Griff and Simms

POV: Ricki

No window announced the morning, just an overhead light snapping on hard and a guard's baton cracking twice against the bars, a sound like knuckles on a coffin lid. Ricki pushed himself upright, jaw tight, the word LATENT still grinding through his skull from a night with no sleep in it, worn down to noise by repetition. Somewhere around three in the morning he'd counted the cracks in the ceiling, forty-one of them, before giving up on counting anything at all.

"Delano." A guard unlocked the cell and jerked his chin toward the corridor, keys still jangling off his belt like loose change. "You're getting an escort. New intakes get shown around before they go feral and start asking everybody what the hell this place is."

The escort was a lean man with a shaved scalp, and he moved with an economy that suggested years of practice at not drawing attention, shoulders loose, steps unhurried. Before the guard's footsteps faded down the block, he introduced himself.

"Richard Simmons. Everybody calls me Simms, on account of the other guy," he said, flat, a line worn smooth from overuse, the kind of joke that had died a long time ago and gotten resurrected out of habit rather than humor. "Witch. You're the unconfirmed. Word travels fast in here."

"Ricki," he offered, because he didn't know what else to give. "Delano."

"I know," Simms said, already moving, eyes sweeping the corridor in slow, methodical passes, the practiced vigilance of a man who'd learned the hard way what happened to people who stopped watching. He rattled off logistics in clipped bursts, commissary, laundry days, meal times, never once landing his gaze on Ricki's face, like naming the small things kept him from naming the big one. When Ricki pushed with a question, Simms answered a half-beat too late, weighing the words before he spent them, a man doling out truth in careful, rationed portions.

"Yard opens at oh-nine-hundred," Simms said, businesslike. "Learn fast which patch belongs to who. Nobody posts a map."

"Is there a map?" Ricki asked, genuinely uncertain.

"There's a map," Simms said, wry, the first real flicker of personality cutting through the careful neutrality. "Nobody posts it. An unconfirmed who wanders into the wrong patch finds out the hard way where the lines sit."

"What happens to unconfirmed inmates who don't figure that out?" Ricki pressed, low.

Simms went quiet a beat too long, something shutting behind his face fast and deliberate, a door closing before Ricki got a look at what was behind it. His jaw worked once, like he was chewing on the shape of an answer before spitting it out half-formed. "Depends who decides to answer that for them," he said, voice dropping. "Class gets sorted here one of two ways. The lab does it. Or somebody bigger than you does it instead."

"Meaning what?" Ricki asked.

"Meaning you want it to be the lab," Simms said, final, offering nothing else. The silence that followed sat heavy, a warning left unfinished on purpose. Ricki understood then that Simms wasn't unkind, just careful, the kind of careful a man learned from watching an unguarded word cost somebody something in a place like this.

They crossed toward the fence line, and Simms's voice dropped lower as he nodded once at a cluster of inmates gathered near the east wall, robes traded for prison grays but somehow still managing to look draped rather than worn. They moved as a single organism, six bodies shifting in a loose, unhurried unison, like something choreographed long ago and never forgotten. A man near the fence caught sight of them and altered his course without breaking stride, giving the whole cluster a wide, unthinking berth, the way a man steps around a downed power line without needing to be told why.

"Court," Simms said, the word clipped short, nothing casual left in it now. "Keep clear unless you're invited. They don't do open ground, and they don't forget a face that crossed it."

Ricki watched the group a moment longer, the eerie unity of their movement, the way the yard seemed to bend around them without anyone appearing to notice they were bending it, and filed the word away with a weight it hadn't carried a second before, one more shape on a map nobody would show him.

They found Griff at the fence line, a cigarette tucked behind one ear and another burning between his fingers, watching the yard sort itself into its usual knots with the flat, half-lidded patience of a man who'd stopped being surprised by anything years back. Even from a distance, something about his stillness read as authority, the kind that didn't need to announce itself.

"Griff," Simms said, nodding at Ricki. "New fish. Unconfirmed."

Griff's eyes came up slow and dragged over Ricki head to foot, an assessment as thorough as it was unhurried. Something shifted in his stance, a straightening that wasn't alarm, not quite, but wasn't nothing either.

"You want one?" he said, gruff, holding the pack out, more reflex than hospitality. "Everybody wants one their first week. Helps with the shakes."

"I don't smoke," Ricki said.

"Everybody says that too," Griff said, dry, already pocketing the pack. For a second it looked like that was the whole exchange, currency offered and turned down, nothing left to it. Then Griff went still, and the amusement drained out of him like water through a cracked cup.

It happened fast. A tightening around his eyes, nostrils flaring once, sharp. He leaned in a couple inches, no attempt at subtlety, dragging a breath through his nose like he was hunting down a smell that wouldn't sit still long enough to name. Ricki fought the urge to step back, some animal part of him recognizing the posture as predatory before his mind caught up. Under his own shirt, sweat had gone cold and sour, and his molars ached faintly, a taste like a bitten coin sitting at the back of his tongue.

"You smell like wolf," Griff said, voice dropped low, weighing Ricki the way a man weighs a stranger's claim to family. "And static."

The words hit low in Ricki's gut, cold and immediate, and the yard tilted slightly at the edges. He didn't know what either was supposed to smell like, but something in him flinched anyway, a buried recognition with no name attached that he didn't want to go digging for. His pulse climbed, a slow, unwelcome drumbeat at the base of his throat, and for a second his fingertips prickled like something under the skin wanted to lengthen. A flash surfaced, the night before his arrest, blood, broken glass, a stretch of hours he'd never been able to account for, gone again before he could close a hand around it. He'd spent months trying to force that memory back into shape, and it had never once cooperated.

"What's that mean?" Ricki asked, rougher than he meant it to come out.

Griff didn't answer right off. He frowned, the same frown the lab technician had worn over her screen the day before, and studied Ricki like a puzzle with pieces that refused to sit flush. "Never met an unconfirmed before," he said, quieter, almost to himself. "Didn't think you'd smell like anything at all." He stepped closer, close enough that Ricki caught tobacco and something colder underneath it, something metallic and faintly wrong, and dropped his voice further. "You don't know what you are. Not even a little."

"I'm human," Ricki said, thin, unconvincing even in his own ears, the protest of a man repeating a fact he was no longer sure of himself.

"Sure you are," Griff said, flat, no laugh in it. He held Ricki's stare a beat too long, something working behind his eyes, calculation or pity, Ricki couldn't tell which, then flicked a glance toward the center of the yard and snapped it back. "Watch yourself, unconfirmed," he said, low and even. "Things that smell like more than one thing usually end up torn between them."

"Yard's this way," Simms cut in, even, steering Ricki off before Griff could add to it, a hand brief and firm against his shoulder. The words followed anyway, static and wolf, circling through Ricki's skull on a loop, and under his ribs something old and patient shifted its weight, settling in to wait a little longer.