Ruthless (8 page)

I pushed Simmons down to the end where one of the guards was waiting with a cell door already open. “Are you putting me in that gel again?” His voice wavered. I couldn’t blame him; I’d tried it once, just for the experience. It feels like being trapped in a Jello mold, unable to move at anything other than a snail’s pace, and all the while trying to keep your head above the surface. It burns when you get it in your eyes, too, though I was assured it’s non-toxic.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. I felt a little pity for him, and he relaxed slightly in my grasp. “Our tech department developed a less invasive version of it for use when prisoners aren’t being transported.” I brought him up to the door and let him look into his new home.

“Aw, man,” he said.

The nullifying gel was still very much a part of the decorating scheme. It was a requirement for all our prisoners who had a certain level of strength or ability to project physical force. In the case of the permanent dwellings, though, we’d found a way to incorporate it into sealed packets that lined the cells. “It’s still in there,” I said, “ready to stop your quakes if you try and shake the walls. Also, I gotta warn you, if you burst open any of the packets, we will flood the cell up to your neck.” I pointed to an itty-bitty vent at the top. “We can get it completely full in less than five seconds, if you can believe it.” Anselmo had figured that one out in his first week, the dick.

“Where’s my bed?” Simmons asked.

“You sleep on the floor,” I said. “The gel packs are pretty comfortable. It’s like a waterbed.”

“You’ve tried sleeping on it, then?” Simmons asked, nonplussed.

“I have.” He looked at me in sharp disbelief, so I shrugged and elaborated. “I’ve slept in worse.”

“You—” he started, giving me a furious evil eye but apparently thinking the better of whatever he was going to say. I wasn’t super petty, but other inmates had occasionally irritated me enough that I pressed the FLOOD button on them as I left.

I sighed. “If you’re searching for something to call me that’s not going to result in me punching you in the kidney, you could try ‘Warden.’” I reached down and started to unlock his hands.

“When do I get out of here?” Simmons asked as he rubbed his wrists. “For exercise or whatever?”

“You don’t,” I said. “You’re in solitary.”

“What the hell?” His voice got sharp and high. “When’s my trial?”

“You don’t get one,” I said, drawing up to look him in the face as I pulled the chains free of him. I watched his body for a hint of defiance; I could put him down before he could raise a hand to me, but I’d probably just shove him into his cell and call it good.

“Where’s the bathroom?” he asked, peeking in. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And it clogs if we have to flood the cell, so …” I tried not to make it sound like a threat, but who wanted to float in gel along with their own waste? Other than Anselmo, anyway.

“Man, this isn’t right!” Simmons said, looking at me in disbelief. “This isn’t fair!”

“I agree,” I said, admitting to him something I wouldn’t even say to my brother, “but it’s what we’ve got.” I shrugged. “It’s not like I can stick you in gen pop at the local jail, because you’d just break out.” My lips were a grim line as I stared at him. “I wish I had a better solution, but I don’t.”

“You’re gonna regret this.” His jaw was set, face was red and eyebrows turned down to show his growing, impotent rage. He believed me now.

“Because your girlfriend is going to make me sorry?” I didn’t say it with any spite, just calm resignation.

He didn’t bite on the bait, so I pushed him beyond the threshold and sealed the door. It closed with a quiet swish, leaving me staring at his disbelieving face as he stood in the gel-sealed cell, comically distorted by the clear-pack door.

I shook my head and turned away, but I could feel him watching me the whole time. I didn’t dare look back as I walked, though. I just kept going to the end of the row.

I stopped near the end, as I always did when I brought a new prisoner down or came for inspection. I paused before a door not that different from Eric Simmons’s. It certainly wasn’t blacked out like Anselmo Serafini’s. I saw the prisoner moving around inside. He’d been watching the entry as I came in—they all had, really—and he stood as I approached. I flipped the switch on the audio microphone and speaker hidden somewhere in his ceiling came to life. “Hey, Timothy,” I said.

Timothy Logan walked up to the clear, distorted door and nodded at me through the barrier that separated us. “Howdy, Warden. How’s it going?”

“Not bad,” I said. That bluster when I closed the door on Eric Simmons? That was the norm around here. It was almost like the prisoners had to posture, had to wave their thingies around to show me that even though I’d stripped their freedom from them, they still had pride. The threats were … graphic, in some cases. Most of them were murderous, and not nearly so subtle and tame as what Eric Simmons had just offered. They were also, between our eighteen prisoners, almost universal.

Except for Timothy Logan.

When I put Timothy in his cell, he didn’t fight it, didn’t yell, didn’t scream or protest. He didn’t flail his meta powers around, used to getting his way and knocking down any cop that opposed him. That was the difference, in my view, between Timothy and the rest of them: contrition. That and humility. “How’s your time passing in here, Timothy?”

“They’ve let me have some books,” he said, nodding. “One at a time, only, always paperbacks.”

“I know,” I said with a smile. It had been my idea, and they’d been my paperbacks, from back when I was a prisoner in my own home.

“It fills the hours,” he said.

“Three months,” I told him, and he blinked at me, trying to process what I’d just said. “Three months and you’re out of here.” I changed my tone. “If you can handle good behavior for three more months.”

He made a slight incline of his head down the line toward Anselmo’s cell. “As much fun as it would be to scream and strip naked and generally make an ass of myself until they flood me in, I think I can probably handle that. I just want to do my time and get out, and if I ever see a place like this again even on the news, it’ll be too much.” His face went slack. “I just want to be … free.”

I felt a curious longing at that last word. “I hear you. Just keep what you’re doing and soon enough you will be.”

He gave me a slightly wistful look, one filled with more than a little vulnerability. “For real?” I don’t think he thought I was lying to him; more like he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the concept.

“You’re a good guy, Timothy,” I said, thinking back to someone I’d met in a similar situation—Antonio Morales. He’d tried to rob a pawn shop in Las Vegas and it had ended badly. I’d let him go almost four years ago and hadn’t heard a peep from him since. He’d shuffled around a little bit and landed in Seattle. I’d kept a watch on him, and not a whisper of trouble had come from anywhere close to him in the intervening time.

I desperately hoped Timothy Logan was going to be my next Antonio Morales story, because none of the other assclowns down here were showing much sign of redemption.

“It means a lot that you think so,” he said gently. “I just want to live my life. Make it up to the people I took from, and go on about my business.”

“Three months,” I said again and slid my bare fingers across his door. “Take care, Timothy.”

“You too, Warden Nealon,” he said and shuffled back to sit down on the floor of his cell. He bounced slightly as he did, the side-effects of the gel at work.

The walk back up the corridor of death was uncomfortable as always, the guns pointed at me as per my orders. I always thought about flying, but I don’t like to give my men a reason to be twitchy with their trigger fingers. They were well trained, but surprising the hell out of them by flying out of here at high speed did not strike me as the brightest move.

I reached the other end, passed the biometric scan, then passed the second checkpoint and stepped into the lobby. Before I even had a chance to draw a breath of relief at being out of that place, Ariadne was upon me. It didn’t take me more than a second to realize she’d been waiting in ambush, right outside the door. Her pale cheeks were flushed the color of her red hair, her face looked drawn, and I could tell just by looking at her that something was desperately wrong before she even got a word out. “What?” I asked.

I could see the gears spinning before she answered, my pre-emptive question throwing her off balance. I gave her a moment—felt like an eternity—to gather herself before she finally vomited it out. “We’ve been replaced as co-directors of the agency,” she said, bitterness infusing every word. “The new director just got here from Washington and he’s demanding a meeting … right now.”

Moscow

The cold of winter had settled in, reminding Natasya Sokolov of every winter passed in the service of the Soviet Union. It had been so long ago, and yet a snap of the fingers in her mind. She stared out the window onto the Moscow street, just as amazed as she had been three months ago, when Limited People—an appropriate name for that band of weasels and lawyers—had brought her and her fellows here.

And ever since, they had been idle save for the occasional chance to play to the capitalist media.

“Another cold day in Russia,” Vitalik said from his usual place in their drawing room. Limited People had pursued the new government rather aggressively in legal maneuverings that Natasya neither understood nor cared about. The result had been a stipend as recompense for their long imprisonment. She was left bemused by the situation: a government that proclaimed no responsibility for their predicament throwing money at them to make them go away.

In her day, the government would have disclaimed responsibility, made her and her group disappear, and any reporter who followed up on the subject would have known they’d face the same fate. This wasn’t the West, after all.

“‘In the midst of winter I find within me the invisible summer … ’” Leonid Volkov said from his place by the window. His beard was still long, though now it was more of an affectation. She’d been watching him for the last few months as he interacted with the gluttonous, gross press. He’d studied academics and prisoners, polished his image so that he could better preen for them. She would have viewed it as an affront, but Leonid had done the same thing before the Party meetings, always coming prepared with quotes from Lenin, Stalin and Marx for blandishment at the appropriate moments.

Natasya waited, scanning her eyes over to Miksa Fenes. He was the quiet one, always. He sat in his place, laconic as always, looking almost as though he were asleep. He wouldn’t say anything until he had to; for a man who projected energy from his hands, his persona was remarkably lethargic. This was not a precinct that would be heard from.

“What do you say on this fine day, boss lady?” Vitalik asked. He was focused in on her, paid special attention to the honorific.

She stared across the opulent palace of a room, still mildly disgusted by the spectacle. It felt overwhelming, the sort of thing that would get a worker killed in the olden days. The room was almost a monument to the Romanovs and their gross excesses. “I think it’s another day we should be looking for an opportunity to escape this garish prison.”

“I think we could walk out at any time,” Vitalik said, almost hopefully.

“Of course we could walk out at any time, fool,” Natasya said. “But then what? Work for the ‘new’ Russian government? I’ve seen the names; they’re almost the same as the old ones. So then what? Bite our new masters—Limited People—in the hand?”

“You think they want to be our masters?” Leonid asked carefully. He stroked his beard as he spoke; Natasya had known him long enough to be sure that he was doing it to be thought a person of careful consideration. He was nothing of the sort.

“I think they are using us to push their agenda,” Natasya said. She looked around the room as though an enemy waited to jump out. In the olden days, there had been no hope of a private conversation, ever. Word always seemed to get out, and always to the wrong ears. After the prison, though, she now found her lips looser than ever they’d been before. It was the disgusting feeling of living in this place, with ideological enemies all around.

This prison was worse; the walls and chains were not visible or obvious. She almost longed for the simplicity of being suspended in the air again. At least then she knew she hung in the middle of a mountain without hope or a future.

“So what should we do?” Vitalik said quietly—so quiet he was almost inaudible.

“We look for … opportunity.” She glanced at the window and caught a glimpse of a press car outside. They were out there by the dozens, an encampment. “I, for one, do not trust our new masters nor the supposed demise of the old ones. Whatever situation has come about that has rearranged the government as wildly as it has seems unlikely to result in the forgiving of old grudges forever.” At the very least, she was not inclined to forget hers. “I want out of this cold, this uncertainty.” She shuddered. “But I don’t want to go to the West, or to America. Somewhere warm, somewhere … not a gluttonous pig’s paradise, streets paved with oppression of—” She made a throaty sound of disgust. “I want debts settled, revenge, and to leave this frigid ice box of hell.” She pulled her arms over her chest. “Find me an opportunity such as that, and I shall leap upon it like a wolf upon a lamb.”

There was a knock at the door, the uncertain sound of a man who’d probably never felt the touch of a woman in his life, Natasya thought. It was the knock of Matfey Krupin, the weak-kneed errand boy of Limited People. She glanced at the clock. Time was a thing she was still readjusting to after thirty years of never knowing the hour or minute. Matfey, though, he always came at the same time every day, to conduct his business.

To feed his wolves, Natasya thought, and all the while thinking they were tame sheep.

“Hello,” Matfey said in that light warble of his. She wanted to grab him by a nipple and twist it to see if milk came dribbling out. It would certainly not change his voice much.