She tried to staunch the flow of blood, but as the hours passed, Mettie’s breath got shallower. Inaya’s cries for help went unanswered.

In the morning, Mettie was dead.

And the prison was terribly, terribly quiet.

Breakfast did not come.

Nor did dinner.

Inaya sat at the edge of the filter and screamed for someone to come for Mettie’s body. Then she screamed for food and water. She could hear other prisoners yelling, their voices muffled by the filters. But no guards. No prisoners being transferred. It was as if life in the prison had stopped.

Mettie’s body was beginning to stiffen, and Inaya was terribly thirsty. She began to test the filter. She tore off the end of her habit and pushed it through the filter. The habit sizzled and disintegrated. She tried a few strands of her hair. The filter ate them, leaving nothing behind.

Mettie’s blood caked the bottoms of her shoes, and that gave her an idea. She wiped her shoe with Mettie’s blood and stuck it through the filter, quickly.

When she pulled the shoe back in, the blood was gone, and some of the cloth had frayed, but it hadn’t disintegrated.

Inaya regarded Mettie’s thick body. Nasheenian filters were much worse than most. They’d take off limbs, eat entire people. But here they wanted to keep prisoners alive, and that meant keeping filters dangerous, but not deadly. She would not be eaten going through this filter, not all at once, but she would be badly injured unless she protected herself with something the filter would find equally as appealing.

She listened to the world outside the filter. A few prisoners had taken up pounding on the walls with their plates or refuse buckets, but that didn’t last long. Everything was made of clay, and eventually broke into shards. Inaya knew that because she had once tried doing the same.

Eventually, she would excrete enough saffron that she could shift, but even then, escape wasn’t certain. The walls were made of solid pieces of stone, and the filters would eat her in any organic form, no matter which she took. She was no magician; she couldn’t change the direction of the nits in the weave.

That meant the only reliable way out… was through.

Inaya took a deep breath.

She went to her overflowing refuse bucket and poured it out into one corner. She gagged as she banged the bucket on the floor until it broke.

Then she took the largest shard and knelt in front of Mettie’s body. Her blood would coagulate soon. Then what chance did she have?