They had her seated facing the glass wall, wrists locked behind the chair with industrial restraints that dug into skin deep enough to leave pale grooves whenever she shifted.
Lila didn't sit still.
Not because she was trying to escape anymore. Because she couldn't decide what to do with the fact that she was being made to wait.
A soldier stepped into her peripheral vision and adjusted the angle of the chair without asking. The metal legs scraped loudly against concrete.
"Stay facing forward," he said.
Lila laughed once under her breath, dry and cracked. "Or what?"
The soldier didn't answer immediately. He just looked at her like she was a problem that had already been solved and was now only waiting to be filed away properly.
Behind the glass wall in front of her, a bright room waited. Clean. Sterile. Overlit in a way that made it feel less like a room and more like a blank page.
A chair sat in the center.
Empty.
