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The man smiles, all teeth, and backs away. “Sure thing, boss.”

He glances at me, and the look says this isn’t over. When he’s gone, I flex my hand, feeling the ache where blood flow has already started to bruise the skin.

Stitch is back at my side, touching the lump on her head. “Asshole,” she mutters.

I don’t answer. My attention is fixed above.

Kang stands on the balcony like a statue carved from judgment and shadow, his posture too straight to be casual. His eyes are locked on me—sharp, unreadable, a storm barely held back. For a second, just one, I think I see it: the faint twitch of his jaw, the way the muscle clenches like he’s biting back something he’ll never say.

He holds my gaze, and I feel it like a tether tightening between us.

Anger. Frustration. Something else buried underneath.

Then he turns away without a word, barking orders to the guards, his voice clipped and cold.

I know what he’s done. He’s painted a target on my back. He’s made me worth fighting for, made it clear I matter more than I should. It’s tactical. Calculated.

But there was a moment—just a flicker—where he looked at me like I wasn’t just another mission file. And despite everything, despite the cuffs and the orders and the walls he never lowers... I felt it.

I hate him for it. I hate how part of me aches for what that look could mean.

So I file it away, sharp and silent, like a blade I might need later.

After breakfast the canteen door slams shut and the guards herd us into the labor corridor, the tannoy crackling to life: “Assignments. Line up.”

The line is a parade of ragged bodies. I hang at the back, pressed for space. Stitch limps beside me; I offer my arm, but she waves me off. “Gotta learn to roll with it,” she says, eyes fixed ahead.

The guards tick off names, pairing each inmate with a shift. You can tell a lot by the task—they shunt the disposable into tunnel duty or refuse detail, keep “clean” work for anyone they think might pay off. When it’s my turn, the guard—a square-jawed hulk with boredom etched into his face—barely glances at me. He shoves a slip into my hand, no partner included. I’m the new girl; I know exactly what that means. They want to make it harder for me.

Stitch steps away, clutching fungus-scraping gear for her “bioremediation” detail in the west tunnel. I unfold my slip: “Sanitation—Shower Block.” Mopping the shit off shower floors. Everyone’s eyes flick to me—half warning, half pride. “Don’t let the ghouls get you,” Stitch calls over her shoulder.

At the rusted metal locker, orange with time, the guard clicks open the padlock. Others crowd in, grabbing the decent brooms. He glares when I hang back, but says nothing. Once they’re gone, I pick a bucket cracked at the rim but still watertight, a brush with bristles splayed like a dead insect, and a bottle of blue disinfectant—label faded, cap crusted shut. I pop it open; the old-kind stench almost makes me retch. I swirl the liquid in the bucket until it sloshes. Enough to clean a block of showers or strip skin in seconds.

The guard chews a toothpick. “You gonna stand there all day?”

“No,” I say flatly, slinging the bucket. The brush goes in my back pocket, the bottle at my belt.

I step into the narrow, coffin-like corridor leading to the showers. Water stains creep down the walls like drowned fingers, and dead LEDs flicker overhead. The air is thick and damp. I walk slow—busy, invisible—and arrive at the showers.

The showers are the coldest room in the block. Not just in temperature, though there’s no shortage of that—the water is drawn from somewhere below freezing, the walls sweat all year round, and the floor is a patchwork of standing ice and black slime where the drains gave up decades ago. No, it’s something deeper. The way sound doesn’t quite carry; the way the fluorescents flicker with deliberate irregularity, like someone is watching, just on the other side of the hum. The way your skin puckers before you ever strip off your clothes.

The door at the entrance is painted with a yellow line, “AUTHORIZED INMATES ONLY,” but that’s a joke. Everyone knows it’s a free-for-all past the threshold. I enter with my bucket and brush and stand a second, letting my eyes adjust to the stutter of light. The tile is white, or was, each square spiderwebbed with cracks, grouting gone gray with the fungus that nothing can kill. Rust streaks snake from the hardware—old pipes, newer faucets, one replaced recently, the rest not. The air stings with ammonia and something sour, unplaceable, beneath the industrial bleach.

First task is the grout. I drop to my knees by the central drain, kneeling on the ridged rubber mat that’s supposed to keep you from slipping and instead soaks up every drop of moisture, pressing cold through to the bone. I dip the brush in the blue disinfectant, watching the color bloom like an oil slick before jamming it into the narrow hole behind the drain. Scrub in slow circles. Count each hairline. The acid eats the fungus, but only just. My hands sting and crack; I barely feel it anymore.

I scrub in rhythm: clockwise, counter, two fast, three slow. The only way to get through it is to disappear inside the pattern. I recite numbers under my breath, muttering, memorizing. The sound is eaten by the room.

At the far wall, the “showers” proper: a row of battered steel heads, only three functional. I move down the line, checking each one for hair and gunk, scrubbing away the gray knots that collect like polyps. Each nozzle is crusted with scale, the water pressure a lottery. In the center stall, the tile is shattered, and someone has jammed a rag in the gap to slow the leak. I pull the rag, wring it out, and add it to the bucket. Chemical taste rises off my skin.

Once the baseline clean is done, it’s my turn. Strip and rinse. Unwritten code, but no one else is here.

I peel the jumpsuit away, standing it on the plastic bench while I test the first shower head. The water hits with the shock of a live wire, finding every cut and bruise I’ve been ignoring. I step into the spray, letting it run from crown to ankle, biting my lip when it finds the fresh scrape at my wrist from the cuffs. The pulse of the water is uneven, the sound alternating between high-pitched hiss and a gutteral clunk as it fights the sediment in the line.

I brace my hands against the wall and lean forward, letting the water sheet off my shoulders. I try not to shiver. I fail. The chill ratchets up my spine, setting every muscle on edge, but it’s better than feeling the dirt. I close my eyes, counting the pattern of drips as they echo from the high ceiling. Three seconds, then two, then another three. I match my breathing to the intervals.

It isn’t until the third set that I hear the door.

I turn, water streaming from my hair. The entrance is half-obscured by the locker partition, but the footsteps are unmistakable. Two: one heavy, one deliberate.