Tasìa clung to the gymnasium wall well above anyone's reach. Other inmates begged her to come down, pleading she would hurt herself. The less sympathetically inclined amongst them yelled that she was acting crazy. That she was only going to piss off the administration if she did not climb down immediately.

The cement blocks on which she clung were highly porous. She could stay there all day if she wanted. That she did so desire.

"I'm not coming down," she yelled. "Not today. This is my day!"

Looking down, she caught sight of Felicité, a skinny Argentinian blonde; that one did not engage with the others.

She never engaged with the others.

Nor did the other inmates care to do so in return. They called her a terrorist and an anarchist behind her back. To be fair, the latter accusation was certainly accurate. Felicité was a notorious criminal throughout Central Quadra long before she was ever caught.

Felicité observed Tasìa with a dominant eye skewed up in cool analysis. Although a frown perched above her severely dimpled chin as she gazed on, Felicité said nothing to discourage Tasìa's little act of rebellion.

One girl was even crying. Sitting with her knees folded on the floor with her head bowed down, her shoulders shook in terror as if she herself was the center of a terrible ordeal brought about by the wicked Tasìa.

Pouty, pouty Princess Woe Is Me, thought Tasìa.

"What is wrong with you, Renny," Tasìa called out to the girl by her nickname.

The girl looked up. Her face pinched tight in an angry scarlet.

"If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty."

Collective punishment. The Salvage way.

"Do you really need your pudding that bad, Renny?"

The girl scowled and she bowed her head back down to cry some more.

In her life outside of Ward Nueve, Tasìa considered herself the most docile creature on the face of the Earth. Even if in the last several years she was a cat burglar by trade, Tasìa retained a social meekness by her most innate nature. She went along to get along.

At least, that was the narrative that she told herself. Recently, anger began to change how she felt.

Even without the anger that now fueled her, the inmates of Ward Nueve proved her self-assessment to be in error. Likely, it was never quite true. With the exception of the brazen Felicité, she was a ball of sheer aggression in comparison to the eighty docile cows with whom she shared an open dorm.

One older inmate who bore a rotund sensibility returned to the gym. Tasìa had no doubt where the woman, named Ria, had disappeared to when Tasìa began to climb the wall.

Four guards followed behind the heavyset woman.

She pointed up to Tasìa.

"My God!. The girl is going to hurt herself," the woman declared. Ria's voice was loud enough for all to hear. Those words she so chose to justify her snitch.

"Thirty-two. Not exactly a girl, Ria. And I'm not doing the chemo," Tasìa shouted. "Not today."

Four guards unfurled a net they had likely scrapped from a non-lethal shotgun canister. A fifth guard entered, their leader, a tall female everyone called Missi.

Shaking her head as she caught sight of Tasìa, Missi began to load a tranq-dart into an air carbine.

Tasìa cursed herself. If she had only planned ahead instead of behaving so emotionally on the spur of the moment, she would have climbed up beside the HVAC fans to gain a more tactical advantage.

There was a set of crawl spaces along the length of the drop-down fans. She could have lifted herself into the space between the guard rail with no problem. It would have taken them the entire day just to find her if she had timed it right with no one around.

Tasìa started lateral climbing towards the drop-down fan unit held inside a jointed cage.

"Hurry," Missi urged her men upon seeing where Tasìa was headed.

They rushed up underneath her with the net spread out between them.

"Grit your teeth together," Missi urged Tasìa, "you don't want to bite your tongue when the dart hits you."

"Don't shoot me then. Just let me be!"

"On the count of three, Tasìa. One ..."

She was within four feet of the drop-down fan unit. Tasìa twisted in midair as she pushed off on taut muscular thighs. Her fingertips brushed against the metal.

Given her sleight weight and her experience, it was enough for her to establish a grip.

She heard the air gun a split moment before pain shattered through the skin of her right butt cheek.

"Aw, shit," Tasìa yelled as she felt her strength leach out of her every limb.

She plunged down and her small figure was caught up in the net. The head guard pulled her up out of the tangles, holding her with a gentle hug. Her face pressed against Tasìa's own. Brassy curls tickled the burglar's face.

"You're such a brave one up on that wall, Tasìa. Why are you a total coward when it comes to your chemo?"

I wished I knew.

Her instincts flared wild whenever the hour of chemo treatment drew closer. Her temples would pound like a drum as if to warn her, run, run, run!

She watched as Felicité studied the wall where Tasìa had climbed as if the anarchist was calculating vectors. What did that Argentine know about the art of second story B&E?

In the real world, could the anarchist be of practical value to her?

Felicité stood up from where she had squatted against a gym wall. As if to answer the questions posed in Tasìa's head, she affirmed with a nod her approval before she turned and left the gym.