“First time down?” the escort asked.
“It show?”
“Little.”
From down the hall, a man’s voice lifted in a roar. A familiar calmness came over him. The escort’s eyebrows went up, and he smiled at her. Her lips turned up in answer, but there was a different assessment behind it.
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “Right through here.”
The hallway was brutal concrete; green-gray metal doors in a line with identical windows of thick green-tinted glass that made the rooms beyond look like they were underwater. In the first, four guards in the same armor Amos’ escort wore were forcing a man to the ground. The woman from the waiting room huddled in the corner, her eyes closed. She seemed to be praying. The prisoner – a tall, thin man with long hair and a flowing beard the color of iron – roared again. His arm flashed out, quicker than Amos’ eye could follow, grabbing one of the guards by the ankle and pulling. The guard toppled, but two of the others had what looked like cattle prods out. One of them landed on the prisoner’s back, the other at the base of his skull. With one last obscenity, the iron-bearded man collapsed. The fallen guard rose back to her feet, blood pouring from her nose as the others teased her. The old woman sank to her knees, her lips moving. She took a long, shuddering breath, and when she spoke, she wailed, her voice sounding like it came from kilometers away.
Amos’ escort ignored it, so he did too.
“Yours is there. No exchange of goods of any sort. If at any point you feel threatened, raise your hand. We’ll be watching.”
“Thanks for that,” Amos said.
Until he saw her, Amos hadn’t realized how much the place reminded him of a medical clinic for people on basic. A cheap plastic hospital bed, a steel toilet on the wall without so much as a screen around it, a battered medical expert system, a wall-mounted screen set to an empty glowing gray, and Clarissa with three long plastic tubes snaking into her veins. She was thinner than she’d been on the ride back from Medina Station before it had been Medina Station. Her elbows were thicker than her arms. Her eyes looked huge in her face.
“Hey there, Peaches,” Amos said, sitting in the chair at her bedside. “You look like shit on a stick.”
She smiled. “Welcome to Bedlam.”
“I thought it was called Bethlehem.”
“Bedlam was called Bethlehem too. So what brings you to my little state-sponsored apartment?”
On the other side of the window, two guards hauled the iron man past. Clarissa followed Amos’ gaze and smirked.
“That’s Konecheck,” she said. “He’s a volunteer.”
“How’d you figure?”
“He can leave if he wants to,” she said, lifting her arm to display the tubes. “We’re all modified down here. If he let them take out his mods, he could transfer up to Angola or Newport. Not freedom, but there’d be a sky.”
“They couldn’t just take ’em?”
“Body privacy’s written into the constitution. Konecheck’s a bad, bad monkey, but he’d still win the lawsuit.”
“What about you? Your… y’know. Stuff?”
Clarissa bowed her head. Her laugh shook the tubes. “Apart from the fact that every time I used them, I wound up puking and mewling for a couple minutes afterward, they’ve got some other drawbacks. If we pull them out, I’d survive, but it would be even less pleasant than this. Turns out there’s a reason the stuff I got isn’t in general use.”
“Shit. That’s got to suck for you.”
“Among other things, it means I’m here until… well. Until I’m not anywhere. I get my blockers every morning, lunch in the cafeteria, half an hour of exercise, and then I can sit in my cell or in a holding tank with nine other inmates for three hours. Rinse, repeat. It’s fair. I did bad things.”
“All that shit the preacher pitched about redemption, getting reformed —”
“Sometimes you don’t get redeemed,” she said, and her voice made it clear she’d thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. “Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That’s your happy ending.”
“Huh,” he said. “Actually, I think I know what you mean.”
“I really hope you don’t,” she said.
“Sorry I didn’t put a bullet in your head when I had the chance.”
“Sorry I didn’t know to ask. What brings you down here, anyway?”