They removed the poles from the rec room eight months ago. The pole-fitness ones, bolted floor to ceiling, that the wellness consultant installed with such optimism.
Nobody will discuss why.
That’s how I like my legends.
Unverified, and slightly worse than the truth.
Lunch. Another block. Meds again at the hinge of the afternoon, the cart and the cups and the waggling tongues. Dinner. Lockdown. Lights down at a decreed hour, the corridors dimmed to the sick amber of the night cycle, and the camerasswitching to whatever it is cameras do when they think you’re asleep.
Because there are always cameras.
That’s the part the families don’t see on the lawn. Blackthorn watches. The lenses are tucked into the smoke detectors, the light fixtures, the seams where wall meets ceiling, little glass eyes that never blink and never bore.
I clocked the whole array inside my first week—Ialways count the eyes in a room, it’s a tic, a courtesy I extend to whoever’s watching—and I’ve spent the years since pretending not to notice them.
I wave at the one above my bed sometimes. I blow it kisses. I want whoever sits in that monitoring room to understand that I see them seeing me, and that I have decided to allow it.
The security is theatrical, total, and, where I’m concerned, doubled.
Every Omega patient wears a band that knows where she is at all times. Every door reads it. Every count—and there are counts, so many counts, the staff tallying us like coins they’re afraid of losing—finds us where the system swears we should be. But there’s a classification stamped across the top of my file in a red that the other files don’t get to wear.
Level Red.
Highly intelligent. Manipulative. Escape risk.
Which is a great deal of bureaucratic poetry that translates, in practice, to: never fewer than two orderlies when I move, the chemical-restraint cocktail kept drawn and ready in a fridge with my name on the dose, and a conspicuous, almost insulting absence of anything in my vicinity that could be sharpened, swallowed, or thrown. They learned that last one the expensive way.
I can throw a great many things.
They took my daggers when I arrived, naturally, but a dagger is a philosophy more than an object, and you can’t confiscate a philosophy.
Six locked rooms, in three years. Three restraint systems. One secure wing, walked out of in a borrowed cardigan with a borrowed smile, just to prove that the wing was a suggestion and not a fact.
I never ran.
That’s the part they can’t metabolize. I open the cage, I admire the open cage, and I sit back down inside it, because I am not finished here.
The leaving will be on my schedule, dressed for the occasion, and it will be a doorway of my own making—not a panicked scramble through somebody else’s.
To the staff, I am a nightmare with good cheekbones.
To the patients, I am a legend they tell in the dark to feel less alone.
To the men in the monitoring room, I am a recurring problem with an open ticket nobody can close.
And to me?
I am the grand prize.
The thing at the center of the maze that the whole maze was built to hold and can’t quite.
They can watch me from every angle, in every light, around the clock, forever. They can log my scent and chart my cycle and count me a hundred times a day.
They cannot touch me without my permission, they know it, and the knowing is what makes them so careful and so afraid. Look all you like. Press your faces to the glass.
The exhibit does not come down off its plinth for anyone.
Not yet, anyway.
