scanned the bay for Bedrosov. He didn’t see him, but he did pick out Teardrop at a table on the far side of the staircase. Evan figured Bedrosov was sitting on the other side of the same table, just out of sight.

“What you looking for?” the guy across from him asked.

“I want a tattoo,” Evan said, concentrating hard to get the words out cleanly. “Commemorate my time in here.”

At this the other inmates chuckled.

“Anyone in here do that?”

“Shit, Cedric over there’s a ink slinger,” the gray-haired man said, chinning at an obese inmate two tables along. “But not no more since the screws took his kit in the shakedown. He got no more needles, no more spoon to mix the ink with toothpaste, no more lace to soak that shit up. So for the meanwhile you’re stuck with your baby-smooth Martha Stewart skin.”