Chapter Eighteen The Cell Block
Chapter Eighteen: The Cell Block
Cassian
My boots are loud on the stone.
Not because I'm trying to announce myself. That's just what happens when you're in no hurry and the corridor is carved from rock and the men down here learned weeks ago that silence doesn't save them.
The Alliance detention block runs twenty meters underground. At this hour, the air tastes like mineral water and old blood, which is the flavor of most mornings down here.
I'm later than I usually am.
The woman in my penthouse kept me occupied past dawn, which pushed everything approximately two hours behind schedule, which I find I don't mind.
I'm in an exceptionally good mood.
My uniform is pressed. My jacket is buttoned.
I showered this morning, briefly, beneath water that barely had time to go cold before I was out again. I did not use the industrial-grade scent suppressor sitting on the shelf above the sink. I thought about it.
Looked at it, even.
Left it there.
Lysandra's scent is still on me. Threaded into the collar of my jacket, into the fabric against my skin, into the air around me the way perfume clings to a room long after the person wearing it has left.
She smells like warm skin and something faintly sweet, and underneath that, now, the specific register of what we did this morning. What I am to her.
I walk past two guards who very deliberately do not look at me.
Smart men.
***
The last cell on the block has a small iron window in the door.
I stop in front of it.
Inside, Gideon hangs in the large-cross position, silver chains looped through iron rings at his wrists and ankles.
He's been in that position, or one like it, for the better part of two weeks. His head is down. His hair, which was well-kept when they brought him in, hangs in matted strings across his face.
I study him the way I'd study a report that's already been filed. Noted. Moving on.
The torturers have been thorough. Nothing they've done has touched him.
He survives each session without screaming, which would be impressive if it weren't for the obvious reason: a man who already believes he's in hell doesn't flinch at more fire.
For fifteen days, Gideon has been processing the fact that the woman he sent to prison killed herself in my cell. He's been doing the math on what his choices built.
The result is that he stopped being a person somewhere around day six and became something else. An open wound in a man's shape.
For fifteen days, he gave us nothing.
There was one exception.
I remember it the way I remember things that pleased me.
Three days in. I was sitting in the leather chair against the wall — the good chair, the one I have them carry down specifically because these sessions can run long and I value my back.
I had coffee, and Gideon was on the rack, and the specialty whip had just opened a new line across his shoulder.
He hadn't made a sound.
I took a sip of my coffee, let the silence go on another half-minute, and then said, in the most conversational voice I own:
"That particular whip leaves a distinctive mark. Interesting thing is, Lysandra received exactly the same treatment in this facility, before you started worrying about her."
A pause to let it settle.
"I keep wondering how she handled it, given how slight she is. Whether she made noise."
The man on the rack came back from wherever he'd gone.
It was not a return I'd want to witness if I had anything like sympathy for him.
His head snapped up and his eyes went the color of broken capillaries and the sound that came out of his throat was the sound of something that used to be a person encountering the full weight of what it had done.
Not a scream. Worse than a scream.
I finished my coffee.
That was the only crack in fifteen days. Until today.
The guard hauls the iron door open.
The hinges scream.
I walk in.
The smell of the cell hits first: silver-burn and damp stone and blood that has had time to go stale. Then I watch the figure against the wall register my arrival.
Gideon's head comes up by degrees, the way things move when they've mostly stopped caring what they see.
He looks at me.
And then — not at me. Past me, or through me, or at the air around me.
I watch it happen.
His nostrils flare. Once. Then again, slower, the way a man double-checks something that doesn't make sense.
His pupils expand to swallow the irises. The chains pull taut as he strains forward without any apparent decision to do so, his body moving before his mind has processed what it's chasing.
The silver cuts in.
He doesn't feel it.
He shuts his eyes and tips his head back and breathes me in, or rather, breathes in what's on me. The thing he has been certain for fifteen days was dead.
And the sound that comes out of him is not a sound I have a clean category for.
Then he laughs.
His shoulders shake with it, a full-body convulsion, his cracked lips splitting back from his teeth.
Tears cut through the dried blood on his face. He laughs and cries at the same time, the way only someone who has completely blown past the edge of what they can hold together manages to do, and the words that come out are barely words at all.
"She's alive." His voice is stripped raw, like something dragged across gravel. "She didn't die in here. She's—" He breaks into the laughing again. "She's alive. She's alive."
He's talking to himself. Or to her. Not to me.
I stand three steps away and watch, and there is no pity in me.
There is, if I'm precise about it, a specific satisfaction that has a cold quality to it, the way a calculation checks out exactly the way you knew it would.
He chose this.
He put her in a cell and he walked away, and she survived it, and someone else was there when he wasn't.
The math was always going to run this way. He just didn't know.
***
Gideon's laughter collapses.
What's left is the crying, and then that, too, hollows out, and he hangs in the chains with his face turned up toward the ceiling, chest heaving in long, uneven pulls.
Then he looks at me.
The eyes are a ruin. But something in them is still running, still reaching, and when he speaks his voice carries a register I haven't heard from him before. Not defiance. Not the careful blankness of a man protecting information.
Just the voice of someone who has nothing.
"Let me see her." His hands curl around the chains, knuckles splitting against the silver. "Cassian. Let me see her once. I'll confess to everything. I'll sign anything you put in front of me." A breath. "Just once."
I run the session.
Every question we need answered. Every name in the network, every route, every transaction.
He answers none of it.
One sentence, every time, voice flat, eyes on me the whole time.
"Let me see her once."
I don't acknowledge it.
When I'm done, I close the folder.
He's barely upright. The blood on his face is fresh in some places now, from where I pressed his jaw back against the wall to make a point. His breathing is labored. He gets his head up anyway, and he looks at me, and he says it again.
"Please." The word sounds like something pulled out of him with a hook. "Let me see her once."
I pull the white silk handkerchief from my breast pocket. Wipe my gloved fingers, slowly, the way you clean something that has inconvenienced you. The fabric comes away dark.
I drop it at his feet.
Look at him.
"In your dreams."
The door is behind me. I don't look back.