Chapter 3
Routine is how they break you.
Not the violence—that comes in flashes, sharp and bright, and your body learns to brace for it.
It's the routine that grinds you down. The sameness.
The fluorescent hum that never changes pitch.
The meals that arrive at the same intervals through a slot in the door—protein bar, water bottle, protein bar, water bottle—until time stops being hours and minutes and becomes the space between feedings.
Like a dog. Like livestock.
I've been here roughly thirty-six hours. I think. There are no windows and the fluorescent tube never turns off, so I'm measuring time by meals and injections. Four meals. Three injections. The math says a day and a half, give or take.
The injections come every eight hours. The woman in scrubs—I've started thinking of her as the Nurse, capital N, because she's never given me a name and I refuse to give her the dignity of one—arrives with a guard, administers the heat blocker into the crook of my arm, checks my vitals, and leaves.
Ninety seconds. I've counted. She doesn't speak to me anymore.
Doesn't ask questions. Just the needle, the cuff, the penlight, the clipboard.
Ninety seconds and gone.
The blocker hits like a wave of cold water. My body temperature drops. The low simmer that's been building underneath—a warmth I keep telling myself is just the temperature in the room, just the wool blanket, just anything other than what it actually is—goes flat.
Dead. Like pouring sand on embers.
Except this last time, the embers didn't go all the way out.
I felt it twenty minutes after she left. A flicker. Low in my belly, barely there, like a pilot light that refuses to die. The blockers pushed it down but couldn't extinguish it. My biology is fighting back, and my biology is stronger than whatever pharmaceutical they're pumping into me.
I don't think about what happens when the blockers stop working.
I don't think about it.
The guards rotate every six hours. I know because the footsteps change—different weight, different rhythm, different boot size on concrete.
The shaved-head guard and his partner take what I think is the night shift.
A different pair during the day. Lighter steps.
Less talking. The day guards are quieter, more mechanical.
The night guards are the ones who slammed my head into the wall.
Meals come through a slot I didn't notice the first day—a narrow hinged panel at the base of the door, just wide enough for a plastic tray.
Protein bars. Water. Twice, an apple. I eat everything.
Not because I'm hungry—my stomach is a fist of anxiety that hasn't unclenched since I woke up here—but because Ellis said you will eat what is provided, and the back of my skull still throbs where the guard taught me what noncompliance costs.
I eat. I drink. I comply.
And I listen.
The building breathes around me. Not silence—never silence.
The ventilation system hums at a constant low frequency, punctuated by the tick and shudder of climate control cycling.
Pipes in the walls. The faint, industrial drone of something heavy running somewhere deeper in the building—a generator, maybe, or compressors for the HVAC system that keeps this place precisely cool enough for bodies that run hot.
Footsteps in the corridor. Dozens a day.
I've started tracking patterns—the sharp click of the Nurse's shoes, the heavy thud of the guards' boots, the occasional softer step that might be Ellis or might be someone I haven't met yet.
Doors opening and closing. The electronic buzz of locks engaging and disengaging.
A rhythm. A schedule. A system designed by people who've been doing this long enough to have it down to clockwork.
And underneath the mechanical sounds, the human ones.
The crying hasn't stopped. It ebbs and flows—sometimes just a quiet whimper, sometimes full-body sobs that shake through the concrete and rattle in my chest. The male voice I heard that first night has gone quiet. I try not to think about what that means.
But the lullaby is still there.
It comes and goes. Sometimes I don't hear it for hours, and then it drifts through the wall to my right—thin, sweet, wavering. A melody I almost recognize but can't quite place. A folk song, maybe, or a hymn. Something learned in childhood and carried forward like a stone in a pocket.
Something to hold onto.
It's the third time I've heard it today—or what I think is today—when I finally go to the wall.
I press my bound hands flat against the concrete. The surface is cold and slightly rough under my palms. I can feel the vibration of her voice, faint as a pulse.
It feels silly to speak, but I’m also compelled. I clear my throat, knock the dust off my voice and find my strength.
"Can–can you hear me?"
The singing stops.
Silence. Long. My heart hammers.
Oh, God. I've scared her. She's curled up on her own thin mattress in her own concrete box, and the voice through the wall is just another threat. Another thing to flinch from in a building full of things that hurt.
I wait. Press my forehead against the cold wall. Close my eyes.
"...yes."
My eyes open, my breath hitches.
Small. Barely there. A word made of breath and fear.
"I'm Max." I keep my voice low. Gentle. The voice I used to use with the younger kids in the foster homes—the ones who'd been moved too many times and flinched at loud noises and needed someone to talk to them like they weren't about to be hit. "W-what's your name?"
A pause. The concrete makes everything feel close and far away at the same time. Like passing notes under a door in the dark. I press my ear against the cold to hear better.
"Wren."
"Hi, Wren."
"Hi." A wet sound—a sniff, a swallowed sob. "Are you... new?"
"Yeah." Whenever new started. A day and a half ago. A lifetime. "How long have you been here?"
"Eleven days." Her voice trails off on days. "I think. Maybe twelve now. It's hard to tell."
My stomach drops. Twelve days. In this box. With the fluorescent hum and the protein bars and the Nurse and her needle.
"How old are you?" I ask, because I need information.
Any information. Every detail I can pull through this wall is a thread connecting me to something real, something outside the fluorescent hum and the protein bars and the endless loop of my own fear.
Talking to her is the first time since I woke up here that the pressure in my chest has eased even slightly.
Another voice. Proof that I exist. That someone knows my name.
"Nineteen."
A year younger than me. One year. She could be in my econ lecture. She could be the girl at the next table in the campus library, earbuds in, highlighting a textbook.
She could be anyone.
Instead she's here. Counting days on the other side of a concrete wall.
"Wren. Can you tell me how you got here?"
She's quiet for a while. I hear her breathing—shaky, uneven, the rhythm of someone deciding whether to trust. I wait.
Press my ear harder against the cold wall, greedy for the sound of another person.
The silence in this cell has been eating me alive.
Every voice that isn't mine is a lifeline, and I'm clutching this one with both hands.
"I was in a group home," she says. "In Bridgeport. It was... it wasn't good. I left. I was on the street for a couple weeks. And then this woman approached me outside a shelter. She said she ran a housing program. Said she could get me a room, a job. She was nice."
The word nice comes out like a bruise.
"She drove me to what she said was an intake center. For the program. I went inside and they..." She stops. Swallows. "They took my phone. My bag. They put me in a room and locked the door. And then the doctor came."
Classic pipeline. I've read about it—in sociology courses, in news articles, in the margins of my own research when I was trying to understand what omegas were and why the world treated us like currency. The recruitment is always the same.
Find someone vulnerable.
Offer something they need.
Close the door behind them.
"The doctor," I say carefully. "A woman? Dark hair?"
"Yeah. She takes blood. Gives me shots. She said the shots would help with the fevers." Wren's voice drops. "I used to get fevers. Bad ones. Every few weeks. My body would get really hot and I'd feel... weird. Sick. The group home didn't know what to do with me. They thought I was faking it."
Heat cycles. She's been having heat cycles and no one ever explained what they were. No one ever told her she was an omega. She's been navigating her own biology blind—terrified, ashamed, convinced something is broken inside her.
I know exactly what that feels like. Eleven years. Eleven years of suppressants and secrecy and shame, of hiding what I am because the world made it clear that what I am is a commodity. A thing to be owned.
The only difference was Linda knew exactly what I was. And hated me for it.
And now Wren is learning it the hardest way possible.
"Wren, listen to me." I press my palm flat against the wall.
Wishing I could push through it. Wishing concrete could dissolve under wanting.
"Those fevers—there's nothing wrong with you.
It's biological. It's something you were born with.
And these people—they know what it is. That's why they took you. "
"I don't understand."
"I know. And I'm going to explain it to you. But not right now. Right now I just need you to know that you're not sick. You're not broken. And you're not alone. Okay?"
Silence. Then, so quiet I almost miss it: "Okay."