Sveta’s hair had been combed with her fingers. She’d pulled on a prison-supplied tunic, keeping her shirt, but tying it around her waist, in a loose approximation of what the veteran prisoners had done. One of the sleeves had a bloodstain. Her arm had been bandaged where it had been cut, but even there, the way blood had soaked into the bandaging suggested a wound more like a piece had been taken out of her, shaped something like a cross between a jigsaw piece and a lightning bolt. She had no stool, only two worn mattresses and a pile of old clothing she’d left in one corner. A single hose that dangled to waist height stuck out of the wall, near a drain that I was guessing served double duty as shower and toilet.

She walked over to the wall and slumped down into a seating position by the bars there. I remained at the stool.

She studied me.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“As far as I can tell,” I said. “They’re watching and recording us?”

I made it a question, but it was a statement.

“Maybe. You look more done with this than I am.”

“Pretty much,” I said. “We’re guessing it won’t be much longer. Jeanne Wynn said she’d pull strings. I talked to Amy after I woke up—”

“Siblings are tough,” Sveta said, quiet, her eyes intense and searching as she studied me.

“All family is, in a sense,” I said. I suppressed a sigh and changed the subject, “We’re guessing it won’t be long. An hour at most, probably half that.”

“Educated guess or…?”

“Kenzie guess, really. We know Jeanne is quick.”

Sveta nodded.

“We think it’s either going to be Natalie or someone else like Armstrong.”

Sveta looked a bit surprised. “Another Kenzie guess?”

I nodded. “We were thinking who we’d want to have there when we get out, worried family members, friends. Ashley thought Armstrong made sense, and the more we thought about it, we thought it was likely. He’d want to help if he could and he does have some clout, he knows Jeanne a bit.”

Sveta nodded, and her face relaxed a bit from the line of thinking alone.