Tasìa watched Castro sit at the break-room table, stirring her coffee with a little wooden stick. Kae-Kae's lower lip drooped down in a glum demeanor.

CO Merino Luz popped his head in through the break room entrance.

"Everything up to code, Ms. Del Alma-Gris. You should teach a class in the Education Department on proper locker maintenance. It would do your fellow inmates a lot of good."

Tasìa nodded her head, appreciatively.

"I'll give that some consideration."

He smacked his hands together as if to conclude the conversation.

"Nice chat. I've got to go call it into the lieutenant."

She turned to Castro.

"Come on, it's pretty out there today. Let's get some sunshine."

The Sun was lit brightly above, radiating nearly uncomfortable heat in the mid-morning. It was mid-season when the days were still hot, but the crisp night air chilled the bone.

Her skin tingled as Tasìa felt a little nauseous. Three days after treatment, little of its effect had flushed out of her system, as of yet.

She glanced towards the radio tower and toward the three PA speakers that stood on poles around the yard complex.

A guard's truck rolled along the road just beyond the double fences. There was a small parking lot on a hill above the yard where the guards routinely parked as they watched the inmates.

In the early months of Tasìa's captivity, she walked the track one fine, humid eve. As she approached the curve of the track just below the lot, a sudden cascading sound from a nest of cicadas alarmed her.

She looked around to find the source of the odd squall. Inside a truck, up on the hill, she could see through the tinted glass windshield a guard slumped unconscious.

His head rested limply against his shoulder which slumped against the door that he leaned upon. A thin grooved rod poked out the door window; its antennae end pointed towards a grove of trees behind the truck where it picked up the sound of insects and amplified their noise into alien-sounding feedback.

She reported the incident to no one. Tasìa filed it away in her head as potentially useful data.

Mere minutes after her walk, a lockdown of the unit was called in. It only lasted a few hours.

The next morning, Tasìa overheard COs talking of a guard who had suffered a diabetic coma being pulled out of a truck and carried away in an ambulance.

Why the constant surveillance of prisoners, Tasìa mused. When inmates thought no one was listening-in to their conversations, they tended to speak uninhibitedly on their activities.

Every slip-up on their part went into a database that formed a broader picture of the underground economy in the Greater Quadra.

The tower could not be observed from the yard. Tasìa now recognized it as the missing piece of the puzzle that riled her curiosity since her incarceration began. Its original purpose must have been intelligence-gathering on inmate activity.

General Kutuzova's presence and the dilapidated condition of the tower's underground infrastructure told Tasìa that its original purpose had been subverted.

The guards gathered intelligence, listening in and recording conversations, still. Who did all of that information go to now? Who filtered it, processed it, and made use of it?

Castro coughed as she walked beside Tasìa. It spun her mind back to the here and now.

Tasìa decided it was too late for caution. There were several means that the powers-that-be could intercept their conversation, but what did it matter now?

If everything went according to plan, she would be outside the barbed wire prison fences in nine hours.

"Kae-Kae, you have barely touched your coffee," Tasìa admonished.

"I have to tell you something."

Tasìa glanced around. It was Saturday. Even this early, approximately 9:30 a.m., the yard was crowded.

"I thought so."

"It no longer matters if they overhear us, Tasìa. I have to get this off my chest."

Coffee spilled on Castro's fingers as she quivered. Her lips tensed in spasm. For several seconds, she did not speak, but walked with a graceless squish onward.

Tasìa decided Castro would need more prompting.

"Is this about something I found in my locker?"

Castro's eyes raised up to the sky. She nodded her head in a quick set of jerks.

Tasìa continued.

"I got back to my cell after talking to Missi, Thursday. I heard something in my locker crash and drop. Do you know what I found?"

"Yes."

"Why did you put it there?"

Castro walked beside her with a listless stroll. She sipped her coffee before answering.

"They offered me something I could not refuse. A way out of here."

"The lieutenant?" Tasìa asked, skeptically.

She was in the lieutenant's sights, but that kind of offer was beyond the credible reach of his station in life.

"I didn't speak to him. Not directly. But Ria is his mouthpiece. She speaks for him. I'm so sorry, Tasìa."

Tasìa could not help but to glare as she watched Castro. She wanted to force the woman to look her in the eyes. To make her feel uncomfortable.

"This is not the first time you have served in this capacity. Is it, Kae-Kae? Since I have been here, six short months, there have been two other girls caught with weapons in their lockers. There was also a third girl whom they found a stash of pills that I've always doubted belonged to her."

"You are right. I have done many, so very many bad things. Here, and throughout my life."

"Right. And in all of those incidences, you were paid, right?"

Castro wrung her hands as her eyes began to glisten wetly.

"That's right. That is right. I am a horrible excuse for a human being."

As Tasìa watched the emotional display, she could only feel a coldness inside of her.

"Kae-Kae, don't drift. Let's stick to the point I'm trying to convey to you."

"Okay," she answered weakly.

"In all of these incidences where you were paid, did they ever offer you anything remotely as valuable as your freedom?"

"Of course not."

"Did you stop to wonder why going up against me was considered so much more valuable than anything else you have done for them?"

Castro's eyes squinted, and she turned up her nose. Her brows furrowed in calculation. Castro kept her mouth firmly shut.

Tasìa continued.

"Did the offer not sound too good to be true, no?"

Castro's head quivered as she shook it. An odd, tight smile creased her face. Tasìa wanted to punch her.

Tasìa pressed on, "so you do know why I'm such a hot target. If you're truly sorry for what you did, Kae-Kae, you will tell me what you know."

"I can't, Tasìa. I'm sorry. Ria told me what it was really about. That was after I told her the offer was bullshit."

"And what she told you convinced you that it was not bullshit?"

"Right. I needed proof, I got proof. I can't tell you. If it ever got back to Ria, she would make my people on the outside pay. You know who her husband is."

Tasìa stopped walking, and she glared back once more.

"If you can't tell me, then we have nothing further to discuss."

Tasìa left Castro standing on the track, alone. She walked back toward the dorm.

At the picnic tables, she passed by a gathering of inmates playing a tabletop game consisting of demonic creatures and Gothic architecture, laminated cards and polyhedral dice.

They spoke excitedly.

"The goon squad just went by. Someone is getting picked up."

Tasìa had a feeling she knew who.

She threw the double doors of the worker's collective dorm open with suspired breath. Her stomach felt light.

Her plans felt as if they were all about to come to naught; she knew what was going to happen next.

As she approached the officer's station, two guards, tall and menacing, turned their heads toward her.

Luz approached.

"I reported into the lieutenant. Sorry, del Alma-Gris, he has got it in for you, hard. He still wants to dump you into the Cistern, and have a talk with you.

"Probably just to scare you. However, I'm writing him up, regardless. Insufficient evidence is insufficient evidence even if he is justified in giving your actions more thorough scrutiny."

Tasìa nodded her head.

"Don't kick yourself, Luz. You're only doing your job."

One of the guards asked her to turn around and to put her hands behind her back. She then heard the expert flick of handcuffs swishing metal against metal from out of his pocket as she complied.