Co-ed, anarchy. Going by what Miss Militia said, the principle of there being little to no traffic laws and high personal responsibility with severe punishments seemed to hold within the prison grounds themselves. There were places where guards patrolled on raised platforms or on the other side of windows, guns in plain few. I could see two cases of them breaking up prisoners—one case where a man and woman were sitting too close together, suggesting that co-ed didn’t mean open season, and another case where things were getting loud—two parents with kids a few years younger than Kenzie were arguing about a game in their natural tongue.

Our priority was to find the quiet, to powwow, figure out where we stood.

We just had to get through a couple of days.

Ashley’s natural intimidation worked in our favor. When we found a place with only a few people, a little damp where moisture dripped down through a crack in the glass above, they saw Ashley and got out of dodge.

“No cameras?” I asked.

“Guards but no cameras, not here,” Kenzie said. “I can tell.”

“You’re an asset,” Tristan said. “And you’re a champ.”

She nodded, no longer smiling, all seriousness.

“How are you for tech, Kenz?” I asked.

She reached up to tap the side of her head. The sound was artificial, a clink. “Hairclip. Projection. Only a few hours of battery. I’m gonna turn it off and hide it.”

“Okay.”

“Um. Oxygen tank and mask. That’s a good one.”

“They didn’t find it?”

“It was hidden with projection. I hung it on the shower lever while talking to Chris. Um. Oh, I’ve got these…”

She reached up and she scraped a fingernail along the surface of her eye. Ashley moved closer, to block the guards’ view.

Golem had the biggest body, and he blocked off the view to the side. He beckoned for Rain to come sit beside him.

“Oh,” Kenzie said, letting go of her eye. “Vista.”

“What?”

“Can you uh, not do your thing, like, at all? At least while I’m working on the eyes? Because your thing borks up my thing and hoo boy. It would be like pulling a pinecone out of a grape.”

“Not doing my thing,” Vista said.

The action drew a prisoner’s attention. A woman, broad with bad skin, raised her voice, asking what might have been a question, but which lacked the inflection at the end.

Sveta turned, and with one finger, drew a line from lower eyelid to chin, then pointed to Kenz.

The woman made a face, sympathetic.

Kenzie pulled out the apparatus that had been phased into her eye, six inches long and bristling with antennae and prongs. She partially removed the one from her other eye, then pushed it back in.

“Not removing it?”