"Kent." I keep my voice steady. "Is he okay?"
Silence. Then: "I'll call you when I have an update."
He hangs up before I can push harder. I drive home and try again the next morning, and the morning after that.
It takes Kent two more days to get my access reinstated. When I finally walk through the checkpoint, Gianna hands me my badge without meeting my eyes, and I pretend not to notice the way her hands shake slightly.
The facility looks the same. Smells the same. But the air is different—a tension I can feel in the set of every guard's shoulders, in the way conversations stop when I pass.
Gage finds me in the admin corridor.
He looks tired. Shadows sit under his eyes that I've never seen before, and his shoulders are rigid, held tight even when he sees me.
"You're back," he says.
"I am."
We stand there for a moment. He's blocking my path without quite blocking it—positioned so that I'd have to step around him to continue down the corridor. The last time we were in the same hallway, Rick was on the floor and the air smelled like blood.
Neither of us brings it up.
"How is he?"
Gage doesn't ask who I mean. "Two weeks in isolation. IV sedation the whole time. They pulled the line this morning for your visit. They're calling it behavioral stabilization," Gage says. "But the dosing isn't in any protocol I've seen in my time here."
"Because it's not treatment. It's retaliation."
A muscle jumps in his jaw. He doesn't argue.
"I need to see him."
"I figured." He shifts his weight. "Day room's been cleared. Thirty minutes. I'll walk you down."
We fall into step together, and neither of us talks. Through the security door, past the nurses' station, down the long corridor to Ward C. Gage badges us through each checkpoint without breaking stride.
At the day room door, he stops.
"Gage."
He's watching me, giving nothing away. His hand moves to the back of his neck, rubs once, drops.
"Yeah?"
"Your report. What you told Hudson about Rick." I hold his gaze. "That was really nice of you, backing Jude."
His face changes—surprise, maybe, or gratitude. Gone before I can be sure.
"Just doing my job," he says, but his voice is rougher than the words warrant. He opens the day room door and steps aside.
The room is empty except for Jude.
He's sitting at one of the bolted-down tables, hands flat on the surface, completely still. The lights wash him out, turn his skin pale, highlight new hollows under his cheekbones. There's bruising on the back of his left hand where the IV line sat, yellowing at the edges.
Fourteen days of isolation and sedation and white walls.
He looks up when the door opens. Green eyes on mine across the room, and I forget about the camera, Gage, the antiseptic smell. All of it.
For a moment, neither of us moves.
