Without his army medical kit, there wasn’t much Jax could do anyway. All he had was his towel, his shame and his fear.

He walked out wondering when they would come for him.

CHAPTER 7

Supermax, Goulburn Correctional Centre, Goulburn, NSW, Australia

THE SERPENT, that sinister shade who shared his cell and controlled his mind, had left a puzzle for Scott Wensley, or the Professor, as the other inmates called him: a carving on the cell wall.

Wensley was rarely allowed to emerge these days. Once, maybe twice a month? He was no longer sure. In any case, he lived mainly inside his own head, which had been entirely black until the Serpent had allowed him into the light. All he knew about his body was that it, too, now belonged to the Serpent – and the thirty-three people he had devoured.

There was always some new riddle for Wensley to solve, and the Serpent knew he liked riddles. This one was strange. Arabic. But it meant nothing to Wensley. Or maybe it did. Either way he did not have time for games. He had real work to do: the P versus NP problem. He had already solved the Hodge Conjecture, one of the five greatest unanswered questions in mathematics, scrawling the solution in chalk on the prison wall during his brief time in the light.

One down. Four to go.

Wensley hoped the Serpent would give him more time now he’d proved himself. Surely he would see his genius, see how important he was. Fair enough, the Hodge Conjecture had proved elementary, but the P versus NP problem would be more challenging. The Serpent could not ignore him if he cracked that nut.

So, best press on. He never knew how much time he had. How much time the Serpent would allow him.

He shook his head when he couldn’t find his chalk. ‘Not again,’ he yelled as he rummaged through his one and only drawer. He ignored the dead cockroaches, all in various stages of dissection – one of the Serpent’s projects, and brushed past the miniature mobile phone, which he hadn’t known he had but knew he couldn’t use.

He remembered back to when they didn’t even have chalk. After being told that pens, pencils, textas, crayons and even chalk were dangerous, he’d been forced to use his food to write with. He had experimented with soup, bananas, and mashed potato with gravy. Tomato sauce had been the best option, but he’d found that even thickly pasted ketchup would eventually dry, flake and peel. It was the Serpent who had suggested using faeces, and that, in fact, had improved his life – after the prison officers complained about the smell, the warden decided chalk wasn’t so dangerous after all. A box of coloured Crayolas was then dropped through the meal slot.