Ward Work

POV: Ricki

Simms broke the law every night with the same care he probably used to fold his laundry into perfect squares. Nobody he protected would ever know his name for it.

Ricki found out by accident. That was how he learned most things in this building now, sideways, at hours nobody expected him upright. He'd been flat on his bunk, replaying the whispered conversation he'd overheard two cells down - the one about inmates whose hearings got postponed, right before they stopped showing up to count. Then footsteps passed his door, soft, on a corridor that should have been dead empty.

He clocked the rhythm before he saw the face through the window slot. Simms.

Curiosity won. Ricki waited for the footsteps to fade, eased open his own door, left with a busted latch since some work order nobody bothered filling, and slipped out after him. Quiet. Careful. Trailing at a distance down a service corridor no official walkthrough had ever shown him.

He found Simms alone in the Scriptorium, hunched over a wall terminal beside one of the pale ward-lattice panels, chalk dust ground into both hands, focus so total he didn't seem to register Ricki until Ricki stood close enough to touch him.

"You're going to get us both in trouble," Simms said, flat, not turning, no surprise in it at all, like he'd clocked Ricki's footsteps three corridors back and hadn't bothered reacting until now.

"What are you doing?"

Simms's fingers kept moving, quick, economical, the same efficiency he brought to everything. "Cleaning up," he said, clipped. "That's all you need to know."

Ricki stepped closer, close enough to see the screen properly. Data scrolled past faster than he could track it, timestamps, symbols, entries that meant nothing at a glance. Simms's hand moved, selected a block, deleted the whole thing without a flicker of hesitation.

"You're editing records," Ricki said, understanding arriving slow and certain. "That's not cleaning. That's erasing evidence."

"Evidence of what is the question you ought to be asking." Simms glanced over, something sharp and worn behind his eyes. "The lattice records everything, Delano. Every partial shift. Every glamour slip. Every small human failure this place refuses to allow. It's not security. It's an invisible camera running twenty-four hours a day."

"And if it gets logged?"

"Solitary. Dose increases. Reclassification." Simms recited the words flat, clipped, the particular cadence of facts turned over in his head a hundred times already. "The system doesn't tell the difference between dangerous and exhausted. It just logs the anomaly and lets the consequences sort themselves out."

Ricki looked back at the terminal, at the scroll of deleted entries, and saw Griff's jaw ticking on Kennel Detail, the guard's joke about walking the dogs. He understood exactly whose name had filled most of those lines.

"This is about Griff," he said, low.

Simms didn't answer directly. His hands stilled on the keys for a second, a pause too deliberate to mean nothing. That was answer enough.

"He doesn't shift," Simms said, finally, voice dropped quiet. "Not fully. Not since he's been in here. But the suppressants don't hold everything back all the time. Small things slip. A claw that doesn't retract fast enough. A growl that isn't quite human. None of it's dangerous. All of it reads as a breakthrough if I don't come down here every few nights and scrub it back out."

Ricki thought back to that first week, Griff hauling slop buckets on Kennel Detail, jaw tight, saying nothing at all when a guard joked about walking the dogs, that particular silence Ricki was learning to recognize as the sound of a man swallowing something he couldn't afford to say out loud.

"How long have you been doing this?" he asked.

"Long enough it doesn't feel illegal anymore." Simms turned back to the terminal, resumed the careful, methodical scrubbing of lines Ricki still couldn't read. "Feels like the only decent thing this building lets me do."

"Let me help," Ricki said.

Simms glanced at him, surprised for the first time all night. "You don't know what you're offering," he said, wary.

"Then tell me."

A long pause. Simms studied him, weighing something, and Ricki understood this wasn't a clinical assessment. This was Simms deciding whether Ricki was worth the risk of trust.

"Stand watch," Simms said, finally. "Corridor's supposed to be empty this hour, but supposed to be doesn't mean a damn thing in this place. You see a guard coming, you cough. Twice, loud. That's the whole job."

Ricki took position near the corridor's mouth, back against cold concrete, pulse ticking faster than the task probably earned. Standing there, he understood this was one more thread pulling him deeper into things he couldn't take back. First Leon's note under his door, the postponement is noted, delivered like a fact Leon already owned. Now this. Each one folded him a little deeper into the building's hidden currents, the parts of this place that ran on favors and silence instead of official rule.

He didn't leave.

The corridor stayed quiet, no footsteps, no flashlight beams sweeping the walls, and after a few minutes Ricki drifted back toward Simms, pulled by the same restless curiosity that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He stopped beside one of the pale ward-lattice panels set into the wall, close enough to see the etched symbols running through the stone in fine, deliberate lines. Without deciding to, he reached out and pressed his palm flat against it.

The hum hit him instantly.

Not loud. Not really a sound at all. More a vibration crawling up through his palm into his wrist, low and steady, pulsing faintly like something breathing on the other side of the wall.

"Delano." Simms's voice cracked close and sharp.

Ricki yanked his hand back, guilty, though he couldn't have said what exactly he felt guilty about. "It's humming," he said, quiet, almost embarrassed by how strange the words sounded out loud. "Can you feel that?"

Simms looked at the panel, then at Ricki's hand, then back at the panel. Something moved behind his eyes, quick and careful, gone before Ricki could name it.

"No," Simms said, flat. "I can't."

He didn't explain further. He didn't need to. Ricki understood, standing there with his hand still faintly tingling, that whatever had just happened wasn't ordinary, wasn't something a human body had any business feeling, and Simms's silence on the matter sat heavier than any explanation could have.

They finished the work in quiet after that, Simms scrubbing the last of the night's entries while Ricki stood watch without needing telling twice. By the time they made their way back through the dim corridors toward general holding, the building had gone fully still around them, that particular hush of the small hours when even the guards seemed to move slower.

"Simms." Ricki kept his voice low. "Thanks. For trusting me with that."

Simms didn't answer right away. Eyes fixed ahead, feet moving steady, he finally spoke, voice dropped into something quieter, more careful than his usual clipped efficiency.

"Your hearing got postponed," he said, low. "That's not backlog."

Ricki's stomach tightened. "Simms," he said, wary.

"Backlog has a form number." Simms kept walking, didn't slow, didn't look at him. "Yours doesn't. No form number means no paper trail. Means nobody official is even watching what happens to you."

Ricki's stomach dropped, cold and sudden, the words settling into his chest like a stone finding the bottom of a well. He didn't ask what that meant. Some part of him understood he already knew, and understanding it out loud would only make it real faster than he was ready for.