Intake

POV: Ricki

They took his clothes first, then his name, then whatever was left of his composure, and finally, in front of everyone, a reading of exactly what he was.

The clothes went the way everything went here: too fast to protest, too slow to survive without feeling every second scrape past. A guard walked him through it in the flat, bored cadence of a man who'd said the same four words to a thousand bodies before this one.

"Strip," the guard said, tone dead as a closed account.

Ricki did it. His fingers fumbled the buttons of the handmade suit his mother pressed that morning, the one she'd sewn herself, the one that felt like armor for exactly as long as it took twelve strangers to come back with a verdict. Now it was just fabric a guard was already balling into a plastic bag like trash nobody would claim.

"Turn around," the guard said, not looking at him.

Ricki turned. Behind him a second guard was already talking to the first, voice pitched for the room, not lowered for anyone's dignity.

"You catch the game last night?" the second guard asked, chewing gum.

"Nah, had the overnight," the first guard said. "What happened?"

"Bengals blew it in the fourth," the second guard said, disgusted. "Same old story."

Ricki stood naked under fluorescent light that made every man in the room look embalmed, and the guards kept talking football over his head like he was a couch they were moving between them. Nobody looked at his face. Nobody had to.

"Bend," the first guard said.

He bent, palms braced on his knees, and the cold found every inch of him at once, gooseflesh rising in a wave he couldn't stop. A gloved hand checked behind his ears, under his arms, between his fingers, quick and clinical, the way a butcher checks a carcass for rot before it goes on the hook.

"Spread," the guard said, already bored of his own voice.

He spread his feet. The light kept doing its ugly work, and Ricki understood, distantly, that the search wasn't the point. The unmaking was the point. How fast a person turned into an object under the right lighting and the right tone of tedium.

"Cough," the guard said.

He coughed, squatting, thighs burning, while gloved fingers moved with the flat efficiency of men who'd done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more before lunch. He didn't argue. Arguing hadn't worked once in five months of pretrial, and some part of him had already learned the fastest way through was to leave his body doing the work while the rest of him went somewhere else. He found a window in his skull, an old one: summer light through the kitchen curtains, his mother Jules humming over the sewing machine. He stood inside that window while the hands did what hands did, discussing overtime pay in the same breath they finished up. When it ended, his own voice came out thin and far away, asking if he could get dressed now.

Nobody answered that.

The delousing came next, a chemical stink that sat in the back of his throat for an hour after, cold spray hitting skin already raw from standing too long in recycled air. He flinched, and the flinch earned him a second, longer blast, like his body's protest was an argument that needed rebutting. Then the jumpsuit, orange, stiff with newness, a size too big through the shoulders and a size too short in the leg, cuffs riding up his shins no matter how he stood.

He thought that was the worst of it. He was wrong.

They walked him into a wide, echoing room, a line of new intakes strung out at intervals in front of a raised desk where a technician sat behind a screen angled away from view. A guard called names off a clipboard, and one by one the men ahead stepped up while the line watched, no politeness in it, no decency of looking away. Eyes tracked every man to the desk and back, cataloguing, the way men size up something they might have to fight or fuck or fear later.

"Griffin. Wolf," the guard read, flat.

Someone in the middle of the line laughed under his breath. "Figures," he muttered. "Look at the size of him."

"Simmons. Witch," the guard read.

"Reyes. Witch, confirmed," the guard read.

The names dropped like gang affiliations off a sheet, each one landing somewhere, a wing, a table, a corridor with rules already understood by everyone but him. A low whistle came from behind Ricki when the cuffs came off the man ahead of him, a wolf-eyed inmate leaning sideways for a better look, murmuring something to the man beside him that Ricki caught only the laugh after. Nobody addressed the men being read out loud. They talked around them, above them, past them, like the ritual belonged to everybody in the room except the person standing inside it.

Then it was his turn.

"Delano," the guard called, and Ricki stepped onto the worn rubber mat. The cuffs came off his wrists - standard procedure for the reading, apparently - and the second they did, the wolf-eyed inmate whistled low from the line, the sound half appreciation, half mockery. "Fresh meat," somebody murmured, not to Ricki, not loud enough to be a challenge, just loud enough to be heard and passed between two or three men like a joke they were already in on.

A technician pressed something cold and flat to the inside of his wrist. The device hummed once and went still.

She frowned at her screen. Tapped something. Frowned harder.

"Run it again," she said to nobody, to herself, and pressed the device to his wrist a second time.

The hum. The stillness. The frown, deeper now, a line cut into her forehead.

"What's it say?" Ricki asked, voice cracking on the last word, and nobody answered him.

The technician turned the screen so the guard beside her could see it too, and Ricki watched curiosity break through the guard's boredom like a crack splitting dry ground. Behind him the line had gone quiet, that same charged, watchful quiet that swallowed the bus whole when he'd asked about the Deep End, and he felt it crawl up the back of his neck like a hand closing.

"LATENT," the technician read out, finally, pitched to carry. "Class unconfirmed."

The ripple that moved through the line wasn't loud. It didn't need volume. It showed in three heads turning at once, in the low sound the vampire from the bus made somewhere behind him, a sound that might have been a laugh dragged through gravel. It showed in the way the yellow-eyed man from the bus went very still, watching, like Ricki had just become something worth the trouble of paying attention to. Every other name found a wing, a wall to lean against, a table in the yard already saving a seat. His found nothing. No faction claimed an unconfirmed man, which meant no faction would spend blood protecting one either, a fact the silence understood before he did.

Then, from the back of the line, unhurried, almost bored, a voice dropped a single sentence into the quiet. "Unconfirmed ones scream loudest," the voice said, conversational, like discussing weather. "First week, in the showers. Once the lights go."

Nobody laughed. Nobody agreed. Nobody told him to shut his mouth, either. The comment just hung there, unanswered, and settled over Ricki like the amber light in the corridor he hadn't reached yet. He understood, with a cold certainty that had nothing to do with any classification device, that this was simply a known fact of the building, the way the cell blocks and the wing placards were facts of the building, spoken once and never needing repeating.

A guard on either side took his elbows and marched him off the mat before he could open his mouth again, and behind him he heard the technician call the next name like nothing at all had happened.

They brought him to a small office with a nameplate reading WARDEN L. REDMOND, and the warden was already on her feet when he came in, a compact woman with iron-gray hair scraped back tight enough to pull the corners of her eyes. She looked him over the way someone examines an interesting thing stuck to the bottom of a shoe.

"Well," Redmond said, dry as chalk. "Aren't you interesting."

"There's been a mistake," Ricki said again, because it was the only sentence he had left in the chamber.

"Mm," Redmond said, circling him once, slow, unhurried, the way the vampire on the bus looked him over, except colder, more clinical, more like inventory. "Our little mystery. Class unconfirmed. First one we've had through intake in, oh, must be years now." She stopped in front of him, tilted her head. "We do love a mystery here, Cupcake," she said, almost fond. "Gives everyone something to talk about at chow."

"I'm human," Ricki said, the words cracking halfway through, and he hated himself for it, hated the shake starting in his hands, the way his breath caught before he could force the rest out. "I don't know why the test is saying whatever it's saying. But I'm human. I've never been anything else."

Redmond's gaze dropped to his hands, then back to his face, and something in her expression sharpened into interest instead of sympathy. "Look at that," she said, almost delighted. "Shaking like a leaf." Her mouth curved, not quite a smile, more like a crack in dry paint. "That's what the paperwork says too. Human, twenty-four years, no prior flags on record." She shrugged one shoulder, like the contradiction amused her more than it worried her. "Machines don't lie, son," she said, flat now, final. "People do. We'll figure out which one of you is wrong."

She didn't explain further. She didn't need to. A guard's hand found his elbow again and steered him out, down a corridor that split into wings he hadn't clocked on the way in, each one marked by a placard overhead. WOLF WING. WITCH WING. VAMPIRE WING. He passed each one and understood, a little more with every step, that nowhere in this building had been built with him in mind.

They put him in general holding instead, a plain block full of intakes still waiting on paperwork, no explanation for how long he'd sit there or what happened once his classification got "resolved," a word the escorting guard used the way a man uses a word he's never once had to define.

On the way, they passed a corridor branching off the main hall, narrower than the rest, lit low and amber instead of the flat white fluorescents everywhere else. The temperature dropped, just slightly, just enough that Ricki felt it prickle against his bare forearms where the jumpsuit sleeves quit early.

The guard escorting him didn't look down that hall. Didn't even turn his head. He just walked a little faster, and Ricki, without knowing why, felt the hair rise on his arms the same way it had on the bus.

He didn't ask what was down there. He'd already learned better than that.

His cell that night was a narrow rectangle of concrete: a bunk, a steel toilet, a slot in the door for trays. He sat on the edge of the bunk in the dark, still wearing the too-big jumpsuit, his wrist still tingling faintly where the device had pressed twice, and stared at nothing in particular.

A voice came through the wall, flat, unhurried, close enough that it might as well have been sitting on the bunk beside him.

"Unconfirmed, huh," the voice said, almost amused.

Ricki's head snapped toward the sound. "Who's there?" he asked, sharper than he meant it.

The voice didn't answer that question. It just kept going, low and even, like it had nowhere else to be tonight or any other night.

"Careful," the voice said, quiet, almost kind, which made it worse. "Things that don't know what they are make everyone nervous in here. Including you."