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A clatter of keys, a push through another door, and then I’m in the holding pen. Ten square meters, glass walls, the stink of disinfectant so strong it burns my throat. The only furniture is a single steel bench, bolted to the floor. I sit, arms twisted behind me, shoulders screaming from the angle.

I can hear Petrov in the next room, arguing with someone on a comm. His words are clipped, angry, but I catch the gist: there’s disagreement about my transfer. Someone upstairs thinks I’m too valuable to waste. Someone else wants me erased. I wonder, for a moment, if Kang is the reason I’m still breathing. Or if, in the end, he’s the one who handed me over.

The door hisses open. Petrov himself enters, alone. He circles the cell, gaze unblinking. “You got lucky,” he says, voice low, deadly. “The Captain argued you’d be more useful alive than as a stain on the lab floor. That’s the only reason you’re not ghoul food.”

He steps close to the glass, so near I can see the blood vessels writhing in his eyes. He taps the glass, once, twice, like he’s checking for cracks.

“You’re a problem,” he says. “A dangerous one. But not dangerous enough to matter.”

He’s baiting me. I know it, but I can’t stop myself.

“I know more about the Spheres than anyone you’ve got,” I say, every syllable a calculated risk. “Without my data, you’ll lose containment in under a week.”

He smiles, slow and predatory. “Containment is an illusion. We don’t contain the Spheres. We adapt to them.”

He turns to leave, then hesitates. “Enjoy the ride to Seven, Diana. If the Ghouls don’t get you, the locals sure will.”

He steps out, and the room goes silent except for the buzz of the overhead lights.

I count sixty-three seconds before the guards come to collect me. They yank me up, rougher than before, and march me down a corridor so narrow my shoulders scrape both sides. At the end is the transport bay, a concrete slab open to the wind and the smear of rain that never quite lets up in the Zone. The vehicle waiting for me is Authority-issue, matte gray, the kind with the reinforced prisoner cage and no windows except for a slit barely wide enough to admit a finger.

The guards shove me inside, unceremonious. The older one pulls a coarse black bag from the seat and jams it over my head. The air inside tastes of rubber and dust, and I feel the world shrink down to the heat of my own breath and the hiss of sweat trickling down my spine.

The vehicle lurches into motion. My wrists scream with every bump; the seat is cold, so slick with old blood and disinfectant that I slide with every turn. For the forty minutes, there is nothing but the roar of the engine and the distant, muffled voices from the cab. Once, the vehicle swerves, and I hear gunfire in the distance—sharp, staccato, over in three bursts. The guards don’t react. Either it’s normal, or they know it’s not meant for us.

In the dark, every sense ratchets up. I inventory the smell of diesel, the taste of iron where my tongue cut against my teeth, the way the sweat beads under the bag and trickles into my eyes.

I think of Maven, and what they said to me: “We need you out, and we need you to remember. The Spheres aren’t just artifacts—they’re a map. You’re the only one who can read it” I try to remember the feeling of their voice, the cadence, but it’s already going fuzzy at the edges.

The transport slows. Gravel crunches under the wheels, and then the vehicle stops. The door opens. Hands grab me, haul me out, and for a moment I’m airborne, then slammed to my knees on wet ground.

When they rip the hood off, the world turns weaponized.

Floodlights sear through both eyes, each bulb engineered to cut. For three, maybe four seconds, all I see is white—so pure and featureless it might as well be the inside of a bomb. Then the pupils catch up, shrink to pinpoints, and the prison resolves around me: walls, towers, chain-link and razor, Authority muscle everywhere you look.

Wasteland Penitentiary 07.

My new home.

The guards prod me to my feet, then march me through the gate. Inside, the world is both smaller and more dangerous: narrow paths between the barracks, armed sentries every ten meters, and the constant, overlapping echoes of a hundred voices, none of which belong to me.

Someone behind me shoves, hard enough that I stumble and nearly eat concrete. My knees catch on reflex, but it still scrapes away a strip of skin. The guard laughs, a single, ugly bark, and waves his baton at the next checkpoint.

“Move, freak.”

I do, because at this point, resistance is just a way to break something more important than bones.

The first thing you notice about Penitentiary 07 is the noise. It’s not just the shouts, though those hit like stones: “Eat shit!” “You Authority whore!” “Run, fucker, run!” There’s also a mechanical undertone—constant, grinding, like half the Zone’s obsolete turbines have been rerouted here just to chew up air and hope. The fans on the perimeter wall howl with each rotation, and every time a door cycles, it’s accompanied by a pneumatic gasp that’s obscene in its satisfaction.

The guards don’t even pretend to care. They walk in tight columns, their boots tuned to a silent metronome. Every fifth step, one slaps a baton against his thigh. Some are just for show. Most aren’t. I watch as one guard peels off, wades into a scrum near the fence, and starts bashing heads with the bored expertise of a factory worker culling defective parts. The bodies drop and rise, but the guard’s rhythm never falters.

They march me up a corridor lined in mesh. Prisoners on both sides, some pressed to the wire like bugs on a filter, others collapsed on their bunks, eyes gone gray with resignation. There are women here, more than I expected. Some of them wear the Authority’s orange jumpsuit, the rest cobble together whatever rags survive the laundry schedule. All are marked by something: a number scrawled in sharpie, a shorn scalp, a forearm tattoo that brags about past crimes or future intent.

I pass a cluster of raiders—the real kind, not Authority scarecrows. They watch me, eyes hungry, and there’s blood on one’s chin. His teeth are perfect, white and sharp. He smiles when he sees me looking, then flicks his tongue across the metal ring in his lip, slow as a snake.

The guards notice nothing, or everything. Hard to tell.

Past the intake line, the world opens into a yard. It’s not a yard in any sense you’d recognize: no grass, no sky, just a strip of half-paved mud ringed by towers and automated turrets. Prisoners wander the perimeter in pairs or trios, most keeping their heads down, a few already scheming their way up the food chain.