Dane's hand is still on my shoulder. His weight is forward, leaning into the push. His feet are planted wrong—too close together, right foot turned out because of his knee. The new guard is half a step behind on my left side.
I drop my center of gravity, twist my right shoulder toward Dane's body, and drive the heel of my cuffed hands into his extended wrist. The radius and ulna break under the strike. His grip releases. I'm already inside his reach. My elbow drives upward into his shoulder joint from underneath and the ball pops free of the socket—a wet crack that bounces off the corridor walls.
Dane screams.
His other hand swings for me. I catch the fist between both palms, lock his fingers, and wrench the hand sideways until bones give. I feel them snap.
He drops. His knees hit the concrete and his shattered hand cradles against his chest and his scream thins to a wet, continuous whine.
The new guard hasn't moved. He stands with his mouth open and his right hand frozen halfway to his radio. Dane is on the floor between us, folded over his own arm, and the corridor fills with the sound of him trying to breathe through it.
"Key your radio, kid," I tell him.
He does.
The swarm takes under a minute. Faster than their average. Four men from the end of the corridor, two from the checkpoint behind us. Shields up, formation tight, boots moving together. They pin me face-down on the floor and someone drives a knee into my spine hard enough to empty my lungs.
I let them.
Cold floor against my cheek. The taste of dust and floor cleaner. Hands wrench my arms up behind my back and a second set of cuffs goes on over the first. Someone's boot presses the side of my head into the ground and holds it there.
"Code White, I repeat, Code White, medical corridor. Patient restrained. One officer down. Need medical and the sedation nurse."
Nurse Devina's shoes click down the corridor a minute later. Short steps, fast, always half-running. She kneels beside me and I hear the needle puncture the vial stopper, the tap of her finger against the syringe barrel clearing the air.
"Full stack," someone says above me. "Hudson's orders."
Not the incident dose. The stack they use when they want me gone.
The needle goes into my shoulder, the plunger drops, and the chemical hits my bloodstream cold. It spreads from the injection site outward—shoulder, neck, chest, down through my ribs, into my stomach. My fingers go first. Then my jaw. Then the corridor starts to smear and melt away.
The last thing I process before I lose the room: the response team's formation held a gap on the left side, second man from the wall. Sloppy. Exploitable.Without the stack in my blood, I'd go through all six of them. At Bragg, my pain threshold tested anomalous and I tore through solid doors bare-handed that the rest of my cadre needed breaching tools for. Three years of bodyweight work in a cell hasn't changed anything—the drugs just give them a head start.
Then I'm gone.
I come back in pieces. The ceiling first—different ceiling, different cell. Solitary. It runs on a schedule I can't track.
The cell has no window. The light stays on—fluorescent, the same flat white whether it's morning or midnight. They feed the doses through on a timer I can't see. Door opening, Devina's shoes, the needle, then the floor tilts again and the ceiling blurs and my body sinks into the mattress until there's nowhere left to sink.
I try to count the injections. I lose count after the fourth. Might be the fifth. The drug stacks on itself, each dose landing before the last one clears, and the gaps between lucid and buried get shorter until there are no gaps at all. Just a gray wash that swallows time and detail.
The tray slot opens and closes. I don't eat. Devina comes back—hand on my arm, needle in the vein, the cold spreading before I can brace for it. "Stay still," she says. I wasn't moving. Guard boots pass my door without stopping.
My fingers curl, slow, one at a time. The usual sedation slows me down. This buries me.
I breathe because I make myself breathe.
The injections keep coming.
Somewhere in the gray, it hits me. The real penalty.
No pen click.
The door opens and closes on Devina's schedule and the tray slot cycles and the guards pass in the corridor. But the sound I'm listening for doesn't come. No light footsteps. No lock cycling at a different time. No voice asking me how I'm feeling.
She's not coming.
I've survived worse boxes than this one. Leavenworth. Pueblo. The hole they put me in after I killed the Aryan Brotherhood's shot-caller with a lunch tray. The worst thing in all of them was the boredom, and I'm built for boredom.
