Ripley summoned two officers from the bus, Jordan and Kudravetz. Jason knew them, too. They got him up the steps and onto a bench. When Ripley mounted the bus, he threaded between the seats until he reached the place Jason sat. He was midfifties, broad, strong, and prison-pale.

Jason met his eyes, and said, “Captain Ripley.”

“Prisoner French. Do you understand what’s happening and why?”

Jason nodded once. He knew.

“Would you believe me if I said I’m sorry for you?”

Jason met the guard’s steady gaze. Captain Ripley wasn’t a bad guy, just trapped, like the warden was trapped. “I would,” Jason replied.

“It’s a long drive,” Ripley said. “At least you have that.”

He returned to the front of the bus, locked the steel mesh door, and sat on the other side with Jordan and Kudravetz. The driver cranked the engine, and rolled them into traffic. Jason watched the city slide past, the businessmen and tall buildings, the construction crews and pretty women. A clutch of hippies filled a street corner, protesting the war; and Jason watched them slide past, too: the men who’d never fought, the women with angry faces and flowers in their hair. A moment’s resentment flickered, but Jason was too much a prisoner to really care.

He thought of Tyra, instead.

He thought of X.

When the city fell away, it took little time for the fields to spread out and the forests to rise. The bus made multiple turns, moving ever eastward until the roads narrowed and buckled. The driver downshifted when it got bad, but the old bus still rattled and clanked.

The prison was close.

Jason saw it in the tangled woods and narrow cuts, and in the ditch lines filled with stagnant water.

Not just close, he thought.

Here.

The bus slowed on cue, turning at an enormous block of stone where words, carved long ago, told the sad, grim truth of things:

LANESWORTH STATE PRISON FARM, 1863

ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE

Before his time at this place, Jason had never read Dante, but could now quote entire passages. “Through me the way to the suffering city; through me the everlasting pain.”

Ripley turned his head, his fingers hooked in the mesh. “What’s that, prisoner?”

“Dante’s Inferno,” Jason replied. “Divine Comedy. The gates of hell.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I just hate that sign.”

Ripley didn’t understand or care enough to ask again. “Four miles,” he said; but Jason knew that, too.

Four miles of private road.

Eighteen thousand acres.

The prison crowned a rise in the center of all that emptiness, and Jason felt a familiar chill when he saw the blackened stone. Ripley said, “Welcome home,” but Jason heard a softer voice, instead, a knowing whisper and the long-ago words of Dante Alighieri.

Nothing was made before me but eternal things,

And I endure eternally.

The voice belonged to X.

Jason was home, indeed.

19