She didn’t know enough yet, but she was in the right place, right on the fault line, a crack that, if she played things right, she could lever open. At the very least, she could buy the time and space to find Karina before either of them. If she could get the warden and Harry to kill one another, maybe life here wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Then there was the missing woman. Amanda didn’t believe in coincidences. The very woman she was hunting goes missing the night Amanda arrives? The two had to be connected somehow. And, as for Harry, much as she wanted to think there was a connection there, she was willing to chalk that up to bad luck. She was amazed she hadn’t already run into someone she knew on the inside.
The White House and the residences beyond were still as busy as an ant’s nest. Where the day before it had seemed a sleepy little village, now it swarmed with guards. Cars sped this way and that, packed with armoured personnel, while others walked the streets in squads. The town hall was command central, a senior staff member outside leaning over a map.
‘You think she’s escaped?’ asked Amanda.
‘There’s no way off this island except the boat,’ said Drummond. ‘She’s here somewhere, hiding out in those trees. But not for long. The dogs will find her.’
‘Warden said no one on the mainland knows.’
‘That’s right. And they’re not going to know. Word gets out and they’ll shut this place down. Guards’ll be out of a job and you’ll all be out of time.’
‘Here’s hoping they find her then.’
Drummond snorted. ‘You’ll think different when you see the place you’re going to be spending the rest of your life in. Now, I don’t have time to be making introductions. You’re going in like any other inmate. Find Harry yourself. Or he’ll find you. Just don’t cause trouble, my people have enough to do right now. It’s almost social time, so you won’t have long to wait.’
They rounded a thick copse of trees, and the prison erupted from the earth before them.
The thick, squat structure, more angular concrete, hunkered down into a pebble-pocked divot. Its wide doors were scratched steel. It was another bunker, much, much larger than the one she had been thrown into when she’d first arrived. It was ringed by two layers of plate fencing, crowned with thickets of barbed wire, the gates having already opened automatically before the jeep.
Looking back, she could see that the inside of the fences were thick with wards, uncountable symbols to prevent escape.
The road dipped to meet the facility doors, which were groaning open to let the car inside.
The vehicle drew to a halt, and she was led deeper on foot, her hands up before her.
It was more of a loading dock than an entry hall. There were guards waiting and a checkpoint.
‘Amanda Ellis,’ said Drummond, stopping her in front of the entry booth. Without another word he was gone, stepping back into the jeep and leaving with a tight turn back into the daylight.
She stood as the masked guard looked through paperwork, asking her no questions, adding notes.
There was the hum of a motor somewhere, the whoosh of air conditioning, but no sound from the three guards in the room at all, except the scrape of their boots.
The guard behind the desk reached down out of sight and began to make a pile in the crook of Amanda’s arms, bedding and a pillow, a towel.
Amanda nearly jumped out of her skin as a guard took her by the arm and led her through the nearest doorway and down the stairs beyond.
The hum of circulated air grew louder as they descended, growing colder as they went down, down.
The place reeked of magic, the scars on her arms and legs itching as unseen wards declared their unheard new rules to the space around her.
This was a prison built to hold Abras, space shifters, reality benders, the dangerous and unpredictable. It had all the comfort of a boot on the throat.
There was another guard at the bottom. Another door. And behind that, for the first time, Amanda could hear voices. These at least were a bit more familiar, closer to barking than speech, the sound of incarcerated people packed in too tightly, chafing against one another.
It was a wide corridor beyond, straight walls topped with a semi-circle of curved ceiling. Bright strip lights traced a dashed line into the distance, pinning shadows in place rather than dispelling them.
The cell doors were painted a sky blue. Each was covered in an irregular pattern of metal rivets, a precaution against unsanctioned wards being drawn on them, the bumps stymying the accuracy required to make a rune function. Now that she saw them, she noticed the same method had been applied to the walls, little concrete nodules everywhere, like stars in a night sky.
Each door was locked shut, a slit of reinforced glass at head height. As she walked, faces began to appear in them, prisoners looking out expectantly to see who was walking past. Those expressions turned to a hard curiosity as they realised she was a new arrival.
Without really thinking about it, Amanda felt her spine straighten, her stride grow more confident. Her chin rose higher and she felt that old familiar armour descend. She was not someone to fuck with.
The prisoners were pale and dirty. Dressed in clothes identical to hers.
‘Has she been found?’ a woman thumped at the glass to get their attention, her voice muffled behind the door.
‘Step back,’ the guard snapped, the first time Amanda had heard one speak, the voice a flat, deep drone, magically disguised. A fist accompanied the words, rapping the glass.
The woman obeyed immediately.
‘She’s just asking a question for God’s sake,’ said the prisoner in the next cell, a very tall, skinny man with a bruise that swelled his left cheek. He received the same treatment.
Their voices had attracted others. The windows of every door in the hall filled with faces. They eyed Amanda hungrily, assessing, looking her up and down. It was in the way they took in her jacket, her trousers, her shoes, the folded linen in her arms. Amanda knew the look well. They were eyeing a marketplace, stripping her for parts.
Keeping up her stride, she took the opportunity to stare straight back, noting the sturdier prisoners, the ones with steel in them. She separated the wolves from the hyenas from the vultures. All the while, some inner voice purred in her ear, telling her she was getting just what she deserved. Maybe here, once she was done with Karina, she would be right where she belonged.
Deeper and deeper they went into the bunker, the chill once again sinking into her bones and between her ribs. But there was something else too. Her legs were beginning to ache like she’d spent a full day hiking uphill, each step heavier than the last. Despite the food earlier, she was ravenous and exhausted.
Finally, they came to a room, the guard telling her to stop.
The cell was empty. Two bed frames, only one with a mattress.
Dumping her new meagre possessions, she turned to have her cuffs removed, flexing her fingers with a sigh as they came off.
She opened her mouth to ask the guard a question, but the door was already closing behind them.
The inside of the cell somehow felt colder than the corridor. The room was bare, as was the bulb that tried its best to light it. Like the walls out in the hall, these were speckled with the same small pimples of concrete to prevent rune-making.
She didn’t have long to wait. With a familiar blare of a horn, there came the ratchet of the doors opening up and down the block. Social time, just like Drummond had said.
Stepping out, everywhere she looked, people turned away, caught in the act of staring.
It wouldn’t be long before they overcame their timidity, she decided. And the last place she wanted to be was in her cell. It felt like a dead end, a trap, and she wasn’t just going to sit in it.
Coming to a decision, she headed back down the corridor.
If this was where she was spending the rest of her life, then she was going to know every inch of the place. And once Harry found her, who knew when she’d ge
t this opportunity again.
The prison was a maze, nothing but cell after cell, every corridor a repeat of the last. Amanda was familiar with social time, the inmates encouraged to interact, and this was little different. When the doors were unlocked, inmates had free rein around the bunker, the set-up meaning that they had no access to any escape routes, facilities or materials where they could cause any harm except to one another. There were no forbidden areas, no wings or sections. But nowhere a prisoner would want to go either. The admin and offices were all up on the surface and, from what she could see, there was no gym, no workshops, no activity space to speak of. The whole complex was one big dead end.
The entrance she had come through was locked and guarded, while other guards patrolled the corridors, watching from corners behind their mirrored visors, stepping in with a truncheon or worse if they decided the situation called for it.
Whoever this Karina was, the fact that she’d escaped at all was growing more and more impressive.
Walking like no one would dare step in her path, the prisoners bent to her way of thinking, picking up on the ‘fuck off’ vibes she was putting out.
Amanda clearly stood out. In a small population like this one, a fresh face was as exotic to them as a brightly coloured bird.
Noting how they’d eyed her sheets from their windows, she’d taken them with her, any embarrassment far outweighed by the thought of returning to her cell and finding them missing. She understood why now that she had the opportunity to peer into other cells. Their sheets were what hers would look like soon enough, washed to within an inch of their lives and then washed again. Even from a distance, she could smell the rot, the damp and the cold colluding so the sheets never dried fast enough. And no number of washings in the world could stave off the stink of the person in the bed, the cloth drinking in the grime and never truly letting it go.
It didn’t take her long to find the cell that must have belonged to Karina. It was the only one that was closed, its heavy door locked. Peering through the tall, narrow slit of window, she could see little. The light was off inside, the fluorescent tubes in the corridor behind casting Amanda’s reflection onto the glass, obscuring the view. She could just make out a bare room in disarray, a mattress hanging out of its frame.
She had to get in there. There had to be some clue inside that would lead her to her target.
No one would talk to her, she discovered after a couple of failed attempts. Conversations died as she approached, resuming only after she was out of sight. It was as though she was walking under some cone of silence. If she turned quickly enough, she caught them watching her. Everywhere she went, she felt their eyes, following.
Though it was hard to tell whether this behaviour was any different, the whole place seemed subdued, trodden on. Conversations were held in whispers. Groups, huddled together, broke at the sight of one the guards.
Everywhere she looked, she saw fresh bruises and scrapes. A lot of people had taken a beating recently.
She wondered if there was a doctor on the island.
Looked like she’d find out soon enough.
They’d been following her for a while now. She’d seen them out of the corner of her eye, lingering at doorways, thinking themselves subtle.
Turning a corner, she quickened her pace and ducked into an empty cell. A few moments later, there they were. Thinking she’d gone on ahead, they were rushing to catch up.
‘Looking for someone?’ she asked, stepping out.
The woman froze. The man tried to pull her onwards, looked to Amanda and realised the game was up.
They were about the same height and, as they approached, Amanda thought they might be brother and sister. It was in the brows and the shapes of their faces. Hunger had hollowed out their cheeks and sharpened their cheekbones.
‘Come on,’ the man ushered her back towards the empty cell.
Amanda didn’t move. ‘What are you following me for?’
The woman put a finger to her lips, looking up and down the corridor. ‘Not here, let’s—’
‘No. Here’s fine. What do you want?’
‘Look, we’re trying to help you,’ said the man. ‘There are people out looking for you. They think you’re working for the warden. Come on.’
Neither seemed like much, so she allowed herself to be led back the way they’d come. It helped that they were heading towards a more populated area.
‘Why would they think I’m working for the warden?’ she asked.
‘You arrived just after a prisoner went missing.’
‘Doesn’t take much,’ said the woman. ‘They just want something to hit.’
Amanda bit back her frustration. She’d barely been here a day and she was already some kind of pariah caught in the middle of prison politics.
‘We’re part of a group,’ said the woman, scratching at her arm. ‘We look out for each other. We share what we have. Sustenance, blankets, you know…’
‘So there is food here,’ said Amanda. ‘Because all I’ve seen so far are cells…’
‘We can show you around,’ smiled the woman. ‘The cells are on this floor. The next floor down, that’s where all the facilities are. The kitchen and the laundry. We’ll show you. The nearest stairs are just around the corner from our room.’
‘Great. You said someone was missing?’ Amanda feigned ignorance.
‘One of the other prisoners,’ said the woman. ‘Karina. She used to be a politician. You’ve probably seen her on the television.’
‘One of our local celebrities,’ said the man.
‘That’s right. They’re saying she attacked one of the guards and escaped.’
The man harrumphed. ‘Not sure why they even bothered lying. Everyone in the prison knows.’
‘Knows what?’
‘Mallory attacked her,’ said the woman. ‘You could say he’s a prisoner… He tried to do who knows what to her and she managed to fight him off. Then she just,’ she mimed a puff of smoke, ‘disappeared.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Amanda.
‘Everyone knows,’ the woman replied, as though that was answer enough.
‘I mean, how do you know this Mallory didn’t kill her? Get rid of the body somehow.’
The woman frowned. ‘If that’s what happened we’d know that too. You might not be undercover, but it’s best you know how things work around here. Men like Mallory, you leave them alone and you don’t speak about what they do. Whether you’re a prisoner or staff. Some people here the warden just gives extra… privileges.’
‘Right,’ said Amanda, beginning to understand: hard to keep secrets on an island, she supposed. Or rather, hard to hide the fact that there was a secret being kept, even if the other inmates didn’t know exactly what the secret was. You couldn’t elevate some prisoners over the others and not have the whole prison population wondering why. ‘Except when this Karina went missing,’ she said. ‘Seems like that was a step too far even for Fitzackley.’
‘It’s never been as bad as this before,’ the woman agreed.
‘Can’t have been part of the plan,’ said the man. ‘Now the guards are off their nut. They think she might have had help escaping, but no one else is missing and there’s no way it was one of the Stasi round here. My advice, if you see Mallory, stay out of his way. A screw loose, that one, and he’s even worse when he’s in a rage.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘You’ll know him when you see him.’
‘But if it’s not part of the plan, then why are the guards covering it up and saying one of their own was attacked?’
The man snorted again. ‘Why tell the truth when you can tell a lie? You’ll see soon enough how it works around here. But, please, keep quiet.’ The man put a finger to his lips. ‘Best to turn a blind eye. Believe me.’
‘If I was a spy you’d already have put yourself in a lot of trouble saying all this,’ said Amanda. ‘What makes you trust me?’
‘Because you,’ the
woman replied, ‘are like us.’ She paused outside a room, inviting her inside.
The man tapped at his forearm with a finger. The skin there was one long tally mark of scarring. ‘We look after our own.’
Amanda tipped her sheets to look at her own arm. Carrying the bundle had caused the sleeve of her jacket to hitch up, revealing her scars.
Looking inside the room, she saw a bed tipped on its side and shoved against a wall, making way for the seven or eight people sitting in a circle on the floor. Each sat with their legs crossed, their left forearm proffered to the next person, an open wound red among pale scars. It was a blood circle, she realised. Blood addicts helping one another to get high off the power surge from consuming another’s blood.
They had all turned to look at her, their eyes fever-bright and hungry. Hunger had made a family of them, wearing them down as the thirst for magical power overcame their need to eat.
Just the sight of it made her sick to her stomach, unbidden images of her father looming behind her eyes.
‘It’s been a while since we had someone new,’ the woman said, her words rushed and eager. ‘Just the same old power over and over. We were starting to get a little depleted.’
‘We have someone,’ the man was near trembling with his excitement at explaining to her. ‘He gets us the herbs we need. We’re a collective and if you’ll just—’
‘Get the fuck away from me.’
Amanda recoiled from the woman’s touch. The pair stared at her open-mouthed at the sudden change in her.
‘I’m not one of you,’ she spat. ‘I will never be one of you.’
‘But your arms,’ said the woman. ‘We thought—’ She made to go after Amanda, reach for her again and was surprised as Amanda stepped forward to meet her.
Getting into the woman’s face, Amanda brought up a finger. ‘Don’t you ever come near me. Because once I’m done with you there’ll be so much blood your friends here will eat you alive.’
The woman paled. Her brow furrowed as anger began to kindle, but the man took her arm.
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