Chapter 363: The Room Has a History.

This is going to work for me.

I sat there next to Melissa with a plate of rice on my knees and let that settle properly. The plastic was still warm from my hands. The greens had gone cold.

And underneath it I was already working the other half, which was getting out of here.

Half a day in this basement and it had stopped being somewhere I needed to be. Sherry was out there. May’s message was still sitting on my comms with that flat certainty she gets when the numbers have already told her the answer. Tomorrow they’d be in the capital.

And Vince was somewhere between here and them.

The two women are in the fertile window.

[ Yes. And it’s the right time to move. What’s building in them will break under the right pressure. ]

I heard them. I don’t need it explained to me.

Melissa set her tray down beside her thigh. The plastic clicked once against the mattress. She shifted her weight and the bedframe gave a soft metallic complaint under both of us.

She wasn’t going to be a problem. She was the one thing down here I didn’t have to plan around.

[ Sophia is at the wall. A move tonight would work. ]

I know.

Can I take both of them before tomorrow night?

[ Sophia is easy. Monica is reserved. She’ll need time and a plan. ]

I don’t have either.

Sophia’s door opened.

Feet came out onto the stone—bare, quiet, the soft sound of skin on cold floor. The door closed behind her with a controlled click.

I waited for the lock.

It didn’t come.

There it is.

I shut the hearing down. The corridor went silent inside my head.

How come I can’t pick anything off him now?

Melissa’s, right beside me, as clear as speech. Her thoughts sat in the air between us like she’d spoken them out loud.

It’s this place. It has to be this place.

And what is he thinking about? Maybe he’s thinking about—

Stop trying to work out what he’s thinking. That has never once helped you.

"Are you done?" she asked, watching me put my tray down. The plate settled on the mattress with a soft thump.

"I’m done."

I stood up. The bedframe creaked as my weight left it.

Tell him.

He’ll think I’m making a move.

Am I making a move?

No. It’s a mattress. People share mattresses in prisons, that’s a normal thing that normal people—

"I was thinking." Out loud this time. The words came a little too fast, then she forced them slower. "We should push the mattresses together. Share a room."

She made it sound like it had taken her longer to arrive at.

"These beds are a joke. You can feel the frame straight through this thing."

She pinched the edge of the mattress between two fingers. The thin foam disappeared completely. The metal bar underneath showed pale against the fabric.

"Yeah. Good idea."

Across the corridor a door opened, and a few seconds later it closed again. Monica back in her room.

Melissa got up off the bed. The frame shifted under the change in weight.

"So which of us is moving?"

"You are."

The smile came up before she could stop it—quick, bright, then immediately reined in.

"I knew you were going to say that."

"This room’s nearer the door." I nodded down the corridor, toward the sealed entrance and the gap where the trays came through. "Easier to answer when the trays come."

She didn’t need the reason. I gave it to her anyway, and she took it, and we both let it stand there being the reason.

"I’m fine with it."

She gathered both trays—one in each hand—and went out. The plastic edges knocked softly together as she turned the corner.

I looked around the room properly for the first time since the seal came down.

A bed. A single bulb above the bed, the light flat and yellow. A vent high on the wall, the grille dark. A door.

No window. Nothing on the walls. Nothing to sit on except the bed. Nothing to put anything on—no shelf, no hook, no drawer, no ledge. Somebody had sat down with a plan of this room and worked out how to hold a person in it while giving them nothing at all to do with their hands or their eyes.

Sinn had known about this place. That was why he’d stood in that corridor and told Max to find him somewhere else.

Then I saw the corner.

High up, where the wall met the ceiling, above the head of the bed. Small words scratched into the paint—four or five lines of them, packed in tight, the letters uneven, dug in with something sharp and thin.

Somebody had stood on that frame to reach.

We’re not the first people in here.

I got up onto the edge of the bed. The metal bar bit into the arch of my foot. I leaned toward the corner, close enough to make out that the first line was longer than the rest and the last one was only a single word, the paint flaked away around the edges of each letter—

—and the door opened behind me and I came down off the frame in one motion, feet hitting the stone.

Melissa was in the doorway with her mattress in both arms, the thin foam folded against her chest.

"What were you doing?"

"Nothing."

She looked at the corner, then at me, and let it go. Her eyes moved on.

"The night’s still young." She dropped the mattress over mine. The two thin layers settled with a soft, almost weightless sound. She pressed it flat with her palm, then sat down on the edge of it and bounced once, testing—the combined mattresses gave a little, then the frame underneath still made itself known. "Better. That’s genuinely better. What are your plans?"

"Bath. Then sleep."

"When?"

"Now."

"Then we’ll bathe together."

Wait.

She said it exactly the way she’d said everything else. No shift in her voice at all. No pause. No glance to check my reaction.

"We share that bathroom with two other people," she said, "and there’s one of it. So we use it in the shortest possible time." A beat. "That’s just sense, Bram."

"That’s just sense."

"It is."

"Right."

It actually works for me.

And she knows exactly what she just said.

She went to the door and stopped in it with her hand on the frame, weight already shifting toward the corridor.

"Come on. Before one of them gets in there first."