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“Does it hurt now, Henrietta?”
“Just a little bit…put it up here…okay. It’s fine now.”
Commingling within cells was not outright forbidden in the Sleep Room, but it drew more than the usual few suspicious glares from the faceless guards behind the bars or reinforced windows. Perhaps they couldn’t be bothered to unsheathe their batons and work out a sweat for something as vapid as two Reagents going all doe-eyed for each other. Maybe they knew romance in the Sinyala Facility was inevitably doomed to fail. Regardless, Dorris Ritter’s cell proved strategic – it lay within a corner very near an observation pane, so if she and a “visitor” hung back away from the door, a guard could not observe them nor their “activities.”
Dorris leaned forward on her chair, stroking the cheek of the woman who was reclined on her bed. “You shouldn’t have pushed yourself, sweetheart,” she chided, adjusting the pillow underneath Henrietta’s foot. “The number of times we’ve been grabbed like that…your teammate would have been fine.”
“I couldn’t just stand there,” Henrietta pleaded, her face scrunched with worry. “I just went into fight mode...what can I say?”
Dorris’s hand drifted to Henrietta’s stringy brown hair. “Remember the first time you got pounced?”
Henrietta nodded frantically. “The Mansion. Scared the absolute shit outta me. I thought my heart giving out would’ve killed me before her.”
Dorris nodded back. “Same here, sweetheart. It’s happened to all of us. You just have to look out for the signs, and be prepared if it happens again. Always have something on you so you can bash ‘em in the skull. Like flickin’ a dog on the nose. Works every time.”
“ He didn’t,” Henrietta protested, turning her head to look Dorris in the eye. She winced in pain at the sudden reflex. “My teammate. He had nothing to bash the Pouncer with.”
Dorris sighed, putting a palm to her face. “I know it hurts, and it’s scary. But pain and fear are what these motherfuckers are teaching us. If it don’t hurt, it don’t work.” She leaned over and rolled Henrietta’s pant leg up past the knee. The skin over the joint was red and swollen. “Looks like you gave the bitch one hell of a kick though.”
Henrietta chuckled. “You see a Pouncer with a head like a deflated basketball, let me know. I’ll kick her twice as hard next time.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” Dorris gently pressed her fingertips into Henrietta’s knee, and she winced. “Fractured. Again. One more kick like that and you’re through. You’ll have to walk around with a peg leg.”
“Shit,” Henrietta whispered, shaking her head. “I don’t want to see the nurse. Last time she gave me that look. You know, the one that says, ‘You again?’ What will they think if I keep hurting myself like this, Dorrie?”
“They’re morons if they think we hurt ourselves out there too much,” Dorris replied. “But I’ll take you there this time. Emily won’t give you crap if I’m with you.” She leaned in and grinned wickedly. “I think I scare her.”
“ You ?” Henrietta laughed, regarding Dorris’s flyaway hair and the scar over her milky eye. “You have the face of an angel!”
“Yeah, a fallen angel,” muttered Dorris.
“But you fell for me,” Henrietta smiled. “And I love you for that.”
Dorris leaned in closer, and their lips met. Henrietta could taste cigarettes in her breath: fibrous, smoky, nostalgic, like being at home. It was sweet ambrosia in a place like this.
*
“Please, honey, be careful.”
“I’ll be fine.” Henrietta grasped Dorris’s hands in hers, squeezing them gently. The smile on her face was infectious, optimistic, and wildly out-of-place. Dorris had only seen smiles so wide on what she called the “dummies” – Reagents so traumatized and hopped up on chemicals all they could do was grin and laugh, even when things weren’t funny. She glanced down at Henrietta’s leg, bandaged and fixed with a stint. She looked back into her eyes. Despite the harsh fluorescence by the terminal, her eyes were almost all pupil, only a ring of brown visible around them.
“Henrietta,” Dorris urged. “What did they give you?”
“Just painkillers,” said Henrietta. “I feel great. It’s like I never even broke my leg.”
“Are you sure ?” she pressed.
Henrietta gave a curt nod. “Relax, my dove. I’m completely here, in the moment. I’m just pain-free. And I love you so much, that’s all.”
Dorris sighed, finally smiling herself. “Just do what you have to do. Ignore the posters if things get rough. And once you get back, we’ll be queens among men.”
“Hope things go well at your meeting,” Henrietta whispered.
“They will,” Dorris grunted. “They have to. I’ve got dirt on everyone here. Even Easterman. Rumors about his wife.”
“He has a wife ?” Henrietta gasped with mock scandal. “Like, an actual woman ? Not a latex glove filled with lotion?”
They laughed, drawing the ire of a gaggle of sullen Reagents slumped at a nearby table. “No, but really, they’ll have to let me sit out of the Trials,” Dorris explained. “JT knows me well. He’ll pull a few strings, and I’ll run my little ‘market’ and help these other suckers get outta here.”
“And then we both get out of here. Together. Right?”
Dorris paused. Then she nodded. “For sure.”
Henrietta turned back to the terminal and selected the new Trial. “‘Vindicate the Guilty,’” she read with mild disdain. “I have a feeling that’s not really what’s gonna happen here.”
“Something something totems, something something Murkoff is Might,” Dorris said snidely.
The overhead lights took on a red hue, and the doors to the SAS opened up. “Please step into the Trial shuttle,” the guard behind the window announced.
“Good luck,” Dorris crooned, patting Henrietta’s cheek.
She turned and sprinted through the turnstile. Dorris stood by the terminal and watched the inert doors. She listened for the sound of the shuttle departing, screeching and chugging down the tracks to wherever this new Trial would take place. A courthouse, she guessed, judging on the title. But she had no time left to concern herself with the Trials. There was work to do.
*
“Don’t let the guards see you with those now,” Dorris warned, pointing a bony finger. “Now scram.”
The Reagent, a young man barely in his twenties, nodded and bolted, a pair of slippers tucked away in the crook of his arms. Dorris drew from her cigarette and leaned back on the table, savoring her new business venture. For the price of a few meal vouchers, Reagents could receive contraband Dorris had either collected or confiscated in her time poking through the Sinyala Facility’s shadiest corners.
She had pitched to JT, the guard posted at the Release Protocol Gate, the covert benefits for both Reagents and the facility: a little boost in their performances so they wouldn’t all end up as chum strewn across the Trial environments. They get hope and a chance to see another day; Murkoff would get more efficient and undamaged Reagents. And in turn, Dorris would not spill the beans on Easterman’s wife, or Nurse Barlow’s nocturnal fantasies, or the background of the mysterious man in the wheelchair who occasionally haunted the observation deck…anything that might potentially whip the Reagents into a riot, or compromise the therapy.
Plus, she would be allowed to smoke in the Sleep Room, not having to hide in her cell and blow the smoke up through the air conditioning vents anymore. Nicotine did her much better than any cocktail of drugs the doctors stuck her with.
Still, she wistfully watched the youth nearly trip over his own feet before he turned the corner and hurried back towards his cell. Sure, she had won security and comfort for herself and for Henrietta…but at the cost of perpetuating the cycle of conspiracy and violence Murkoff touted so well. A kid like him ought to be in school, studying to become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever clichés his parents had put in his head.
Not here.
But then there were the rumors. Stories of Reagents who had finally won their release, stumbling out into the world with no sense of who they were or what they’d done, blowing themselves up in overseas operations, or losing their minds entirely and raping and killing women and children…
Dorris blew out a veritable fogbank of smoke, her throat singeing. The Sleep Room suddenly seemed quite cozy. What was the good in being “reborn” if she would forget everything she’d seen and learned, and most likely suffer a horrible fate in some foreign country, or in a strike against her own, orchestrated by the goons in the CIA?
She sighed, leaning back against the table. Maybe she had a good thing going with her little black market venture. The outside world had driven her to one of Murkoff’s “charity outreach centers,” having rejected her “deviant” views on love; and now, the outside world offered nothing but suffering and regret. Maybe she would stay. And maybe, just maybe, Henrietta would agree.
“Oh, shit.” Dorris suddenly sat up. “Hey. Cookie!” The chef behind the cafeteria counter continued prepping his bowl of ground mystery meat. She gave a sharp whistle. “Cookie!” she snapped. “What’s the time?”
The chef gave her a bleary look. “It’s the day cycle.”
Dorris rolled her eyes. “The actual time. C’mon, don’t be thick.”
Glowering at her, Cookie rolled up his sleeve and consulted his cheap wristwatch. “Sixteen hundred,” he said briskly, returning to the bowl.
Dorris sprung to her feet. Henrietta had been in the Trial for over two hours…none of the new Trials had taken so long before, and Henrietta was no novice.
Something had happened. Something bad.
She barreled downstairs, knocking two Reagents to the side as she skidded to a halt at Emily Barlow’s desk. “Is Henrietta back there!” Dorris gasped, panting and doubling over.
Nurse Barlow’s eyes narrowed at the speck of saliva dripping from Dorris’s mouth onto the countertop. She drew her paperback novel close to her chest. “I’m sorry, which one is this?”
“You know Henrietta!” Dorris demanded, causing a few Reagents around her to flinch. “She was with me when she fractured her knee! Now tell me if she’s back here!”
Barlow consulted a manila envelope on the desk, flicking through some fresh forms. “What’s her number?”
Dorris growled with breathless frustration. “Oh-nine-eight-five!”
Barlow sorted the papers, humming a little tune to herself. Dorris’s fingers curled on the countertop, forcing herself to not burst through the divider and strangle the broad. “Mmm…nope. Don’t see zero nine eight five. Sorry, dear.”
Dorris swore under her breath. Was she really still in the Trial?
But then a white-coated doctor stepped into Barlow’s room and handed off a clipboard. His gloves and coat were stained with ash and fresh blood. The scent of scorched flesh spiked the air.
Barlow examined the first page on the clipboard and gave a tut. “Ah. Here it is. Just arrived.”
Dorris’s heart sank. “Is she okay??”
Barlow scrutinized the record, her expression betraying nothing.
From the hallway outside the nurse’s station, a woman groaned in agony. Dorris peeled away from the desk and pressed herself against the observation window, her labored breath fogging the glass.
“Oh God,” the patient wailed. “Oh my fucking Godddd…aaahhhhggg…”
A doctor emerged from a corridor, pushing a stretcher. Its occupant was blanketed in a bloodied white sheet, arms flailing weakly in the air.
“Henrietta!” Dorris cried, banging on the glass. “ Henrietta !!”
“Dorrie!” she wailed, as the stretcher banked left and disappeared up another hallway. “Dorrie, please…I’m sorry…”
“No!” Dorris flung herself back at the desk. “Let me back there!” she cried at Barlow, tears breaking. “Let me in, damn you!” The nurse scooted backwards on her chair, eyes wild, and she pressed a button under her desk.
Sinyala guards swarmed in out of nowhere and grabbed Dorris’s arms, bringing her to the floor. Her lip split open and she tasted blood, but she yelled past the pain. “Tell me she’s gonna be okay! Just tell me she’ll be fine! Please, for the love of God!”
“Hush,” a guard whispered, and a syringe slipped into Dorris’s neck.
She struggled and spat and screamed, but the darkness overtook her, and the last thing she saw before succumbing to sleep was Henrietta’s face morphing into a skull, eyes burning, her hair a corona of snakes.
*
“Hello? Miss?”
Dorris’s head gave a jerk and she snapped back to wakefulness. It had been over twenty-four hours since she’d slept, thanks to Cookie and his begrudging time-telling. Guards had been posted near Nurse Barlow’s desk, and word had spread fast around the Sleep Room about Dorris’s blowup. Reagents losing their tempers were not uncommon, but those who got unacceptably angry were never seen again. No one knew exactly what the “unacceptable levels” were, but no one wanted to find out, even when blowups inevitably flared.
“Ma’am,” the middle-aged woman with sunken eyes pressed. She offered a handful of vouchers. “I wanted the Backpack amp?”
“Yes, of course,” Dorris coughed, sifting through the suitcase under the lunch table and grabbing a discreet black pouch. “You don’t let any of the guards see you with that,” she warned, handing it over. “Or any of your teammates for that matter. They might try and take it from you.”
The Reagent’s face drooped even lower. “Whatever happened to the concept of personal property?”
“You grow up on the streets like me,” said Dorris, “you learn you really only ‘own’ something if you can keep two hands on it at all times.” She flicked her hand. “Now get outta here. You didn’t see me.”
The woman nodded and trudged off. Dorris tapped her foot, lighting another cigarette. The smoke only gilded her anxiety in a thin sheet. Henrietta would have inchwormed her way up the stairs to her in a full body cast if she could have managed it.
She couldn’t take it anymore.
“Cookie, if anyone asks, tell ‘em I got sick off your food,” Dorris declared, before she sprung from her seat and strode down towards Henrietta’s cell. Reagents stared as she made her way through the hallway. “There goes the Shadowy Dame,” one hissed to his friend, and they shared a private laugh. Dorris pretended not to hear them.
The window to Henrietta’s cell was newly upholstered with papers. Dorris knocked on the door. “Henrietta. It’s me. You in there?” No answer. Panic spiked in her chest again and she rapped harder. “Sweetheart? Can you open the door?”
Still nothing. Swallowing, Dorris turned the doorknob and pushed it open.
“Henrietta!” she cried, stepping into the room. Her partner laid silently on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Her left shoulder and forearm were heavily bandaged. “Baby, are you okay?” Dorris continued, shutting the door and rushing to her side, kneeling down. “Talk to me. I’m here.”
Henrietta shook her head, her eyes blank. Dorris silently counted to twenty. “Henrietta,” she finally urged, her voice a husky purr. “What happened in there?”
The other woman grimaced, shifting uncomfortably. “I was doing good. I was doing so good. But then…” She gave a ragged sigh. “There was a puzzle. Numbers under a blacklight. I was trying to find them. But that pig…that asshole fucking pig…found me. Torched me.” She flexed her left arm. “I’m a goddamn well-done steak under these wrappings.” She let her arm flop down with a wince of pain. “I had to quit. Otherwise he’d have cooked me alive.”
“Shit,” Dorris breathed, lowering her head. “Fucking shit, Henrietta. I’m so sorry.”
Henrietta’s right fist clenched. “Don’t be. I’m angry. I’m ready to go back.”
“Henrietta, no,” Dorris insisted, clasping her fist. “You’re not fit to go back. Stay here and rest up.”
She finally looked at her. “Figures you’d say that. When’s the last time you ran a Trial?”
“I’m done with the Trials,” said Dorris. “I’m running the black market now. We’re gonna help these other folks help themselves.”
“And what about you ?” Henrietta’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me you want to stay at Sinyala forever. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here.”
“It’s what’s best for us!” Dorris insisted. “Both the Trials and the outside world are FUBAR, sweetheart. Foo-fuckin’-bar. We need to stay here and focus on ourselves.”
“You said it yourself…if it don’t hurt, it don’t work.” Henrietta breathed through her teeth and sat up. “I’m hurting a lot, Dorris. But I’m learning so much. And I know I can solve that puzzle and give that asshole cop the slip if I can just get in there again soon, while my brain is still raw.”
Dorris shook her head, letting go of Henrietta’s hand. “You’re talking a bunch of crap. Don’t fall for Easterman’s bullshit.”
Henrietta glared at her. “He wants us to get out. Why should I not listen to him?”
Dorris stood up and backed away, aghast. “I can’t believe this. What’s happened to you?”
“To me ?” she laughed. “ I want to get out of this place! I want to learn! I want to win !” A strained smile cracked her face. “And I don’t think you do.”
“Ma’am, you need to leave the cell now.”
Dorris wheeled around to see a doctor standing in the doorway, a tray of medicinal bottles in his grasp. “Now,” he repeated.
“What have you done to her?” Dorris hissed.
The doctor’s gaze hardened. “Leave. Now.”
Dorris bared her teeth, her hands balling into fists. But she shoved past the doctor, rattling the tray, and out into the Sleep Room. The door snapped shut and locked behind her.
“Goddamned-fucking-brownshirt-bootlickers,” Dorris growled, stalking away. A breathy giggle caught her ear, and she turned to see a Reagent slumped in the corner and staring at her, a vacant grin on his face, laughing in the manner only one of the dummies could.
Despite herself, a swooping feeling overturned her stomach. She suppressed a laugh of her own before moving on. This place changes you , she thought. Nobody is safe.
*
The weeks dragged on. Dorris maintained her post in the cafeteria, trading away contraband to the seemingly endless stream of battered, downtrodden Reagents. But every opportunity saw her sneaking off downstairs to Henrietta’s cell, trying to ascertain her condition or whereabouts. She rarely saw her these days. Her door was always locked. Her window remained covered.
The one time they passed in the corridors, Henrietta merely stared dimly ahead. Dorris noticed her left side was slumped, and the limp in her right knee had become pronounced again. Was she rejecting the therapy? Sinyala’s drugs worked like magic; they could make you believe you had never spent the prior three hours getting chased, stabbed, scorched, or eviscerated. And was she still participating in Trials? Dorris could not pin an answer. The market consumed too much of her time and attention. If she couldn’t help Henrietta, she might as well help everyone else.
But it hurt her terribly. Her thoughts drifted back to the neighborhood girl in the Bowery, that forbidden kiss in the alleyway, the flesh-rending blows from her father when he’d found out, and that first night on the streets, her tears melding with the rain. The dockworkers had been good to her, mostly. There was still the occasional drooling deviant, asking where her parents were, while knowing – and anticipating – the answer. Despite their advances, twelve-year-old Dorris had found humor nonetheless. “I don’t even swing that way, you chomo fucks,” she’d tell them, before trotting off laughing. The shock was enough to put off even the most determined pervert.
Still, the decades that followed were worse than rough: fleeting odd jobs, run-ins with gangsters and pimps and addicts, hunger and cold and disease, the occasional romance that broke up with varying levels of violence. So the allure of a shiny “charity outreach center” run by clean-cut, happy-faced, white-collar suits had been irresistible to her one evening, starving and embittered and blooming with bruises from a recent scrap.
And the rest, just like the thousands of others sent through the wringer and back again, was history.
Henrietta had been her Virgil, and in a matter of weeks, her lover. But for the first time since her years-long sojourn in the Bowery, Dorris was truly alone.
“They’ve hosed down and reset the Trial,” a voice over an intercom said. “You can enter the shuttle.” Dorris jumped, realizing her wanderings had landed her near the terminal. She turned to see the backs of four Reagents enter the turnstiles. She looked for Henrietta. But they had disappeared too quickly.
“Hey,” a voice said. It was the young man who had bought the slippers from her what felt like months ago. “I wanted to get more amps. You open?”
Dorris gazed into his eyes, naïve, but slightly sodden with the weight of the Trials. She sighed. If Henrietta truly wanted to get out, then so be it. All she wanted for the love of her life was what would be best for her. In the meantime, there were others who needed help.
“Sure, kid,” Dorris said with a smile. “What’re you looking for?”
*
The overhead lights were blinding. Henrietta writhed atop the gurney, gasping and groaning in agony. Everything stung and ached and seared with hot flowing blood. “I tried,” she sobbed to no one, “I promise I tried…don’t kill me…I want to win…”
Silhouettes with reflective eyes loomed over her. “Christ, what happened to this one?” one of them asked. “Looks like a goddamn casserole.”
“Idiot tried to run down a Night Hunter in the Courthouse,” another replied. “Steel versus flesh. Kind of a one-sided battle.”
“Look at this medical history,” a third voice muttered. “Fractures, lacerations, third-degree burns…she’s too erratic. She’s a liability. A drain on our resources.”
“But her therapy levels are off the charts. She accepts the drugs and hormone treatments like a dream.”
“Waste not. We’ll find a use for her. Every accident is an opportunity for innovation.”
“I’ll run it up the ladder.”
“No,” Henrietta pleaded, “Sleep Room…want…see…” But the darkness was too much, and she faded away.
*
Lucidity became a bad dream passing in the night. All Henrietta knew was that she had been sequestered to a part of the Sleep Room she had never seen before, her wounds patched up and injected with enough drugs to kill a racehorse, and her clothes ripped away. Strapped to a table, the poking and prodding began. Then it became drilling and stabbing. It could have been hours, or days, of drifting in and out of consciousness, the gleam of metal, the smell of antiseptic and lingering pheromones, the derisive laughter and buzzing equipment.
Is this better? she thought. Are they making me better?
At some point she realized the sides of her head were unusually tender and cold, and that a weight had been taken off her thorax. They removed my ESOP. Is this rebirth?
But the procedures continued. It was pain and pleasure and noxious chemicals blasted up her nose. There was tingling and laughter and arousal. And the peculiar sensation of wood, or maybe fast-growing bamboo, broadening and shooting up her limbs.
The doctors…watching…always…watching…
Eventually, they brought in a television for her. The man on the screen was comforting, yet oddly familiar, like she had seen him before, despite the shadows obscuring his face. The prickle of doubt in the back of her mind was stamped out by the delirium, anxiety, anger, and childlike mirth that now ran amok.
“Welcome to the world, my daughter,” his snide, crisp voice said. “I am Doctor Easterman. You may think of me as your dad.”
“Daddy?” Henrietta grunted, her voice garbled and low.
“You’ve done us proud, sweetheart,” he simpered. “And we’ve given you an amazing gift for your hard work. You should thank me.”
“Thank…you,” she blubbered.
“Now it’s time to play,” the doctor said. “The rules are simple: don’t let them run past you. And be nice to the police officer. Do whatever he says.”
“Puh-leece…” she rasped. “Puh…puh…hurt…where…where Dorrie?”
“Eyes on the prize, my child,” he warned. “We need your head in the game.” The TV switched off. The world underneath her rumbled and shifted – she was being moved.
“What…this? Dorrie? You there?...”
An alarm blared…and suddenly the darkness in front of her opened up and she staggered into blinding light. A great ivory statue towered before her, Lady Justice, streaked with dried blood. But below her, everything looked…small. The benches were for children. The doorways she would have had to stoop to go through. Her hands were distended, warped, as if her skin had been stretched over a giant’s bones.
“Wha…” Henrietta stumbled, head pitching, vision spinning. “What is this?”
Then, with a lightning strike of horror, she recognized where she was. She had done this before…ran past that statue countless times in her efforts to beat the puzzle and evade the cop...
“What they do!” she cried. The tears poured down her face, putrescent tears tinted pink with eye juice and blood as she lurched about the Courthouse lobby. “What…happened…me! Dorrie! Dorrie, help!!”
A set of wooden double doors burst open, and a gang of four Reagents – smaller than her but perfectly proportioned – surged into the lobby. “Shit, that’s a new one!” one of them barked, streaking past her.
“Help me!” Henrietta wailed, lunging at them. “Where Dorrie! Please!” But the Reagents were long gone.
“Stop resisting!” a new voice commanded. Through the double doors came a fifth man in pursuit, his burnt face obscured by sunglasses, clad in police dress blues, wielding a massive baton that flared with electricity.
Fury, white-hot and intoxicating, exploded inside Henrietta. “ You !” she roared, charging at the cop. “Scum!” She took a meaty swing as the officer rushed past her – and clocked him in the head.
“ Lord !” he shouted, knocked over on his side. “Hey, what gives! You tryin’ to hurt me?!”
“Fucking! Kill ! You!” Henrietta screamed, stomping over to him, itching to rip the miserable fuck piece by piece and squash his overcooked face into a pulp – but the cop was on his feet again, and his baton became a blazing arc that sideswept through the air.
Agonizing voltage shot through her knee, reigniting the old pain, and she collapsed in a sobbing heap, tangled in her own gangly limbs, dizzy and broken and racked with tears.
“There ya go, ol’ hoss,” the cop growled, striding up to her. “ Now when you get on up to pig-ugly heaven…tell ‘em Sergeant Coyle sent ya.”
The baton lingered in her face, and the last thing she saw was the dancing crackle of electricity before he plunged it forward.
*
“Well, well, I think I’ve just about given you all I can offer,” Dorris said with a smirk to the same young man.
“The doctors say I’ve hit my maximum therapy level,” said the Reagent, whom she now knew as Peter. “I’m ready to finally get out of here. To show them what I’ve learned.”
Dorris dragged on her cigarette, hiding a smile. Hope was a precious resource in this place. Good-hearted kids like him deserved it. “You’ve lasted this long,” she said. “Maybe you really will make it out there.”
Peter nodded. His face fell slightly. “What about you, Dorris? Don’t you want to get back to the world?”
“Nah.” She reclined against the table. “I got a good thing goin’ on here. Job security. Benefits. And my investment portfolio is just booming .”
Peter laughed. “Alright. Well if you don’t see me again, it means I’ve earned my freedom.” He turned to leave, but hesitated. “Do you know anyone who got out?”
Dorris tapped her cigarette, letting ash trickle onto the tabletop. “I had this friend. Henrietta. Last time we argued, she accused me of likin’ it here. I accused her of fallin’ for Easterman’s bullshit. And in the end, I guess we were both right.” She went for another drag. “This places changes you. And frankly I don’t know anymore which is more fucked: in here, or out there.” She blew smoke through her nostrils, closing her eyes. “If Henrietta did get out…she’s changed. I wouldn’t know her. But I guess that’s the point.” She peered up into Peter’s face. “Better figure out now if it’s worth it.”
Peter nodded again, then departed for his cell, head lowered in thought.
“Sweet kid,” Dorris muttered, smudging her cigarette on the tabletop. Maybe, just maybe, something would break, and they could all get out together…truly, unequivocally, whole.
One way or another, she would see her dear Henrietta again.