Our destination was a building that looked to be a stout castle, split in two and separated, with an office building growing out of the divide, concrete and tinted windows covered in bars. Wrought iron fences with whole sections wrought to be bent to right angles, spikes rising up from the face of it in echoes of the multitude of medieval-style towers that leaned out and then up from buildings around us.

Just a few days. No alternative, we did this, we let the Wardens handle shit and work out an alternative, and we went back. If we couldn’t, we’d break out. We had the means.

The cold was biting enough that I was glad to be indoors. I was less glad that the lobby before the internal prison gates was as small as it was.

I was very aware of Amy entering the space, of her proximity to me, and to everyone else. Vista avoided being within arm’s reach, and on Amy’s opposite side, guards did the same. It made everything else more squashed with the sudden influx being what it was.

My dad went to her side, creating a buffer of space where others could move closer without being in immediate proximity.

I’d complained the greenhouse patio was claustrophobic. This was worse.

From alien political pressure to cold to claustrophobia. There wasn’t any time or place since I’d entered this damn world that I’d felt capable of breathing.

Vista had talked about how the little things went underappreciated. That the public would never know about the monsters being slain, the nascent S-class threats that never grew beyond a certain point or figured out how to use their full potential, because the PRT or the Wardens had stepped in.

With orders and directions given in a language we didn’t understand, we were all filed off together into an adjacent area. The western of the two half-castles.

Co-ed shower, with only a dividing wall up to my shoulder.

We had to. As much as I could briefly entertain the notion that we might eventually have to say ‘fuck it’ and stop caring as much about what civilians thought, in practice, if aid for millions was on the line, I’d eat the shit, I’d endure.

I’d fucking endure my sister being here, of all things.

I just had to hope our more temperamental and unreliable allies could keep it toned down. That we could manage this for the one or two days it was necessary.

We handed over gear, piece by piece, slowly, with multiple guards keeping weapons trained on us. Because we’d cooperated this far, but when asked to hand over phones, keys, pens, loose change, that was when we’d pull out guns and open fire, right?

Fuck me. Fuck this.