Chapter 26
Jude
I know the time because I've learned to read it in the guard rotations—the shuffle of feet at shift change, the silence that drops over the solitary wing when the day staff leaves and the skeleton crew takes over. Three weeks in the box and I know this building by sound alone.
Voices in the corridor. Low, not meant to carry, but solitary is quiet enough that everything carries.
"—Hudson's office had cake. Actual cake. Like it was someone's birthday."
"What were they celebrating?"
"Hope Turner. The monitor. They pulled her access tonight. Fired her."
"No shit?"
"Effective immediately. Hudson's been walking around like he won the lottery."
The footsteps fade. The voices fade. The information doesn't.
They fired her.
The sedation wants me to let that go. Roll it over, fold it into the fog and forget it. I don't.
Boots in the corridor. The observation slot slides open.
Gage.
He doesn't ask how I am. He looks at my face, checks my arms where the restraints sit, sees the IV line. The assessment takes two seconds.
"Have you heard?" he asks.
"Yes, the guards like to talk."
"Yeah." He glances back down the corridor. "Hudson went to the court. Fabricated concerns about her objectivity, her professional conduct. Got someone to suspend her access pending review. Kent already knows. He's filing Tuesday. Says Hudson just handed him everything he needs."
I process that. It takes longer than it should because the drip is pulling at the edges and I have to hold each word in place before the next one reaches me.
"Hope," I say.
"She's alright. She's pissed, but she's alright." He shifts his weight. "I'm keeping an eye on her. She's not on her own."
There's a pause. Gage isn't a man who pauses without reason.
"We're working on getting you out of here," he says. "Out of solitary. Kent, Hope, me."
I look at him through the slot. He holds the look. One soldier to another, and whatever he sees in my face doesn't make him step back.
"Copy," I say.
He nods once, slides the slot closed, his boots fade down the corridor until there's nothing left but the fluorescent hum, the drip and the dark.
Hudson thinks he won.
The sedation thickens after midnight. The cycles get heavier, the gaps between clarity get shorter, and I can feel the edges of my thinking start to soften and blur. Three weeks in this box and every day the window where my mind is my own gets a little narrower.
The cold comes up to meet it. The same part of me that kept working through worse than this in places with no names and no oversight.
The part that doesn't need clarity to function, just a direction.
It fills the spaces the drugs hollow out and holds the structure together when the rest of me can't.
Right now the cold part of me is the only thing standing between me and whatever they want me to be when the fog wins.
But underneath it—underneath the quiet, underneath the patience, underneath all of it—I hold on to her face.
The way she looked at me and didn't look away.
The warmth of her hand on the side of my neck, her thumb against my jaw, the steady weight of a woman who chose to stay in the room with me when every instinct should have told her to run.
Hope.
The cold keeps me alive. She's the reason I want to be.