Doctor Callaway steps in, pulls up short, and smiles at the bowls. “You cooked?” she asks, and the surprise makes her lovely.
“Something simple,” I say. “Something soothing.”
When she reaches for a mug, I lay my fingers on her wrist and tilt my head. “You don’t sleep well.” She wants to deny it. She doesn’t.
“Not lately,” she admits.
“One cup. Half.” I pour, innocent as prayer. Just a touch more generous with her than I am with the others. She’s earned it.
We walk back to her office together while she tells me about a paper she wrote a decade ago arguing for long-term therapeutic containment rather than punitive isolation. She uses the phrases ‘care pathway’ and ‘community integration’ like they could be spells. I nod, attentive, the way you nod at a child’s drawing of a dragon that’s absolutely fucking shit but you can’t tell them that.
By the time we sit, the soporific is in full conversation with the first two guards’ bloodstreams. I can imagine them blinking hard at the monitors, deciding they’ll just rest their eyes for one second, heads lowering into sleeves. The coffee will be slower; people drink their vigilance like a sacrament. I gave him enoughto make God blink. Callaway takes her first sip and grimaces at the taste.
“Strong,” she says.
“Long day,” I reply.
Doctor Callaway’s pen lifts, falls, lifts. “Let’s try something different this evening,” she says, setting the notebook aside like a parent closing a bedtime story to talk seriously about monsters. “You’ve been very calm. Perhaps we could revisit the end point of your…incidents. What are your earliest physical cues?”
A generous offer, to map my edges. I sit forward, hands folded. “Heat along the forearms. A tightening in the jaw. The urge to correct noise.”
“Noise,” she repeats. “Define.”
“Chaos without purpose,” I say. “Screaming that doesn’t mean anything.”
“And when you redirect?—”
“I plan. I make the noisemeansomething.”
She nods, pleased, then sips her tea again. The steam fogs her glasses for a second. When it clears, her pupils have thinned. Her hand shakes, just once, a tiny tremor that has nothing to do with fear this time.
Good girl.
In the halls the camera feed performs the eighteenth minute of twenty-two. Two guards blink in pairs. One sweeps the corridor with his beam, slow and lazy, the cone of light heavy with sleep. No radio chatter. No ping. The temp writes his initials in a box to prove he existed there at that time and then writes them again because his hand slipped the first time.
“Kayla,” Doctor Callaway says, a little thick, “I want you to know that I’m proud?—”
Her sentence veers sideways. The word slurs. She blinks slow, like she’s moving through honey.
“I know,” I say, and I stand.
She tries to follow. Her knees don’t fully cooperate; the sedative has loosened the joints of her certainty. She catches herself on the desk, breath puffing out through her nose. “I’m…a little light-headed,” she admits, and the confession annoys her even as it leaves her mouth.
“You should lie down,” I say, all bedside kindness. “You do so much.”
She hesitates, then lets me guide her into the spare chair in the corner, the one she offers me on days she’s trying to be the softer kind of warden. Her movements are sloppy now, the edges of her professionalism blurring. I put a cushion behind her head, loosen her collar, move the cup just out of reach. Her tongue feels thick in her mouth as she tries to form another reassuring phrase.
“Kayla…we can…reassess…intervention protocols…if?—”
“Shh,” I say, stroking her hair back from her forehead. “You’ve done enough for today.”
Her eyes fight to stay open. She loses. Sleep drags her down in ugly, graceless swallows. I watch her chest rise and fall for a full count of thirty, just to be sure. Then I take the keycard from her pocket and the pen from her fingers and step out into the corridor alone.
It is a kind thing, the way sedation turns a person into an unlocked door. I don’t have to push; I only have to lean.
Harry is in the break room with his bowl empty and his head down on his arms, one hand still in the crisp packet, fingers shiny with salt and grease. A string of drool glistens from his mouth to his sleeve. The TV murmurs some game show where people clap on command. I take his bowl and set it in the sink because I like things tidy. His pulse flutters, steady and slow, at the side of his neck.
“Harry,” I murmur.
