Ruaan saw the gym first.
It was large with a high ceiling.
Equipment lined along the walls — weights, bars, things Ruaan could name and things he couldn't. Natural light comes through narrow windows near the top. His cellmates were already near the far wall, Bandaged Arm raising a hand in his direction.
Normal. Fine. He could work with this.
Then his brain caught up with his eyes.
Ruaan stopped walking.
In the far left corner of the gym, against the wall, partially obscured by a weight rack but not — not nearly enough — was Finn. And above Finn, moving with the unhurried rhythm of a man who owned every room he walked into and several he didn't, was Cullen Ray.
Ruaan stared.
Around them, men lifted weights. Someone was doing pull-ups. Two grey uniforms near the water station were having what appeared to be a completely normal conversation. A dark blue near the bench press was counting his own reps out loud.
Nobody was looking.
Nobody was reacting.
The sounds were — Ruaan's brain supplied several words and discarded all of them.
"—2525!"
He blinked. Bandaged Arm was waving at him more urgently now. He crossed the gym on automatic, sat down beside his cellmates, and faced directly forward with a focused expression, deciding that what was happening in the corner was not happening.
"Don't look," Split Lip said immediately, without turning his head.
"I'm not looking."
"You were absolutely looking."
"I was 'arriving,'" Ruaan said. "My eyes were in transit."
From the corner, a sound. Rhythmic. Ruaan's jaw tightened.
Somewhere near the pull-up bar, two grey uniforms had started a low hum that matched the rhythm with dedication that suggested this was not their first time doing so.
One of them added words or even... A rap.
Ruaan could not repeat the words. He stared at the opposite wall with profound intensity.
"Is this—" he started.
"Normal?" Bruised Jaw said. "Yes."
"It is not—"
"It is here."
Ruaan looked — briefly, against his better judgment — toward the corner. Finn's face was turned sideways against the wall, eyes closed, expression carved somewhere between exhaustion and something Ruaan didn't want to name. He looked like a person who had stopped being surprised by anything a long time ago and was simply waiting for it to be over.
Something tightened in Ruaan's chest. He looked away. He turned to look again and...
Cullen's eyes were open.
And they were on Ruaan.
The eye contact lasted approximately two seconds. Cullen didn't stop moving. He didn't change expression. He simply looked at Ruaan like he was already deciding something, filed it away, and looked back at the wall above Finn's head.
Ruaan looked away first.
He sat down properly, straightened his spine, and focused on the middle distance.
"Don't worry about it," Bandaged Arm said, reading him with the accuracy that Ruaan was beginning to find genuinely annoying.
"I'm not worried."
"You've got the face—"
"I don't have a 'face,'" Ruaan said. "Stop saying that. I have a 'neutral expression' that people keep misinterpreting."
From the corner came a sharp, punched-out gasp—Finn's. It was followed by the slick, rhythmic sound of skin meeting skin, faster now. Cullen had one large hand splayed between Finn's shoulder blades, pinning him to the wall. The other was wrapped in Finn's hair, holding his head at an angle. Cullen's hips pistoned forward with a brutal, driving rhythm. Each thrust slammed Finn harder against the concrete, the impact a dull, wet thud that cut through the gym's ambient noise.
Finn's moans were low, ragged things, torn from him with every drive. They weren't sounds of pleasure, not really. There were sounds of exertion, of breath being forced from his lungs, of a body being used. His fingers scrabbled weakly against the painted cinderblock, leaving no mark.
Cullen bent lower, his mouth near Finn's ear. Ruaan couldn't hear the words, but he saw the way Finn's body went rigid for a second before a full-body shudder wracked him. Cullen's pace didn't falter; if anything, it became more punishing. His own breathing was a low, steady grunt, a counterpoint to Finn's broken sounds.
The humming near the pull-up bar reached a small, enthusiastic crescendo and then faded.
Silence from the corner, broken only by Cullen's low, satisfied exhale and Finn's ragged, trying-to-be-quiet breathing.
Ruaan unclenched his hands from his knees.
"He looks exhausted," Ruaan said, quietly, not quite meaning to say it out loud.
"Finn?" Bandaged Arm glanced sideways. "Three weeks of that. Every day."
"Someone should—"
"No one's going to," Split Lip said. Not cruel. Just factual. "And don't finish that sentence where anyone can hear you."
Ruaan pressed his mouth shut.
"Cullen'll get tired of him eventually," Bruised Jaw said, with the resigned practicality of a man discussing weather patterns. "He always does. A few more weeks, maybe."
"And then?"
Nobody answered immediately.
"And then he finds the next one," Bandaged Arm said carefully, and didn't look at Ruaan when he said it.
Ruaan felt the implication land. He chose not to acknowledge it directly. "Right. Fine. We should train. Why is nobody training?"
"Grey uniforms don't just train," Split Lip said. "We wait for the trainer."
"Who assigns the trainer?"
"The facility. For our rank, they rotate officers."
"And today's?"
The door opened.
Ruaan knew before he fully turned his head.
He didn't know how he knew. The quality of the silence, maybe — the way the grey uniforms around him straightened without being told to, the way even the ambient noise of the gym seemed to recalibrate. His body processed it a half-second before his brain did.
He turned.
Harolin Crowe walked through the door in a black training outfit, sleeves pushed up, the same cold unhurried energy he carried in a uniform translated perfectly into something more stripped back and somehow worse. Without the officer's jacket, he was— the breadth of his shoulders was— Ruaan's brain attempted a sentence and abandoned it.
He looked at the floor. Stood up. Remembered his plan this morning. The very clear, very reasonable plan.
'Stay out of his path.'
Harolin was their trainer.
'Of course he fucking was.'
All around him, grey uniforms stood in a rough line. Ruaan followed suit, standing between Bandaged Arm and a man whose name he hadn't learned yet — compact, shaved head, who had been one of the few in this block who hadn't stared at Ruaan when he arrived. He glanced at Ruaan now, brief and assessing.
"That's Dex," Bandaged Arm murmured. "Chief of grey. Best fighter in our rank."
Ruaan looked at Dex properly, who seemed to be the quiet type.
He stood like someone who knew exactly how dangerous he was and had nothing to prove about it. Ruaan filed that away.
Harolin hadn't looked at him yet.
Ruaan intended to keep it that way. He kept his chin down, his expression neutral, and stared at a point approximately eighteen inches to the left of Harolin's shoulder, which was close enough to look attentive and far enough to avoid direct eye contact.
He was doing well.
He was being invisible.
"Five laps," Harolin said. Not loud. It never needed to be loud. "Around the field. Then we begin the training."
Murmuring ran through the line — the resigned sound of people accepting something unpleasant. Ruaan kept his face neutral.
Then Harolin turned and walked toward the far door — a door that Ruaan genuinely hadn't noticed was there, half obscured by a rack of equipment — and pushed it open. Sunlight flooded in.
The group moved. Ruaan moved with them.
The field was enormous.
Ruaan stepped through the door and stopped for half a second to take it in — a vast open stretch of packed earth and scrubby grass surrounded by high walls, narrow strips of blue sky above, the sun hitting everything without mercy. A few pieces of outdoor equipment are scattered around the edges. No shade to speak of.
"Why are we out here?" Ruaan asked Bandaged Arm as they walked.
"Cullen's in the gym," he said simply. "Gym belongs to the black rank when they want it. We get the field."
"And the field is—"
"Hot. Yes."
"I was going to say inadequate."
"Same thing."
Ruaan squinted up at the sky. The sun had apparently decided to take this personally.
Around him, the group was spreading out along the edge of the field, preparing to run. Ruaan looked at the perimeter. Calculated the distance. Multiplied by five.
He was fit. He was not — he was reasonably fit. He had a gym membership that he had used with moderate consistency for the last three years. He was not a man who ran five laps around a field in direct sunlight in a grey prison uniform.
'Five times isn't that much,' he told himself.
'It's fine.'
'It's completely—'
"Isn't that too much?"
He heard his own voice a fraction of a second after it left his mouth.
The words hung in the hot air.
Dex, standing two feet away, turned to look at him with an expression like a man watching someone pull a pin from a grenade. Bandaged Arm's hand shot toward Ruaan's face and slapped over his mouth with a speed that suggested genuine fear.
"'Shush,'" he hissed, barely a breath. "Did you see everyone else? Did you see a single person complain? Don't you know if he hears you he'll—"
"I heard him."
The voice was quiet and even.
Bandaged Arm's hand dropped from Ruaan's mouth.
The group parted.
Ruaan watched it happen — the same thing as the first time, the same instinctive clearing of a path — and then Harolin was walking toward him across the packed earth, unhurried, the sun at his back, and every single one of Ruaan's cellmates had somehow relocated themselves to a safer distance with speed.
Ruaan stood his ground.
He thought, briefly and involuntarily, about what happened in the processing room. The cold wall. The gloves. The absolute controlled quiet of the man in front of him, who was currently stopping a few feet away and looking at Ruaan with those pale grey eyes that gave nothing away and asked for nothing either.
Ruaan looked back.
He kept his chin level. He was Ruaan Calder. He stood his ground.
Harolin looked at him for a long moment.
"2525," he said.
"Yes," Ruaan said, with commendable steadiness.
"Since you have a complaint—" a pause, brief, almost imperceptible, "—your count is ten."
Silence.
Then the murmuring started through the group like a current. Ruaan caught fragments.
'—extra two, he always gives extra two—'
'—why double, he's never—'
'—who is that, why does Crowe—'
Harolin had already turned away, walking back toward the edge of the field. He was done with the interaction the moment the sentence was finished.
Ruaan stared at his back.
Ten laps. Under direct sun. One day before the Thursday game.
He thought about the plan from this morning. The clear, reasonable, stay-out-of-his-path plan that he had constructed with genuine intention and executed for approximately fourteen hours before walking into this field and opening his mouth.
He thought about Mara Crowe's name on a document he'd signed without reading.
He looked at Harolin Crowe standing at the edge of the field with his back turned, waiting for the run to begin.
'Why double,' the murmuring said. 'He never gives double.'
Ruaan already knew the answer.
It was simple and complete and sat in his chest like something he was going to have to carry for a while.
'Because this man came here for me,' Ruaan thought. 'Because I am the reason his sister went to prison.'
'And he has not even started dealing with me yet.'