Page 54 of One Step Sideways

“O’Connell’s messing with my food.” Because at that moment, that was my biggest concern, since I wouldn’t know when he was doing it unless I saw him.

Ringo paused as if waiting for more, but I couldn’t give myself away, so he stepped back to the door, keeping his back to it as I knew they had been instructed to do. No C.O. would turn his back on a prisoner, and it wasn’t that I thought Ringo didn’t trust me. I knew if they saw him do that on the monitors, they would yank him out for further training. “He only works this side for two or three days. Three on the other side. They’re desperate for more C.O.s, but the warden doesn’t like him. I’ll find out when he’d due here and warn you.” I breathed out a second sigh of relief and ate every scrap of the chicken and rice.

On day five, I finally got to go outside my cell. I was shackled until I got into a small yard, and I eyed the other three enhanced with suspicion.

No Shae.

I’d watched as he had been taken from the cell in the same leg shackles I had and expected him to be here. I understood why the weights on his feet. Shae hadn’t displayed strength, just speed and he couldn’t run with those on.

I sized the others up immediately based on my seventeen years. They were all a lot younger, which made sense. Apparently, I was one of the oldest enhanced. My generation, with the exception of an older guy in Tampa, were the original. Rawlings had told me that on our ride to Atlanta.

One seemed shit-scared and was struggling to hide it, one looked completely disinterested, and one was cocky and determined not to take any crap. I deliberately avoided them at first and ran a few laps to get my blood moving, noting the tower in each corner and the high-powered rifles aimed at us, which explained why the C.O. hadn’t stayed, although it still surprised me. Rec had always closely supervised before. Fights, killing, could happen in an instant. Then, spotting the water machine in the corner, I slowed and walked to get a drink from the paper cups.

All the running had let me test my new vision. I clearly saw the two guards with the rifles, but I would have seen that before. The inner fence was huge. The outside fence curled over the other one and I knew what a lethal/non-lethal fence looked like, even if I couldn’t hear the hum from it. First contact delivered a non-lethal shock, but a second touch would deliver a voltage more powerful than an electric chair. I’d seen a guy commit suicide in exactly that way.

I glanced over at the prison walls, and I couldn’t see through them, but that might simply take practice as well. Deciding I was running out of time, I walked to the bench table and sat my ass down with the three others.

And waited.

I’d spent seventeen years learning how to be intimidating.

The one who seemed to be the youngest broke first. “Hi, I’m Cherry.”

“Kane,” I responded immediately, which seemed to open the floodgates.

Charles, or Cherry as he preferred to be called, had been thrown out of his house at fifteen when his father had caught him with another boy. Apparently, getting the scar hadn’t bothered his dad as much as kissing another man. A year later, he’d gotten arrested for shoplifting.

“You have to be fucking with me,” I said. “You’re in a max security prison forshoplifting?” I didn’t think I could be still surprised, but I was clearly wrong. Then I paused. “Wait, you’resixteen?” I’d been the same age, though. Why I thought things might be different now, I had no idea.

Cherry shrugged, but he didn’t have to answer. This was so fucking messed up.

And I really needed to stop saying fucking. I imagined a pair of gorgeous blue eyes laughing at me.

“I’m prisoner forty-eight,” the cocky one said with a smirk. Cherry nudged him but he didn’t react. His bluster was just with me, then. He wasn’t being a dick to the other two.

It turned out prisoner forty-eight orBlazehad followed his older brother into a street gang. He’d been running drugs by the time he was thirteen. The mark on his face made no difference.

I looked at the third boy, who was their age but seemed so much older.

“What about you?” he asked me, trying to make it a demand. Trying to sound challenging.

“I was born into the wrong family,” which was true enough, and got the message across without further explanation. He relented a little and told me his name was Mark. “Who else is here? I was expecting more of us, to be honest.” Where the hell was Shae?

“We haven’t met anyone else yet. I heard there was a new guy on Friday, but I haven’t seen him,” Mark said. “Mr. Kerrigan told me.” Kerrigan was one of the C.O.s. He seemed okay.

“But we know there’s at least two more,” Cherry whispered.

The new guy had to be Shae. “Aren’t they allowed out here?”

“Not until they’ve been in the gym,” Mark said.

“The gym? Like a regular gym?”

Blaze shook his head. “It’s fortesting.”

“What kind of testing?” But I had an awful idea that I already knew. I wondered why I was out here. No one hadtestedme.

“We’ve all been through the same kind of thing,” Cherry said. “Running, but they set the treadmill so high I fell off and got burned. It was going so fast it took the skin off my hip. I guess they were trying to see if I had super-speed or something.”

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