Chapter 5: Useful

Miles's POV

The second task was worse than the first.

Not dangerous exactly, not yet, but ugly in a way that sat wrong in my chest for hours afterward. Moving something I wasn't allowed to look at from one point to another, timed to the minute, past two guards who somehow didn't see me even though I walked directly past both of them. I kept my head down and my steps even, the way I'd rehearsed in my head the night before, and somehow it worked.

I didn't ask how that worked. I'd learned already that some questions got answered and some just got you a look that told you to stop talking.

By the third task, I stopped flinching at the instructions before I'd even finished reading them. By the fourth, I'd learned to read Vincent's face for the difference between routine and risk, a skill I hadn't wanted and couldn't unlearn now that I had it.

"This one's simple," Vincent said, sliding another folded note across whatever surface happened to be between us that day. We never met in the same place twice.

"You said that last time."

"Last time was also simple. You handled it fine."

"I threw up afterward."

Something that wasn't quite amusement crossed his face. "Nerves. Happens to everyone the first few times."

I unfolded the note, read it, and felt the same cold drop in my stomach I'd started to expect by now. Simple, apparently, meant something different in Vincent's vocabulary than it did in mine.

"When do I get to ask about the release," I said, not really a question by that point, more a formality I went through because stopping felt like giving up something I couldn't afford to lose.

"You just did."

"You know what I mean."

"I do." Vincent folded his hands, unhurried, the way he always was when he was about to tell me nothing at all. "And the answer's the same as last time. There isn't a timeline. There's progress. You're making it."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting today."

I wanted to push harder. I always wanted to push harder, and every time I stopped myself, because I'd started noticing the men who pushed too hard, and I'd started noticing that they didn't stay around long enough to finish their sentences the normal way.

I did the task. It went the way Vincent said it would, which was to say it went fine on the surface and left something scraped raw underneath that I didn't examine too closely. I'd gotten good at that too. Not examining things too closely.

That night, back in my cell, I lay on my bunk and did the math I kept trying not to do. Four tasks in. No mention of release beyond the vague word progress, which meant less every time I heard it. No sign that whatever Julian Hayes wanted from me had a ceiling. Above me, my bunkmate snored steadily, undisturbed by any of it, and I envied him that for exactly as long as it took me to remember I didn't actually know what he'd done to end up here either.

I thought about the old man in the library, the one who'd told me some men here were useful and some weren't, and how the useful ones made it out with all their teeth. Nobody had ever told me making it out with all your teeth was the same thing as making it out.

I was starting to wonder if I'd been lied to. Not outright, not in a way I could point to and call a lie exactly. Just in the specific, careful way that let everyone involved keep their hands clean while the truth quietly disappeared somewhere between the words that were said and the things that actually happened. It was a kind of lying I recognized, one I'd studied in textbooks once, back when the worst thing I had to worry about was an exam. It hadn't occurred to me back then that I'd ever need to recognize it in real time, aimed directly at me.

I didn't have proof of that. I just had a feeling building slowly in my chest, the kind that used to warn me, back before all this, when something in a room didn't add up the way people wanted me to believe it did.

The next morning, Vincent found me during the yard hour, which he'd never done before. Usually it was a note slipped somewhere, a whispered word from someone else, never Vincent himself in the open like this.

That alone told me something had changed.

"Walk with me," he said.

I fell into step beside him, and we walked the perimeter in silence for a while, past men who very deliberately didn't look at either of us. The fence line ran gray and endless beside us, wire catching the morning light in a way that almost made it look sharp on purpose, like a warning built into the architecture itself.

"The next one's different," Vincent said finally.

"Different how?"

"Harder. More exposure. More risk than anything you've done so far." He said it plainly, no attempt to soften it, which somehow made it worse than if he had. "I need to know you understand that before I give you the details."

My mouth went dry. "How much risk?"

Vincent stopped walking and looked at me directly for the first time that morning, something unreadable in his gray eyes.

"Enough that I need you thinking clearly," he said. "Enough that Mr. Hayes wanted me to make sure you were ready before I handed it to you."

The fact that Julian Hayes had personally weighed in on whether I was ready for something landed harder than the warning itself.

"Tell me," I said.

Vincent reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded paper, heavier than the others somehow, though I knew that was only in my head.

"This one," he said, "you don't get to say no to."

I looked down at the paper in his hand and didn't reach for it right away. Somewhere behind us, the yard bell rang for the end of the hour, and neither of us moved to answer it.