Page 64

He leans back against the wall, arms folded, face blank. But I see the tremor in his left hand, the way his thumb worries at the inside of his wrist.

I step closer, crowding him until we’re nose-to-nose. I can smell the antiseptic on his collar, the trace of blood from where he bit his lip.

“Make up your fucking mind,” I whisper. “Are you the big, bad captain, or are you something else?”

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t even blink.

I shove him, hard. “Pick a side, Kang. You can’t ride the fence anymore.”

He steps back, but not far. His eyes are bright, wild. For a moment, I think he’ll hit me. Instead, he grabs my shoulders, holds me there, breathing fast. There’s a kind of pain in his face that makes me want to bite him or hold him.

Then he lets go, steps away, and slams the door behind him.

I hear the lock engage, the hiss of the security seal.

I collapse onto the bunk, breathing hard, wrists burning where the cuffs bite. I stare at the ceiling, at the cracks that run like veins across the cheap plaster.

The vent hums. Someone screams, distant and muffled.

I trace the tally marks on the wall, counting off the days and weeks of prisoners who came before me.

I wonder how many of them survived.

I pull the map from my sleeve, spread it out on the thin blanket. I memorize every path, every blind spot, every loophole. I close my eyes and replay the walk from Intake, marking the routes, the guard stations, the open and closed doors.

I build the prison in my mind, brick by brick.

I will not be meat. Not for Petrov, not for Kang, not for fucking anyone.

The cell is cold. The blanket smells of bleach and old fear.

But I’m alive.

And I am not finished.

Not by a long shot.

The next morning starts with the kind of alarm designed to strip paint from the inside of your skull.

First the lights go ultraviolet, burning away any pretense of sleep, then the tannoy slams to life with a voice so distorted it sounds like a throat singing through a cheese grater. “Block D, rise for morning chow. Noncompliance will be sanctioned.”

I lever myself upright, bones humming from the cold and the memory of a night spent cataloging every microcrack in the ceiling. Stitch is already up—she’s one of those freaks who wakes smiling, as if each day is a fresh experiment. She shoves a grimy elbow at me. “Ready for another lap in the human zoo?”

I snort, stretch, and glance at my hands. The bruises from yesterday are already purpling, an anatomy lesson in Authority hospitality. I pull on the jumpsuit, ignoring the crust at the collar.

The cell door stutters open, the magnetic lock making a wet, mucosal sound that always reminds me of surgery. The corridor is colder than the cell. The air tastes of ozone, disinfectant, and the stale sweat of a thousand mornings before this one.

Guards stand at intervals along the wall, visors polished, faces unreadable. The rifles they carry are less for shooting and more for reminding us what we are: liabilities with a pulse. They herd us like livestock—no, that’s too kind—like spare parts on a production line, pushing and shoving until the hall floods with bodies, all shuffling in the same direction.

The path to the canteen is marked by scratches and bloodstains that no one bothers to clean anymore. The shoes of the inmate ahead of me leave little blue prints with every step. I file that away, just in case.

At the main chow hall, the crowd thickens and slows. I try to stay on the margins, but that’s the problem with being the new girl—everyone notices, and they all want to see if you’ll break. Or if you’ll be the one doing the breaking.

The canteen is a pit, both literally and figuratively. Two stories deep, the walls ringed with steel mesh balconies that might once have had a function. Now they just act as observation points for guards and bored prisoners alike. At the center: a series of benches welded to the floor, each slick with decades of ass sweat and the residue of food too cheap to rot.

The noise is a physical thing. Metal trays bang against the counter. Someone’s screaming at a guard for extra protein. A group of ghouls—Zone casualties, not-quite-human anymore—sit in a cluster by the west wall, eating with their hands and making no effort to hide the way they watch the rest of us.

The food line is chaos, but the guards tolerate a little chaos. It keeps the population self-correcting.