The noise outside Inaya’s cell got louder. The voices, more frantic. There was more screaming. Not just during the day, but at night as well. People were being dragged through the halls.

“I can’t stand this,” Inaya’s cellmate, whose name was Mettie, said. She chattered on the first few days, but, like Inaya, eventually fell into a deep depression.

They spent the time playing word games and exchanging stories. Inaya’s were always general, guarded. She shared some of her family life in Tirhan, but little else. It still felt too dangerous, even now.

Mostly, Inaya listened. Not just to Mettie, but to everything happening in the hall. Things were not cooling outside the walls, but getting worse. She desperately yearned to take back control of it all. Every time she heard a cry, her body tried to shift, to break free.

“I’m going to kill them when they come for me,” Mettie said.

“It’s not worth trying,” Inaya said.

“No, no,” Mettie said, and her gaze got a faraway look, as if she were back with her husband and sons, watching her whole world get torched. “No, when they come for me, I will fight. Not like you. I won’t sit here and rot like you.”

But it was not Mettie they came for first. It was Inaya.

A new female jailer, one Inaya had never seen before, hauled her through the filter. Mettie tried to run, but the jailer cried out, and two more men came from the other side of the hall. They tackled Mettie. She made a good show of it. Inaya admired her attempt. Why haven’t I tried to run? she thought.

The female jailer led Inaya away as Mettie still fought. Mettie cried after Inaya, “Break out the first chance you get, girl! They will eat us here!”

Inaya found herself back in one of the organic rooms with the glow worms in the ceiling. She found it to be a nice change of scenery. She wondered if she could ask for a change of clothes. A shower, perhaps. Then she started to cry, because it was insulting, to realize how deferential she had become in just a few weeks. Months? They had not even touched her, really. They had not cut off a limb or suspended her over fire. They had not even starved her. Yet here she was, cowed and broken.

The Angel entered. Not a new one, but the same one who had caught her out with the letters. She found it oddly comforting to see him again, and hated herself for that, too. For his part, he did not seem as confident this time. There was worry on his face, and something more. Inaya recognized it immediately, because it was something she had felt every moment of every day now for some time. It was fear.