Page 4

“Jesus… Anyway, you’ll get a chart with a number on it and a blank where the name goes. First time I’ve seen that in thirteen years.”

I stood very still in that clean little room because I knew about names that weren’t on paper. I knew what it took to erase yourself, how much fear you had to be carrying to want to disappear that badly. Because I was carrying that exact fear myself quietly, every single day, under a name that wasn’t mine and a fake smile that was.

I just never thought I’d hear it described from the other side. About someone worse. About someone who was never the frightened one. Only ever the reason.

“What… what did he do?” I asked quietly, because, like I said, the habit of curiosity had never quite left me.

Jones looked at me for a long moment and whatever he saw in the pleasant, forgettable, capable face of Anna Vale, it made him decide, for once, to spare me.

“Be boring around him,” he said.

“That’s all you need to know.”

He straightened up, clipped his pen back into his pocket, told me my shift started at seven, and left me alone in the infirmary with the low hum of the lights, a panic button under the desk, and eleven days of a name I didn’t answer to yet.

So, I did the only thing I could do when life threw me another curveball… I ate another candy bar. Even though my sugar was fine. I was never above a little stress eating. And after all, some habits keep you alive.

Some just keep you company.

And out beyond the walls, somewhere in a convoy I couldn’t see, a man with no name was already on his way here… to me.

Not that it would have mattered if I’d known what was coming. Not that I’d have run because it honestly felt like there was nowhere left to run to.

And that… well, that was pretty much the point of a place like this.

A prison for more than just its inmates.

2

THE SILENCE

THE GHOST

Fear has a smell.

Most men never learn it, yet I’d known it my whole life. Known it the way other men know rain is on its way, or blood drying on their knuckles, or a woman’s hair in their fist as she sucks them off. But fear, well that comes off the skin like coils of smoke. A living thing that clings to the soul and sours it at the edges. And that morning it was pouring off every man in the transport that carried me to Ashlock.

Four of them.

Armed.

And not one willing to sit inside arm’s reach of a man already chained to the floor. It made me smirk, because it was exactly the type of scent I usually craved.

They needn’t have worried, as I had no plans to touch them, not yet anyway. No, I just let them believe that I might… after all, it was more fun that way. It kept the ride quiet, and I’d learned to love quiet the way other men love money.

They’d strapped me down the way they do a man who bites. Waist chain, ankle irons, wrists bolted to my belt, and a mesh hood pulled over my face. I’d earned that hood early on. One guard, twice my width, who decided a chained man was a safe man to lean on. I taught him otherwise, with my teeth, and well, he kept the ear… Mostly.

The story ran ahead of me down every corridor after that, and I never once bothered to catch it and set it straight. A reputation does your work for you. Best of all, it never needs feeding.

Let them build the monster. Saved me the trouble of building it myself.

Through the mesh I watched the country roll past. Gray, flat, and utterly forgettable. And I thought about nothing, because thinking about nothing is a discipline. My father taught me that one before I’d lost my baby teeth.

Pain is only discipline of the mind, boy. The body screams because you let it.

One of the few of his lessons I still bother to use.

They all think a man like me is empty. Nothing behind the eyes… Hollow and rotten to the core… and I let them think it.