Page 10 of Shadow Waltz

I counted everything now. Breaths between guard rotations. Steps in the corridor. The number of times someone down the hall sobbed themselves to sleep. Numbers were solid, reliable, something to hold onto when everything else felt like it was slipping through my fingers like smoke.

The lights never really turned off, just dimmed to a sickly yellow that made everything look jaundiced and wrong. I'd learned to sleep in fragments, catching minutes here and there between the sounds of footsteps and muffled conversations and the constant mechanical hum of air circulation systems working overtime to keep the fear from stagnating.

My cell was exactly seven feet by nine feet. I'd measured it by lying down lengthwise, then crosswise, mapping every inchof my concrete kingdom. The walls were painted institutional white, the kind of non-color that was supposed to be calming but just made you feel like you were trapped inside a fluorescent bulb. There was a cot bolted to one wall, a metal toilet that barely qualified as functional, and a sink that dripped every thirty-seven seconds like a metronome counting down to judgment day.

Three soft taps echoed through the wall beside my head. Miguel's signal from the cell next door, asking if I was awake. I tapped back three times, then pressed my ear to the concrete where I'd found a hairline crack that carried sound better than the rest.

“You keeping track?” Miguel's voice was barely a whisper, but I caught every word.

“Day six,” I whispered back. “You?”

“Lost count after four. Time moves different in here.”

He was right about that. Hours stretched like taffy, each minute feeling like it might never end. But then suddenly you'd realize that a whole day had passed and you couldn't remember most of it, like your brain was protecting you from the full weight of what was happening by editing out the worst parts.

“Any word from the others?” I asked.

“The kid in cell three stopped crying yesterday. That's either good or real bad.”

I'd heard the crying too, desperate sobs that echoed through the walls like a ghost haunting the place. When it stopped, part of me had been relieved. But Miguel was right to be worried. In places like this, silence could mean acceptance, and acceptance could mean something inside you had finally broken beyond repair.

“What about the girl?”

“Still fighting. Heard her tell a guard to go fuck himself this morning.”

That made me smile despite everything. Defiance was currency in places like this, the only thing they couldn't take away from you unless you gave it up voluntarily. As long as people were still fighting, still saying no, still refusing to make their captors' jobs easy, there was hope.

“Miguel,” I said, keeping my voice so low it was barely breath. “When they move us, whatever happens, stay close to me.”

“You got a plan?”

I did and I didn't. I had the bones of something, fragments of an idea built on observation and desperation and the kind of stupid courage that came from having nothing left to lose. But plans required opportunities, and opportunities required patience.

“Working on it,” I said. “Just trust me.”

“I do.”

The simple faith in those two words hit me harder than it should have. Miguel barely knew me, had no reason to believe I was any different from the dozens of other lots who'd probably made similar promises and failed to keep them. But he was choosing to trust anyway, to believe that maybe this time would be different.

I hoped like hell I wouldn't let him down.

Footsteps echoed in the corridor, the heavy boots of guards doing their rounds. I pulled away from the wall and lay down on my cot, closing my eyes and trying to look like I was sleeping. The routine had become second nature: be invisible when authority was present, be human when it was safe.

The footsteps stopped outside my door. Keys jangled, metal scraped against metal, and then my cell door swung open with a squeal that made my teeth hurt.

“Carter,” a voice said. “Time for processing.”

I opened my eyes and sat up slowly, hands visible, posture non-threatening. The guard standing in my doorway was oneI'd seen before, a man in his thirties with nervous eyes and hands that shook just enough to tell me he wasn't entirely comfortable with his job. That made him potentially useful, or potentially dangerous, depending on how desperate he was to prove himself.

“What kind of processing?” I asked.

“Medical. Blood work, physical exam, the usual.”

The usual. As if any of this was normal, as if kidnapping and human trafficking were just another day at the office. But I'd learned that people could normalize almost anything if their paycheck depended on it.

They zip-tied my hands again, the plastic cutting into the raw skin around my wrists where the previous restraints had left their mark. The guard gestured for me to walk ahead of him, and we made our way through corridors I was starting to know by heart.

The medical facility was three levels up from the cells, accessed by a freight elevator that felt like a cattle car designed for human cargo. The space had the same harsh fluorescent lighting as the cells below, but here it felt more purposeful—clinical rather than punitive. Examination tables lined one wall, medical equipment that looked expensive and rarely used dominated another, and the whole place hummed with the kind of professional atmosphere that made my skin crawl.