The Count

Four counts a day, and Valhalla stripped every man down to a number. Ricki's was 0-7-7-4-1, the only name this place bothered learning.

The first count landed before dawn, a flashlight blade cutting down the row, a voice barking digits in a flat institutional rhythm. No names. No eyes met. Just the metal-on-metal clank of cell doors getting checked one by one like a man could be inventoried the same as a crate. Ricki learned fast to be on his feet before the beam hit his door. The half-second of hesitation on his first morning had cost him a comment he had no interest in hearing twice. His right hand still throbbed where it had cracked against the bunk frame the night before, a dull heat that wouldn't fade the way a bruise should. It simmered low under the skin, patient, like it hadn't decided yet whether to leave.

"0-7-7-4-1," the guard barked, tone bored as a man reading grocery totals, already moving before Ricki finished answering.

After count came the dosing line, and it taught Ricki more about the yard's hierarchy than anything Simms had bothered explaining in words. Each species had its own compound, its own place in the queue, its own particular flavor of ruin. The wolves went first, tremors bad enough to click teeth together like dice in a cup, shakes running through them so hard Ricki understood the priority the second he saw it. The vampires came next. The man just ahead of him turned his head enough to show gums pulled back too far, canines jutting long and yellowed despite whatever meal they'd fed him that morning. Starved while fed. Whatever they dosed him with kept his heart going and kept him hollow at the same time, two facts sitting side by side without contradicting each other. A witch two spots up took her tablet with a hand that wouldn't hold still, fingers trembling hard enough that the pill nearly bounced off her palm before she got it to her mouth. Ricki recognized the shake. He'd seen its twin in Simms's chalk-dusted hands, ward-lines gone crooked because the suppressant meant to leash her power was unraveling her fine motor control one session at a time. Sloppy wards meant punishment. Punishment meant docked commissary. Docked commissary meant no leverage to trade for a better dose, and somewhere down that chain a body ended up in a supply closet paying the difference in a currency that didn't show up on any chart. The line fed on itself, and everybody standing in it seemed to know exactly how the machinery worked, resigned in the specific way of men who'd stopped expecting it to change.

Every hand behind the counter stayed steady with the practiced stillness of people who'd done this a thousand times and stopped seeing the faces attached to the arms. A different compound waited for every freak in line, and Ricki didn't have a name for what he was.

When his turn came, the man behind the window, lanyard reading DR. R. OKAFOR, stared at his chart longer than he had for anybody else.

"We don't have a calibration for you yet," Okafor said, voice pitched low, almost apologetic, an anomaly in a building built not to give a damn. "Giving you the generic baseline till they figure out what you are."

The needle went in. Metal flooded Ricki's mouth, sharp and coppery, and stayed there long after the nurse moved to the next arm. Nausea rolled through his gut in one greasy lurch, followed by a fine tremor that rattled his fingers before he could steady them against his thigh. Behind him, low murmurs rippled down the line, heads turning, the word generic landing like a brand pressed into skin. Nobody in that room belonged to nothing. He'd just announced, in front of every faction present, that he belonged to nothing at all. Okafor's eyes caught the tremor, lingered a beat too long, then dropped to the chart. He scratched a note, mouth tightening into something that wasn't concern and wasn't pity either, just paperwork finding its shape.

"Hold me over from what?" Ricki asked, flat, no lift at the end of it.

Okafor just shrugged, small and uncomfortable, and looked past him to the next inmate. Ricki understood the question wasn't getting answered here any more than it had anywhere else in this place. The metallic taste clung to his tongue for the better part of an hour, coating every breath like he'd been sucking on a fistful of pennies.

Work assignment came next, a guard reading names off a clipboard and pointing bodies toward corners of the building like a man sorting livestock. Ricki's crew got marched past the Scriptorium first, a long room lined with pale stone panels carved with symbols that ran through the rock like veins under skin. Simms stood at one of them, chalk dust caked on both hands now instead of one, tracing a line with two fingers that wouldn't quite hold steady, the ward beneath her touch bending crooked where it should have run true.

Simms didn't look up. Ricki didn't call out. Something about the old witch's focus made interruption feel like a mistake worth avoiding.

Kennel Detail came after, and Ricki's stomach turned before he understood why. The smell hit first, sharp and rotten, buckets of kitchen slop hauled down a corridor toward holding cells set lower than the rest of the block, bars instead of solid steel. Griff was there, hauling two buckets at once, jaw locked tight, sweat beading at his hairline despite the cold, the particular sweat of a body running a low fever it never got to break. Further down, a guard stood over a wolf who'd dropped his tray, the contents scattered across the concrete in a wet gray fan.

"Pick it up," the guard said, bored, the words costing him nothing. When the wolf reached for it with his hands, the guard planted a boot near his fingers, close enough to promise. "With your mouth. Since you're already on all fours."

The wolf's shoulders dropped. He bent low and did it, the sound of his breathing thick and wrong in his own throat.

"Good boy," the guard said to his partner as he passed, grinning like the line still had juice left in it after all these years. "Walking the dogs."

Griff's jaw ticked, the muscle jumping along his cheek, but he didn't look over, didn't give either guard the satisfaction of a reaction. He just kept hauling, eyes down, carrying the stillness of a man who'd learned long ago that reacting only bought a trip to the Hole. Ricki filed the moment away without understanding yet why it sat so heavy behind his ribs.

That was when he saw Moose.

Easily the biggest man Ricki had ever laid eyes on, shoulders straining the seams of his jumpsuit, crouched in the corner of a lower cell with something small cradled in both massive hands. Gentle. Careful. Nothing about the size of him matched the tenderness in his grip.

"What's he got?" Ricki asked before he could stop the question leaving his mouth.

Griff followed his gaze, and his whole posture eased, the tightness in his jaw melting into something softer. "Bird," he said, quiet, setting his buckets down. "Died against the window screen last week. He's been carrying it around since."

Ricki looked closer and understood. Something in his chest twisted at the sight, the massive hands, the small still bird, Moose's face bent low with a focus that looked a lot like grief wearing a stranger's body.

"Does he know it's..." Ricki didn't finish it.

"He doesn't understand it's not sleeping," Griff said, crouching near the bars, slow, unhurried, the way a man approaches something he doesn't want to spook.

"How's a man supposed to know what's really wrong with somebody in a place that doesn't explain a damn thing?" Ricki asked, quiet.

"You're not," Griff said, flat, final, eyes still on Moose. "You just pay attention anyway."

"Hey, big guy," he added, gentling as he turned back to the cell. "You eat yet?"

Moose looked up, and his face cracked open into something unguarded and hopeful. Ricki watched Griff coax him toward the food tray, patient in a way that had nothing to do with survival math, nothing to do with anything Ricki had seen from another soul in this building.

Commissary came at the end of the day, a cramped room with a barred window and a chalkboard list of goods, cigarettes, ramen, soap, batteries, none of it priced in dollars. Favors. Reputation. Currency Ricki didn't have. On his way in, he passed a supply closet with the door pulled shut, and he heard what was happening behind it before he understood what he was hearing, a low murmur, a rhythm, a transaction as ordinary to this place as the count itself. Nobody around him so much as glanced at the door.

Ricki stood in front of the commissary board a long time, fingers running over the empty pockets of his jumpsuit, and understood plainly that he had nothing here worth trading. No name that meant anything yet.

He was still standing there when evening count rolled around, and he made it back to his cell in time, spine straight at the door the way he'd learned. The guard on rounds was new to him, quiet, forgettable, the kind of face that slipped out of memory five minutes after you looked away.

The guard stopped outside Ricki's cell. Didn't call the number right away. Just stood there, studying something on the tablet in his hand, eyes flicking up to Ricki's face and back down, methodical, unhurried, a beat longer than procedure called for.

Ricki glanced at the badge over the man's shirt pocket.

SGT. HARTT.

Hartt's thumb moved across the screen, and the tablet chimed, soft, deliberate, a sound Ricki hadn't heard at any other cell that night. Hartt studied whatever came up, then studied Ricki again, longer this time, weighing something behind his eyes that he clearly wasn't obligated to explain.

"0-7-7-4-1," Hartt said finally, tapping something into the tablet before he moved to the next cell. "Flagged for reassessment. Congratulations."

The word landed wrong in Ricki's ears, too cheerful for the tone underneath it. His hand throbbed in answer, a fresh pulse of heat rising sharp enough that he had to press it flat against his thigh to keep it from shaking. Whatever Hartt had just entered into that file, it wasn't nothing, and Ricki understood, watching the sergeant's back recede down the row, that he'd just become a line item somebody intended to follow up on.

The ache in his hand hadn't gone anywhere. Neither had the tremor Okafor wrote down without explaining. Nobody in this building was going to name what was happening to him. That much was clear now, cold and settled behind his ribs. If an answer existed anywhere in Valhalla, he'd have to go find it himself.

Two cells down, low enough that it might not have been meant for him at all, someone laughed, a dry, humorless sound. "Curious men go to the Undercroft," the voice said. "Curious men don't always come back the same."

Ricki didn't turn toward it. He didn't need to. The words settled into him alongside the ache in his hand, another weight added to a body already keeping too many secrets, and he understood, lying back on the thin mattress with his eyes open in the dark, that whatever answer he went looking for would cost him something before it gave him anything back.