The grate vibrates slightly.
Someone is shifting on the other side.
"Vent guy," I call softly, "you alive up there?"
There's a pause.
A long one.
Long enough that I start calculating whether whatever they pumped into the east block last night was stronger than what I got. Then a hoarse voice drifts down through the metal slats.
"Shut… up."
I grin wider.
"Great talk." I settle cross-legged on the floor beneath the grate. "You sound terrible, by the way."
A longer pause.
"I know."
Progress.
That's two responses. We're having a whole conversation, and I can’t help my excitement for it. At night, the vents carry sound between the containment cells. It's the closest thing we have to social interaction, and we've all developed our own strange rhythms around it.
The unspoken rules of the network. Don't broadcast during observation hours. Keep the volume down when the night crew does their rounds. Cover for each other when the sounds get bad.
There's Screamer two rooms down, who absolutely loses his mind during hormone trials. I've stopped counting how many times I've fallen asleep to that particular soundtrack. You'd think it would get easier to ignore.
It doesn't.
But you get better at keeping your face flat when the technicians walk in afterward, like the sounds don't register. Like you're not cataloguing every name and face of everyone who walked past that door without stopping.
Crybaby across the hall who sobs every time the sedation wears off. Quiet, horrible crying that the vents carry with devastating clarity. That one started recently. I don't know their number. I don't know much about them at all, only that they've been here less time than me. I can tell because they still cry like they think someone's going to come and save them.
Nobody's coming, though. You figure that out eventually.
And Vent Guy, whose entire personality seems to consist of telling people to shut up. Apparently, on particularly adventurous mornings, confirming his own terrible mood. Community building.
Important for morale.
I tap the glass lightly with my knuckles, drumming a thoughtless rhythm.
"You think today's a bite day?" I ask the room. Bite days are my favorite.
The last time a technician leaned too close with a syringe, I grabbed his wrist and sank my teeth straight into the soft part of his arm. Not hard enough to break skin. Just hard enough to make a point.
The look on his face?
Priceless.
He'd been in and out of my cell a dozen times by then. Started getting comfortable. Started talking over me to his colleague while reaching for my arm like I wasn't attached to it. Like the arm was just floating there in space, conveniently located.
That's the thing about this place. They get comfortable, and then they stop paying attention. And then they remember, very suddenly, why they should have been.
Apparently, "hostile response behavior" is frowned upon in controlled laboratory environments. They added a notation to my file. I can see them reference it sometimes through the glass. They hold the clipboards slightly differently when they're looking at something that concerns them.
My file must be enormous by now. I consider that a point of pride. Footsteps echo faintly down the hallway outside my cell, pulling me out of my morbid thoughts. I go very still.
