I know what's in that file. I've heard it read aloud in courtrooms and intake offices and emergency placement reviews. Alexandra Jones, eighteen, ward of the state. Extensivejuvenile record. Multiple placement failures. History of aggression, property destruction, and one incident classified as—
They always pause before they say it. Like the word itself is dangerous.
Homicide.
Unresolved. That's the part they don't like. Not that someone died — people die all the time and nobody calls an emergency review panel. It's that they can't explain how. The body was found in a group home basement with bite marks that didn't match any human dental pattern and blood splatter that a forensic analyst described, in a report I was not supposed to see, as "inconsistent with known attack methodology."
I was fourteen. I was covered in blood. I don't remember what happened.
That's the truth, and nobody has ever believed it, and after a while I stopped trying to make them.
The van turns off the main road onto something that isn't quite a road — two ruts in the snow with gravel underneath, winding through trees so dense the light drops by half. The driver slows down. Fire Hydrant sits up straighter. His hand moves to his belt, casual, like he's adjusting his pants, but I see the snap on his holster pop open.
I'm handcuffed in the back of a transport van in the middle of nowhere, Alaska, and this man just unsnapped his holster.
Something cold moves through my chest. Not fear — I know what fear feels like, and this isn't it. Fear is fast. This is slow. Heavy.
The trees break.
The facility sits in a clearing like it was dropped there and the forest grew up around it to hide it. Not what I expected. I expected concrete and razor wire — the standard juvie aesthetic, all right angles and concrete architecture. This is different. Thebuildings are spread out, made of some dark wood, hard to tell from here. There are three main structures that I can see, plus smaller ones set farther back toward the tree line. A yard. No, two yards — one open, one enclosed with fencing that's taller than it needs to be for a therapeutic facility.
The fencing is the first thing that's wrong.
It's layered. Chain link on the outside, then a gap of maybe ten feet, then a second fence — this one solid, metal, with no handholds. The inner fence has something along the top that isn't razor wire. It's thicker. Darker. It hums. I can hear it from inside the van, a low vibration that I feel in my back teeth before my ears pick it up.
Electrified. They electrified the inner fence.
No juvenile facility in the country uses electrified fencing. I know this because I've escaped from two of them and researched the security specs of eleven others during a period of my life I refer to privately as my ambitious phase.
The van rolls to a stop at an outer gate. The driver punches a code into a panel I can't see, and the gate slides open — smooth, fast, mechanical. No guard booth. No sign-in. Just the code and the gate and then we're inside the first fence and rolling toward the second.
"You can uncuff me now," I say. "Unless this is a place where I need to stay cuffed."
Neither of them answers.
Right.
The second gate is different. It doesn't open automatically. Someone's standing on the other side, waiting, and the van idles while that someone walks to a panel and does something I can't see — not a code, something else. Something that takes longer. The gate opens slower. Heavier.
And then we're through, and the gate closes behind us, and the sound it makes isn't a click. It's a thud. Deep, final, sealed. The sound of something that wasn't designed to open again quickly.
The driver pulls up to the nearest building and kills the engine. For a second, nobody moves. Then Fire Hydrant turns around in his seat and looks at me — really looks at me, for the first time since the airport — and what I see in his face isn't hostility. It's relief. Thank God this is someone else's problem now.
"Sit tight," he says. "They're coming around for you."
I sit tight. I watch through the mesh of the reinforced glass.
The door of the building opens and a man walks out. He's tall — taller than the guy who opened the gate, taller than most people I've met. Blond hair cut short. Face that could be handsome if it ever learned how to relax. He moves like he was built for a specific purpose and has never once questioned what that purpose is. There's an efficiency to him that makes my skin prickle. Not the lazy authority of a prison guard. Something sharper. Something trained.
He's not wearing a corrections uniform. Dark jacket, dark pants, boots that are meant for terrain, not tile. No badge. No visible weapon. No radio. He walks to the van like he's done this a hundred times and has never once been surprised by what was inside.
The side door slides open. Cold air hits me so hard my lungs clench. Alaska cold. A reminder that this place exists specifically because it's far away from everything else.
"Alexandra Jones." Not a question. He's reading from a tablet, not a clipboard, and his eyes move over it the way you'd scan a threat assessment, not a student file.
"It's Alex," I say.
He looks up from the tablet. Pale eyes. Steady. He holds my gaze for a beat longer than is normal, and something behind hisexpression shifts. Not surprise. More like confirmation. Like I match something he was told to expect.
