Rohde grabbed me and held my arms behind me. Polsen, the CO who’d joined him at the video monitor, stood nearby but didn’t touch my assailant.

“Nonsense,” I panted. “Celia is lying there with something in her hand that gave me this cut on my neck. And as for you, whoever you are, if you were waiting to take a shower, where the hell is your towel or your soap? As you two CO’s know, because you were watching all this on your monitor.”

“You stole them from me.”

“Those are my things on the floor there. Where are yours?” I demanded.

At that point CO Cornish appeared. He was the fairest–minded of the CO’s on our wing.

“You fighting again?” he asked me.

“The woman on the floor there cut me with something when I came into the shower room,” I got my story in quickly. “She still has the razor or whatever she used in her right hand.”

The woman was beginning to stir. Before Rohde or Polsen could move, Cornish bent over and pulled a strip of metal from her.

“She belongs on the prison wing. As does the other one. I’m putting all three of you on report. Warshawski, if I catch you in one more fight you’re going into segregation. And you two, off you go to your own quarters. How did you get in here, anyway?”

Rohde was forced to let me go. He and Polsen escorted my assailants off the floor. Cornish looked at my neck and told me to go to the infirmary for a tetanus shot. It was the closest he was going to come to acknowledging that I’d been jumped, but it eased the injustice of the whole situation slightly.

“I’d like to wash off first,” I said.

Cornish waited in the hall while I picked up my shampoo and towel from the filthy floor. I took off my shirt and bra and washed off under the shower most remote from the video monitor. Cornish took me in an elevator down to the basement, which I’d never seen, and waited while I got my shot. The woman on duty put some antibiotic ointment on the wound in my neck. It hadn’t gone deep enough to require stitches, which was fortunate, since she didn’t have the equipment to put me back together.

Cornish took me back to my cell and told me to be very careful where I walked at night. Everyone on my wing seemed to know about the attack. In fact, they seemed to have been warned away from the showers when I came up from my workout.

“You’re in trouble now,” Solina said, gloating. “Rohde’s fucking one of the Iscariots. He got those two to jump you out of revenge for Angie. And he put money on them.”