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The Game Boy got turned over and pressed and squinted at until I was sure they’d confiscate it, and something in me went small and desperate. Anything but that. She could have patted me down twice, and I wouldn’t have flinched, but that cracked little screen was the one piece of me I couldn’t lose. Then she set it down, waved it through, and I could breathe again.

Everything I was got emptied into a plastic tray and slid across a counter. Phone… Keys… Everything I’d built that morning to be somebody, cataloged and set aside.

Another officer started running a security wand over me. He was older, heavyset, with tired eyes sunk into a face that had plainly seen it all twice and then some.

“First day?” He asked, not unkindly, sweeping it down my arms with practiced ease.

“That obvious?” I replied with an awkward laugh.

“You’ve got the face.” He gestured vaguely at all of me, making me wonder what ‘the face’ was exactly.

“Agency?” He asked before I could inquire about the face comment.

“Filling in. Their regular nurse went on leave.” I said it in a light, breezy, nothing-to-see-here kind of tone. After all, I’d had a lot of practice at nothing-to-see-here.

“Their regular nurse went on stress leave and that should tell you something.” He said ‘stress’ like it had a bad taste. Then he seemed to decide he’d said too much and jerked his chin toward a door.

“That I should run now?” I only half-joked, making him scoff.

“Something like that. The name’s Mick, by the way. You know, in case you last longer than the day.”

“Well, here’s hoping. Nice to meet you, I’m Anna Vale.” He grinned then and waved my fake ID up at me.

“Oh, I know,” he said, before handing it back and telling me,

“Medicals through there. Somebody’ll walk you. You don’t go anywhere in here without somebody walking you. Not anywhere. You understand what I’m telling you?”

“I understand,” I said, and I really did. Because I’d never worked a prison before, so I wasn’t expecting sweet little old ladies with bad hips and stories for days like my last job. But then, didn’t they say challenges built character? Or maybe that was just something people said to make the bad stuff sound like it was for a reason. I didn’t know. Either way, I needed the paycheck, so it was what it was.

The next man who approached was as friendly as Mick, which I took as a good start. He was younger, softer around the middle, with a lanyard that said JONES. He also had a way of glancing at me sideways like he was building an opinion of me as he showed me the way to the infirmary. Oh, and he talked to me the whole route.

Somewhere around the second set of gates, I nodded up at the building and said the name out loud for the first time.

“So, this is Ashlock.”

“Ashlock was a family,” he said, pulling his lanyard out to badge us through. “Farmers. All of this was theirs, back when there was nothing out here worth owning. Bad ground, though. Limestone about a foot down, so nothing ever grew for them.” The gate buzzed and he shouldered it open. “State bought them out in thirty-four for about the price of a truck.”

“And nobody thought to give it a different name?”

“Cheaper not to.” He glanced back at me, pleased with himself. “Took me a year to even notice it, you know. Ashlock. Lock.” He waited for me to laugh, so I gave him something close enough in the way of a chuckle. “Nobody did that on purpose. It’s just a family that had a name and a state that didn’t want to pay for a new sign.”

And well, I found I liked that. There was something almost restful about a place this grim getting its name by pure accident, which was how most bad things arrived, in my experience.

“They’re still here, too,” he added.

“The family?”

“Plot out past the east yard. Dozen stones, little iron rail around it. Fence went up in fifty-one when they extended the wall, and the plot just… ended up on the wrong side of it.” He shrugged, already bored with his own story. “They’re not going to move a graveyard.”

A whole family, lying in ground they had worked, sold, and walked away from. Then one day in 1951 somebody built a fence around them.

Nobody thought to ask.

They hadn’t done anything. They had simply been in a place, and the walls had arrived afterward.

“This place has a rhythm to it. That’s the thing you learn,” he said, and before I could ask what it was, he went on.

“Meds, meals, head counts and lockdowns… that’s how you measure the days… that, and the trick is to become part of the furniture.”