Commissary Day

POV: Ricki

In Valhalla, money was a rumor. The real currency was whatever you could hold in your hand and somebody else wanted bad enough to bend for.

Ricki learned the true shape of the economy on his second commissary day, standing near the back of a line that crawled slower than the one before it. Transactions played out in the open, casual as breathing, the way the whole building breathed. Not an exception to the rules. The only rule that mattered.

Odile's dosing window sat at the far end of the room, and the line feeding into it told its own story before anyone opened their mouth. A witch near the front had both hands tucked into her sleeves, and they shook hard enough that the fabric moved with them. The woman behind her leaned in, murmured something about the ward-work going sloppy again this week, symbols smudged, lines drawn crooked by hands that couldn't hold steady anymore. The witch didn't answer. Didn't need to. Sloppy ward-work meant a write-up. A write-up meant docked commissary. Docked commissary meant the calibrated dose stayed out of reach another week, and the shaking got worse instead of better. Ricki watched her shuffle forward two inches at a time and understood he was looking at a wheel that only turned one direction, and it wasn't toward her.

A few places up, a vampire stood with his lips peeled back thin and tight over his teeth, an unconscious tic. His jaw kept working even when he wasn't talking, grinding like he was trying to file his own teeth down smaller. His gums had receded far enough that everything in his mouth looked too big for the space, exposed in a way that had nothing to do with hunger for a fight and everything to do with a body starving in plain sight while getting fed exactly what the manifest said it needed. Commissary blood-packets. Ricki had heard the phrase once in passing and hadn't understood, until now, just how thin a substitute that was for something a body actually needed to survive whole instead of just surviving.

Further down, near the wall, a low exchange caught his eye before he managed to look away fast enough to pretend he hadn't seen it. A guard leaned back against the concrete, arms crossed, and an inmate stood close in front of him, voice pitched down under the noise of the room. Phone time. Extra minutes. A call home worth trading for.

"You know what that costs," the guard said, tone flat, bored, like he was reading a price off a menu he'd memorized years ago.

The inmate's shoulders squared, the particular posture of someone doing math they'd already finished a long time back, math that never came out in their favor and they'd stopped expecting it to. Nobody around them so much as glanced over. Ricki understood, watching it, that his own body carried the same weight whether he wanted it to or not. Nobody had asked him yet what he'd trade and for what. That didn't mean nobody would.

Leon found him near the edge of the line, materializing the way he always seemed to, unhurried, already talking before Ricki fully registered him there. Ricki's stomach clenched before Leon said a word, the same tightening he'd felt the night he'd carried a folded, wax-sealed note down to the Kennel and back, the first small thing Leon had ever asked of him.

"Delano." Leon's eyes swept the room once, cataloguing it the way he seemed to catalogue everything, then settled back on Ricki, cool and unhurried. "Got something for you. Bigger than last time."

"What is it?"

"A package." Leon held it out. Small, wrapped in plain brown paper, taped at the corners with the kind of care that said it had been handled, unwrapped, rewrapped, more than once. "Hold it twenty-four hours. Don't open it. Don't ask about it."

Ricki looked at the package, then at Leon, and felt the same hesitation he'd felt the first time, standing in the Undercroft with a folded note in his hand and a question that was never going to get an answer.

"Why me?"

"Same reason as before." Leon didn't blink, didn't soften it, voice level as a scale. "You're new. That won't last long."

Ricki took it anyway. He'd already learned that refusing bought nothing but the specific danger of standing in this building with empty hands, owing no one and owed by no one. In a place like this, being worth nothing to anybody got you killed faster than being worth something to the wrong somebody.

He carried the package into the yard tucked under one arm and found, again, that he had nowhere in particular to sit. The species geography hadn't shifted in the weeks he'd been inside: wolves clustered along the north fence, witches near the chalk-scarred benches by the Scriptorium entrance, vampires keeping to the shaded overhang where the sun never quite reached even at midday. Ricki drifted to an empty stretch of concrete near none of them, sat alone, ate his commissary ramen dry straight from the packet, the salt at least giving him something to chew on besides the isolation.

Officer Blackwood came through on her afternoon round partway through his meal, moving at her usual steady clip, eyes sweeping the yard the way procedure required. She didn't look at him. Not a glance, not a flicker. Her gaze passed over the space where he sat like the concrete itself was empty.

He turned it over in his head, trying to place when exactly that had started. Somewhere between the note under his door and the package now digging into his ribs, maybe. He wondered if being on Leon Church's radar made a man radioactive to guards who'd learned the hard way not to look too closely at anything that belonged to Church.

The not-looking sat wrong in his chest the rest of the afternoon, worse than a look would have. The specific, deliberate absence of her attention, like she'd made a decision about him somewhere he hadn't been present for, and the decision had been to pretend he didn't exist.

That night, alone in his cell, the package sat on the edge of his bunk where he'd dropped it hours earlier. Ricki found himself staring at it more than he meant to.

He wasn't good at secrets. Never had been. The not-knowing gnawed at him worse with every hour, the plain brown paper sitting there like a held breath he couldn't force out.

He told himself he wouldn't. He told himself that for almost three hours.

Then he peeled back the tape, careful, slow, the paper coming away with a soft tearing sound too loud in the quiet.

Inside: a single photograph. A young man, maybe twenty, with Leon's jawline, the same clean, sharp line, but warmer eyes, softer, nothing like Leon's careful stillness.

He turned it over. Handwriting, small and careful, pressed hard enough into the paper that Ricki could feel the indentation under his thumb.

*Eddie. Don't lose this.*

Eddie. The name snagged on something in the back of Ricki's memory, faint, half-formed, a name he was almost certain he'd heard once before, low and unfinished, the way people say a name they don't let themselves finish saying out loud. He couldn't place where. He only knew, looking at the pressed-hard handwriting on the back of the photograph, that whoever Eddie was, Leon had written that name like it cost him something just to shape the letters.

Ricki sat with it a long time, the photograph balanced between two fingers like something that might shatter if he held it wrong. Slowly, he understood he'd just seen something Leon Church had never meant for another living soul to see.

He closed the package back up as carefully as he'd opened it, tucked it beneath his thin mattress, and lay in the dark with his heart going too fast for a room that had gone completely still.

He didn't sleep.