FAZER LOGINPOV: KaiaAt Briar Ridge, nobody hit you. They just made sure nobody remembered your name.Kaia Griffin didn't know that yet when the transport van pulled through the gate. She knew the drive had taken six hours with no windows. She knew her wrists were sore where the cuffs had rubbed them raw, and that the county deputy who handed her off had refused to look her in the eye, like she was a package he'd been told not to open. She also knew her bloodwork had come back wrong at county intake. Two nurses had gone quiet over a clipboard, then a man in a gray suit had shown up, and the next morning her charge sheet had a second stamp on it that she couldn't read upside down.The building itself was a disappointment. She'd built it up on the drive into something with towers and floodlights, like the stories her brother wrote her about Valhalla. Briar Ridge was low and brown and spread out like a community college, with long windows and flower beds nobody had watered. A woman in a cardigan me
POV: RickiRebuilding trust in Valhalla looked nothing like the movies. It looked like a cigarette on his bunk one morning, and him smoking it even though he didn't smoke.It showed up the day after Griff told him about Kaia - lying on the thin gray blanket, slightly bent, like it had lived in someone's pocket first. No note. No Griff hovering at the bars waiting to be thanked.A cigarette was money in here. Two bought a phone call. Five bought a few nights of somebody watching your back, and there were men on this block who paid in other currency once the cigarettes ran out. Ricki had seen it happen in the laundry room his second week, a transaction nobody so much as blinked at. Bodies and smokes, weighed against each other like an exchange rate nobody questioned anymore.So the cigarette wasn't free. It was Griff putting something real on the table and asking for nothing back.Ricki didn't smoke. He'd never smoked. But that night he sat on the floor with his spine against the cold b
POV: RickiRicki's hands found the cinderblock wall around the corner from the Deep End, palms flat against stone that seemed to hold no warmth at all, like the cold had leached into the mortar itself and stayed there. His breath came in ragged pulls that fogged faintly in air that had no business being that cold, not in a corridor with working heat vents, not in a building where every other hallway smelled of sweat and bleach and too many bodies packed too close. Here there was only the cold, and beneath it, that sensation of being watched by something that didn't need eyes to do it.He made himself breathe slow, the way Odile had taught him, four counts in, four counts held, four counts out. His legs still didn't trust the floor beneath them. Whatever had turned to look at him from behind that door, he'd felt its attention land on him like a physical weight, a pressure behind his sternum that had nothing to do with suppressants or fear in the ordinary sense. This was older than fear
POV: RickiThe count didn't care who'd betrayed whom. Four times a day the speaker crackled and the block went still, and Ricki Delano stood at his door same as always, said his number when it came, 0-7-7-4-1, present and accounted for, and the guard's pen scratched on to the next name like nothing in Ricki's life had cracked open three weeks ago. The building just wanted the number, and it wanted his voice steady when he gave it, because a shaking voice got you flagged for a psych eval, and more paperwork meant more days added to a sentence that already felt bottomless.He'd gotten good at avoiding Griff without making a thing of it. That was its own kind of skill, he was learning, the specific choreography of two men who used to eat every meal together learning how to occupy the same yard, the same cafeteria, the same narrow hallway between the Kennel and the commissary line, without ever quite sharing the same six feet of space. Griff would come out of the chow line and Ricki would
POV: RickiNine months ago, Ricki Delano walked into Valhalla Containment Facility not knowing what he was. He still didn't know. But the building did, and it had been deciding what to do about it since the day the gate shut behind him.The cell looked the same as it had that first night. Same bunk with its thin, piss-yellow mattress worn thin at the corners. Same steel toilet, rust bleeding down from the bolts. Same narrow rectangle of concrete swallowing the last of the evening light through a high, barred window, the bars themselves gone cold to the touch an hour before the light fully died. Ricki sat on the edge of the mattress the way he had nine months ago, and felt, in his knees and his spine and the base of his skull, exactly how much distance separated the man he'd been from the man currently occupying this same small space.He was harder now. He could feel it in the calluses on his knuckles, in the way his shoulders didn't hunch anymore when a guard's shadow crossed his cell
POV: Leon ChurchFourteen years inside Valhalla had taught Leon one thing above all else: the most dangerous things in this building weren't the inmates or the guards. They were the filing cabinets, the quiet rooms where a man's whole existence lived on paper thinner than the skin protecting it. Leon had learned that lesson the hard way, and he never forgot it.The Undercroft smelled the way it always smelled at this hour - mildew, cold concrete, and the ghost of bleach from whatever body the trustees had scrubbed off the floor last week. Leon sat with his back against the pipe that usually ran warm at night, though tonight it had gone cold, the chill settling into the muscle along his spine. His hands didn't shake. They hadn't shaken in years, not since he'd learned to ration the tremor along with everything else his body wanted to do and wasn't allowed to.Graves arrived later than usual, moving with a care that told him everything before she opened her mouth. She was his last remai







