"Yeah?"
"Tell me another terrible joke."
"What do you call a fake noodle?"
I close my eyes in the dark. "What."
"An im-pasta."
"That's the worst thing I've ever heard."
"You should hear my knock-knock material. I once made a fourteen-year-old cry. Not from laughter."
My mouth curves despite everything. Despite the cold, the screaming, the throbbing pain in my skull, and the man I'm trying not to think about who's in Palermo, probably not even aware I'm gone.
Somewhere above us, a door slams. Metal on metal. Heavy footsteps, and the muffled sound of a woman pleading in a language I don't recognize.
Matt goes silent. I go silent. We listen together in the dark, two people holding their breath while someone else's nightmare plays out through the walls.
The footsteps pass. The pleading fades.
"They'll come again in about two hours," Matt says. His voice is low, careful. "When they do, keep your head down. Don't look at them. Don't talk unless they ask you a direct question."
"You've been watching them."
"Not much else to do down here."
I press my back against the wall. The concrete is rough through my sweater, grounding in a way the floor isn't. My fingers find the scar on my left palm and trace its familiar ridge. The one constant my body carries from a life before all of this.
Two hours. Then guards. Then whatever comes next.
"Hey, Matt?"
"Yeah?"
"When the guards come back, I need you to tell me everything you've noticed about this place. Layout, sounds, anything. Can you do that?"
"Yeah."
3
VIOLET
Days blur. Guard rotations instead of hours, three per day give or take, according to Matt's estimate.
They move us on what I think is day four. Could be three. Could be five. Two guards haul us out of the small cell and shove us down a corridor lit by bare fluorescent tubes buzzing on their last legs, and after days of total darkness the light feels like broken glass against my eyes. I throw my arm up, trying to shield my face as I stagger while Matt grabs my elbow.
That's when I see the scale of it.
Warehouse floor, maybe, could be an old factory. Partitioned with chain-link fencing and corrugated metal into sections, dozens of them, some walled off with plywood and industrial plastic sheeting, others open enough to see through. Women on thin mattresses. Women on bare floors. A girl barely older than eighteen rocking against a fence panel, lips moving around words I can't hear.
My brain does what it always does. Reads the bones before I can stop it. Load-bearing columns, twenty-foot spans, poured concrete, steel reinforcement. Ventilation industrial, wiring recent, not original to the structure. Whoever built this place built it to hold.
I press my fist to my mouth and breathe.
They put us in a larger section near the back. Chain-link on three sides, solid wall behind, two thin mattresses that smell of mildew and old sweat. Matt claims the one closer to the open side without making a thing of it, positions himself between me and the fence, and I let him because I'm busy looking for possible exits.
I spot two. One at the far end of the floor, heavy steel, with an armed guard in front of it, and one to our left, up a flight of metal stairs. The second one looks unused.
