Chapter 2 Newtorn Prison #2
The carriage slowed by the broad iron barrier, a dappled moon lighting the walkway.
The driver descended first and, after a brief exchange with the guard, the gate swung open and the carriage rattled on.
She observed in stony silence the utter lack of green in the courtyard.
Everything was gray: gray bricks, gray towers, gray pillars.
She wondered if Baba missed the plants he had left thriving on the windowsill in their home.
By the time they arrived, a man stood waiting for them near the great steel entrance. Lanky, with hollowed cheeks and an ashen complexion, he rubbed his hands with nervous energy as they approached. He came to the window at once, holding up a lamp to peer in.
“Mr. St. Silas, what an honor,” the man wheezed, eyes jolting from St. Silas to Leena. “If I had known earlier you’d be visiting, I would’ve made preparations…”
St. Silas held up a lazy hand to interrupt the man’s hurried speech. “No need, Warden. I’ve come to call on Colson.”
The Warden’s mouth fell open. “Wha—Why?”
St. Silas lifted his brows. “Because I choose to.”
The lamp in the Warden’s hand jerked, and he hastily interjected, “It is merely protocol, sir. A-and who is your companion?”
“Someone you will endeavor to forget.”
Leena stared at St. Silas, at this man who had the very Warden of Newtorn Prison in the palm of his hand.
Who relished the hold he had over others.
That was why only the desperate sought the Saint of Silence.
Her stomach tightened; she had delivered her own weakness to him.
If she survived the night, how would he use her secrets against her?
The Warden bowed, deep and low, before bidding them to follow.
Leena’s chill had worsened, and her teeth chattered as she and St. Silas followed the Warden past the guarded gate and down a long corridor.
She’d never been this far in, although she had dreamed many times of running down the length of the prison, finding the exact cell that housed her father, throwing off his manacles, and freeing him.
Now, as she was led farther inside, the sheer volume of this place stunned her, lines and lines of prison cells stacked on top of one another like cages.
She caught flickers of movement from within, feet pacing stone floors—disturbed, frenzied pacing—like animals circling bars.
She staggered, then gagged. The reek of the prison had reached her all at once—an overwhelming mixture of excrement and soiled, decaying flesh. Breathing through her mouth, Leena straightened, not wanting to appear afraid.
She searched hungrily for the faces behind the bars, but she doubted she could recognize even her beloved baba in this darkness.
How could he survive this place? The image of her father here in threadbare clothes, eyes staring unseeing at the wall, unnerved her so much that she struggled to keep walking.
Ahead of her, the Warden spoke as if he was giving them a tour, his eyes continuously jerking toward and away from St. Silas uneasily.
He gestured at one of the cells, inside which Leena could see only a shadowy silhouette.
“A special visitor, sent from the Algaraan Malik himself,” the Warden continued, despite St. Silas’s lack of response.
“One of Commander Yosif’s best captains, captured moments before a planned invasion of Algaraa’s capital. ”
Leena’s head whipped up. “Which captain?”
Everyone knew of Commander Yosif, the charismatic leader of the anti-Malik movement—a university student who had led the first marches nearly twenty years ago, and had paid for it when the Malik’s soldiers responded with violence.
He was one of the few who had survived the ensuing onslaught.
His comrades had been butchered on the streets, the gutters clogged with their blood.
Leena’s own uncle, Baba’s younger brother, had been studying to be a lawyer when he’d joined that first march; Baba had once told her in a choked voice that there had not been enough of him left to bury. All the corpses were set on fire by the soldiers. Unmarked. Desecrated. Ashes.
The Warden threw her a disdainful glance. “It is confidential.”
She had grown obsessive about the Algaraan war ever since Baba had been taken.
It tied her to him and to a homeland she had never seen.
She combed through the newspapers, driven to anger when most of the Morish articles were skewed in favor of the Algaraan monarch, painting the Liberation Party as savages and the Algaraans who supported them as equally barbaric.
Leena screwed up her mouth but said nothing, even though she wanted to turn spitefully to the Warden and tell him that the capture of one captain would not save the Malik. That there would be many who would take his place.
None of the Morish papers had ever mentioned that the Liberation Party had gained so much power that they were now at the steps of the capital. This meant they were closer to taking the Malik’s palace than she’d ever thought possible.
Leena wished she could tell Baba this. She wished she could scream it so loud that every cell in Newtorn Prison could absorb her words, and maybe Baba could hear her and gain hope from her voice.
Of course, she could not.
Instead, as she passed the captain’s cell, she whispered to him in Algaraan—an old phrase that was said to loved ones when they left home, to remind them to be resolute in foreign lands.
May your spirit endure.
At first, she was not sure he had heard her from deep within his cell, but the responding tap on the metal bars confirmed he had. Spiteful gladness almost made her smile. She did not care that the Saint of Silence turned to her sharply, his eyes boring into her. He did not comment, though.
As they roamed deeper into the prison, a strange whirring sound sent vibrations through the walls, rattling the bars and raising dust from the ground. For an odd moment, disoriented and faint, Leena swore that it was Newtorn Prison’s own stomach that rumbled, salivating for a feast.
“What is that?” Leena asked, goosebumps trailing across her neck.
The Warden turned around, the lamplight bouncing across the gritty walls, momentarily shedding light into the cell closest to her.
This time she did manage to catch a glimpse of another inmate.
His face was pressed flush against the bars, his hollowed eyes gaping, mouth slack, so close that he could have reached out to grab hold of Leena’s dress.
But she didn’t shrink back. For a moment, she was unable to tell if he was another of her ghosts.
Evidently, he was not, for she felt a firm touch on her shoulder leading her to the center of the corridor. It was St. Silas, withdrawing once more behind her, collecting shadows in his wake.
“Mind your step,” he said silkily, as if he was a gentleman escorting her down a promenade.
Leena nodded. She’d been purposely walking near the cells in hopes of finding her baba, but she now saw the hopelessness of that endeavor. Ahead of them, the hall stretched and stretched and…
“What is causing that vibration?” Leena repeated, her voice raised this time.
The Warden appeared pleased by this question.
“I view Newtorn as less of a prison and more of a factory, and the inmates as workers. We give them earnings to stoke the fires, to manage the kitchens, to work the assembly lines packaging flour and other goods to feed the nation. They can choose to send those earnings to their family once they’ve reached a certain amount.
It gives them a sense of purpose, essential in the rehabilitation process. ”
That was what the Algaraan Malik did as well—allowed his people to work their fingers stiff while he lived a life of decadence.
The Warden, Leena thought, could not in his arrogance draw the parallels between the two countries.
Hunger was hunger, and it always incited violent change, no matter if it was felt by an Algaraan or a Mor.
Leena had never seen a penny from Newtorn Prison.
She knew Baba—knew how he’d worked his entire life for his children, knew that he must be breaking his back for the mere promise of providing for them.
She wondered bitterly which guard’s pocket the money must be disappearing into.
Anger built behind her eyes like a headache.
“It is nearly three in the morning,” Leena said through gritted teeth. “What benefit is to be had from working the assembly line during these dead hours? That is not rehabilitation, sir, that is profit.”
“Any profit to Morland is profit to our great King Edmund. Long live the King.” The Warden turned to her again, the heat from the lamp approaching too close to her face.
“Would you not agree, madam?” When she did not respond, he laughed—a thin, weedy sound that grated on her ears.
“An Algaraan, aren’t you? Surely you should have more sympathy for the country that offered you shelter than your own kin who have been nothing but criminals? ”
“Warden,” St. Silas interrupted. “Have I ordered you to stop?”
The Warden stared at her for a moment longer.
His blue eyes bulged in his thin face, reminding Leena of a bug, and she stared back at him with the same amount of ugly vehemence.
Finally, he wrenched himself away to lead them farther on.
Leena, the headache now throbbing in her temples, dragged her feet after him. St. Silas took up the rear.
They walked for a spell before the Warden halted in front of cell number 342. Ahead of them, the corridor stretched even farther on into stark blackness.
“Colson,” the Warden spat.
Behind the bars were only a single bed, an empty pewter plate scraped clean, and a steel bowl meant for refuse.
A sleepy groan was emitted by a lump on the mattress, and what Leena had mistaken for a pile of blankets was actually a man.
He was starved to the bone, so thin that his clothes enveloped his body.
“What did he do?” Leena whispered. Ghosts came to her in every state—bruised, beaten, bloodied—so she’d grown used to seeing the dead in misery. But seeing the living in this state was jarring.
The Warden looked at St. Silas, who gave a short nod, before continuing, “Murdered his business partner.”
Another groan spewed from the bundle of bones on the mattress.
“Leave us, pray,” St. Silas said, handing the Warden a coin.
The Warden didn’t move. “You wouldn’t hurt him?”
“Am I not a gentleman?”
The Warden’s panicked eyes met Leena’s. Even she didn’t know how to answer that question. Finally, he gave a jerky nod.
“Then leave us,” St. Silas repeated.
Just as the Warden turned away, Leena grasped his arm. “Please, sir, could you tell me if an Ali Al-Sayer is alive in this prison? He was sentenced for life nearly three years ago for attempting to start a union.”
The Warden’s mouth formed a thin stubborn line.
“Answer her,” St. Silas commanded.
“The prison houses many immigrants. We are not given proper papers for most of them,” the Warden replied grudgingly, shrugging away from her grip. “We only hold them. We do not seek to differentiate them.”
Her cheeks burning, she kept direct eye contact with the Warden and wiped her hands on her dress as if she’d touched something rotten. The Warden’s frown deepened before he turned back the way they had come, his footsteps drifting farther and farther away.
She turned to look at the prisoner again, blinking away the wetness from her eyes.
“How do you know the prisoner?” Leena asked, trying to speak through the burning in her throat.
“He is a former secretary of mine,” was St. Silas’s easy response.
She looked sharply at him.
St. Silas rapped his knuckles against the steel bars, eliciting another grumble from the prisoner. An eye poked out, then a tuft of matted hair. Then Colson caught sight of St. Silas and lurched forward, stretching his arm through the bars toward the Saint, who positioned himself just out of reach.
Through the litany of the prisoner’s curses, St. Silas said quietly to her, “I could not have given you a better opportunity.”
Sweat slid down her back. Her eyes searched the cell, her heart pounding, desperation collecting like a scream in her sternum. Nothing, nothing, nothing…
There!
She almost cried out in relief.
A figure—so still; they were always so still—stood over the prisoner.
She reeled off a description of the spirit. “A young man, russet-colored hair, a crooked nose, and…and…and a hole through his left temple.”
“Very good,” the Saint murmured. “Now ask who killed him.”
Leena shook her head. “Somewhere between the living world and the dead one, ghosts lose their ability to speak. I can only see them.”
“Ask him to point to his murderer, then.”
She swallowed thickly and turned to face the phantom. “Sir, is the man who killed you in this room?”
The phantom watched her. She felt his anger like birds pecking her skin. He stepped toward the prisoner, partially blocking him, as if to shield Colson from their gaze. Leena thought it was an oddly protective gesture. Finally, the ghost gave a nod.
“Point to him.”
A hard gesture, firm and sure—not toward the prostrate prisoner, but toward Mr. St. Silas. She stared up at the Saint as a dawning horror mounted, transforming her features and draining the color from her cheeks. He saw the change and a slow smile spread across his face.
“Congratulations are in order, Miss Leena Al-Sayer.” The Saint bowed his head—not a remorseful action, but one of vicious triumph. “Champion of the dead.”