Chapter 30 #2
That’s how I ended up stuck with Stitch more often than not.
At first, she was just noise—sharp, manic stories that spilled from her mouth like broken glass, full of details that never quite fit together.
One day she’d swear she used to be a smuggler with a whole network of tunnels under the city; the next she claimed she’d once sewn up a man’s stomach with fishing line and a bent nail, then charged him double for the effort.
Most people wrote her off as cracked, or dangerous, or both.
But somewhere in the middle of all that madness, I started to notice the way she always gave the weakest women the lighter loads, how she slipped extra socks into the piles of the ones shivering through winter nights, how she picked fights not to prove she was tough but to draw attention away from someone who couldn’t defend themselves.
It didn’t happen overnight, but the weeks stretched, and the routine dulled, and suddenly Stitch was the one I found myself listening for at the start of each shift.
Her laugh was too loud, her grin too sharp, and yet she had a way of making the walls feel a little less close.
She told me stories until I caught myself laughing, stories so ridiculous I wanted to call her a liar but secretly hoped they were true. She made the laundry room feel alive.
I mapped the guard shifts, too. Laundry was on the north end of the block, furthest from the canteen, adjacent to the showers and two stories below the admin offices.
There were three main guards: the blonde, the scarface, and the one with the permanent nasal drip who everyone called “Snot.” Each worked a double, then rotated out for a full twelve, but there were always gaps—points when the cameras didn’t quite cover every angle, or when a guard would vanish into the breakroom for forty minutes at a stretch.
I filed these away, even though I didn’t plan to use them. Old habits die harder than inmates.
I tracked the prisoner politics, too. The hardcases ran the shifts: D-Block Queen, the former Authority commando who now kept order by breaking teeth; the Skinners, who controlled smuggling, tattoos, and revenge; the mutant contingent, who mostly stayed out of the way but went feral if cornered.
All the old lines—race, gender, even original crime—meant nothing here.
Everything was about survival, and every day the balance shifted, just a little, as someone lost a fight or got transferred or just snapped.
More and more, I listened to Stitch. Because underneath the mania, the scars, the wild laugh, she had a heart too big for this place—and somehow, she’d started letting me see it.
Mostly, I stayed invisible. But I listened
That’s how I heard about the pit.
It was late, last shift before lights out, and the dryers were running hot. The heat warped the air, turned the little laundry room into a sweatbox. I was folding towels—old Authority issue, still labeled PROPERTY OF EXPERIMENTAL ZONE 7—when two girls from C block started whispering by the washer.
“They’re gonna do another one,” said the first, voice barely above the noise of the machines.
“Not yet,” said the other. “They only pull the trigger at the end of the month.”
The first girl glanced around, saw me at the counter, and lowered her voice even more. “It’s almost that time. You heard what happened to the last lot, right? Half of them came back wrong. The other half—”
The other girl cut her off, glancing at the camera eye above the door. “Shut up.”
They started loading sheets, talking about nothing, but I caught enough to know the pattern. “The pit” wasn’t a rumor. It was an event.
As they left, the second girl bumped my shoulder hard, enough to make me stagger. She leaned in, close enough that I felt her breath on my ear.
“Mind your own business if you want to stay breathing,” she said. Her voice was high, almost shaky.
The first girl gave me a glare, then followed.
I finished the towels, folded them into perfect Authority rectangles, and stacked them in the bin. My mind spun with the new data. The pit. End of the month. Groups went in, some came back “wrong.”
I’d seen a lot of ways to break people, but this was a new one.
Back in the cell, I lay on my bunk, staring at the vent above my head, counting the number of times it rattled with the change in air pressure from the block doors opening.
I thought about the pit, about what it might be—a punishment, an experiment, a kind of random culling.
The Authority didn’t do random. They did data collection. They did controlled chaos.
Maybe the pit was both.
I drifted off cataloguing the possible variables: body count, psychological profile, group size, exposure duration. I dreamed of Kang, but this time, his face was covered in a mask, and his hands were full of blue fire.
I woke with the memory of the pit still in my head, and the taste of something metallic on my tongue.
The day cycle started again. More towels, more shirts, more sheets. Every now and then, I caught sight of the C block girls in the hallways. They never met my gaze, but they always moved a little faster when they saw me.
A week later, the schedule changed. New guards, new faces. A memo on the digital bulletin board announced “Maintenance for South Block” and warned of temporary service interruptions. The laundry doubled its output, prepping for something no one would explain.
The night before the end of the month, I watched as a new group of girls were pulled from their cells and marched off, not to labor, but to the sublevel below admin. I saw the fear on their faces. I heard the rumors ripple through the block.
No one slept that night. Not really.
The next incident hit when I was least expecting it—middle of the sleep cycle, the cell dark but for the tiny diode above the door, a blue dot that pulsed in time with the block’s heartbeat.
I was deep under, finally, when the weight landed on my chest.
A hand—dry, rough, and so fast I barely had time to react—slammed over my mouth, pinning my head to the pillow. My body remembered the old drill before my mind did: I bit down, hard, and tasted the iron tang of blood before the muffled voice reached me through the darkness.
“Easy,” it hissed. “It’s me.”
I went still. My brain caught up. The hand didn’t let go.
The voice came again, this time slower. “Don’t scream. Don’t move. I’ll let go if you promise.”
It was Kang. The certainty flooded me—a cocktail of dread, relief, and the old fury that sparked at the base of my skull.
I nodded, once. The hand slipped away, and I inhaled, sharp and deep, cataloguing the sweat, the hint of soap, the ozone crackle that always clung to him.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered, voice barely a breath.
Kang’s silhouette loomed over me, a shifting mass in the zero-light. He was out of uniform, or at least missing the armor. His shirt was Authority black, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and his left hand—already bandaged—was dripping blood onto the blanket.
He leaned close, eyes searching for mine. “Get dressed.”
I bristled. “Or what? You’ll choke me out? or just completely disappear for weeks again?”
He didn’t answer, just pointed to my boots at the end of the bed. The air between us vibrated with all the things we weren’t saying.
I sat up, pulling the jumpsuit over my sleepwear. Kang watched, arms folded, scanning the cell like he expected the walls to sprout ears. I laced my boots with numb fingers. When I stood, he caught my elbow and steered me toward the door.
The corridor outside was pitch black. Kang moved ahead, his steps muffled by soft-soled shoes. He led the way with practiced precision, never once pausing or second-guessing. I followed, hyper-aware of every sound, every shift in air pressure as we passed the cell doors.