Chapter one
The paperwork saystransfer. The cuffs say something else.
They say I killed someone. The problem is I don't remember it.
The van smells like sweat and vinyl and the particular brand of industrial cleaner they use in county facilities — the kind that doesn't actually clean anything, just covers one bad smell with a worse one.
I know that smell. I've been breathing it for years, in seven different placements. I could bottle it and sell it as Eau de You Fucked Up. It's the smell of fluorescent lights and metal detectors and being told to sit down by people whose names I'll forget by tomorrow.
My wrists ache.
The cuffs are standard transport — steel, not zip ties. Whoever requisitioned this transfer used the adult form, not the juvenile one.
I'm eighteen, but I've been in the system since I was fourteen, and nobody has ever cuffed me with hardware this heavy.
These are the kind they use for people who've hurt someone.
Which.
Fair.
I shift in the seat, the metal biting into my wrists.
The two officers up front haven't spoken to me since we left the airport.
One of them — stocky, blond, neck like a fire hydrant — keeps checking the rearview mirror like he's waiting for me to do something.
The other one drives with both hands on the wheel and his jaw clamped shut.
They're not corrections officers.
I've spent enough time around COs to recognize the posture. The fake boredom. The way they hold their shoulders like the job is beneath them.
These two look scared. But not of the road or the weather.
Of me.
The weather's worth being scared of, honestly. We've been driving for hours — a flight I slept through, then a smaller plane that rattled so hard I bit the inside of my cheek, then this van. The landscape outside the mesh-covered window has been getting emptier for the last ninety minutes. Trees. Mountains. Snow. No cell towers. No gas stations. No other cars. Alaska. That's all the transfer paperwork said. Juvenile rehabilitation program. Remote therapeutic facility. Frosthaven Review Panel Authorization.
I don't know what a Frosthaven Review Panel is. I don't care. The phrasing sounds federal. Or military. Something withenough pull to requisition a transport van and a flight to Alaska for one eighteen-year-old with a juvie record. That's not county-level paperwork. Someone above the normal chain signed off on this.
Every facility has a name that sounds like it was focus-grouped by people who've never been inside one. Sunrise Academy. New Horizons. Fresh Start. All of them smell the same. All of them have the same locks.
"How much longer?" I ask, because the silence is starting to feel heavier than the cuffs.
Fire Hydrant glances at the rearview again. Doesn't answer.
"I'm not being difficult. I have to pee."
"Twenty minutes," the driver says, without looking back. His voice is flat. Clipped.
I lean my head against the window and watch the trees blur. There's a scratch on the glass — someone dragged a key or something hard enough to leave a mark. I trace it with my eyes without moving my hands. I used to do that in every new placement. Map the damage. Figure out who was here before me and how angry they were. You can tell a lot about a place by what the last person left behind.
My file is on the seat next to Fire Hydrant — a manila folder thick enough to prop open a door, with colored tabs I can't read from this angle. But I can see the red tag on the front. I've seen red tags before. They mean high risk or violent history or do not house with general population.
Mine probably says all three.
The folder's been opened at least twice since we left the airport. Fire Hydrant keeps going back to one page — I can't see what's on it.
