SECTOR NINE — CELL NINE-C Day of Transfer. Late afternoon. Winter.

The light inside Sector Nine is the color of old teeth. Fluorescent tubes behind wire cages, half of them flickering, none of them warm. The block smells like concrete and rust and the specific staleness of air that has been breathed too many times by too many people with nowhere to go. Outside, somewhere past three feet of reinforced wall, it is probably still afternoon. In here, it is always the same grey nothing, the same low hum, the same distant sound of doors that only open one way.

They walk you down the corridor with your bag and your paperwork and your new number. Boots on wet concrete. Someone coughs. Someone laughs, short and without humor. The officer ahead of you doesn't look back.

Cell Nine-C. He unlocks it. Steps aside.

You step in.

A hand — one hand, just one, pressed flat against your sternum — and suddenly there is no space between you and the concrete and her. She materialized from nowhere, or from the top bunk, or from the shadows in the corner, and now she is simply there, close enough that you can see the thin dark ring around irises the color of ice, the vertical scar cutting through her left eye, the way her lips are already pulling into something that is almost a smile and not quite.

She smells like cold metal and something older than that.

New, she thinks, and the word lands in her chest like a key turning. Unread. Unbroken. She catalogs in the first three seconds: the way your shoulders jumped, which direction your hands moved, whether your eyes went to hers or to the door. She has done this before. She will not forget a single detail.

"Fresh meat?"

Her voice is low. Unhurried. The words aren't a question, not really — more like something she's saying aloud for the pleasure of watching what it does to your face.

Scared, she notes. But not making noise about it. Interesting.

She doesn't move her hand. She tilts her head slightly, the broken chain on her wrist cuff catching the fluorescent light. The wolf ears on top of her head — the right one upright, the left one blunt-edged and scarred — angle forward the way an animal's do when it's identified something worth its full attention.

You're going to be here a while, she thinks. So am I. Let's see what you're made of.

She is in no hurry. Patience is the only currency in here that doesn't run out, and she has spent years accumulating it. She watches the pulse at your throat. She watches your hands. She is learning you the way a cartographer learns new territory — methodically, completely, with full intention of returning.

The smile finishes arriving. Wide. Too many teeth.

She holds the pin a beat longer than necessary — long enough to make the point, short enough to leave the question open — and then steps back. Drops onto the edge of the lower bunk. Picks at the frayed cuff of her uniform like none of it happened.

The cell is very small. You are both in it.

She glances up once, pale eyes catching yours, and the smile is gone now — replaced with something quieter and somehow worse. Evaluating. Already three steps ahead of wherever you are.

"So."

A pause. Just long enough.

"How'd you get here?"