As they pulled up to the weathered dock, the chain that connected her cuffs to an iron hook in the floor was released. The guards took her by each elbow, careful not to risk touching any of her skin as they escorted her off the boat. One of them nodded a friendly farewell to the boat captain, who tipped his hat in response. Nova almost laughed for how normal the small interaction seemed, here, on this brutal island, where nothing could possibly be normal.
Two more guards and the prison warden were waiting at the end of the dock. She was shoved into a small motorized vehicle and again had her enclosed hands chained up, this time to a hook on the vehicle’s ceiling. No one said much. Some small talk between the warden and the guard who was driving, too quiet for Nova to make out anything over the roaring motor. She welcomed being left alone, though, inspecting the walls of the prison as the car skirted the narrow switchbacks up the cliffside.
As the ground leveled off, she saw the guard towers, manned by Renegades in familiar gray uniforms. Two were carrying guns. The others had no weapons she could see, but she knew that only meant that their superpowers were dangerous enough that weapons would be superfluous.
The wall around the prison was thick stone topped with razor wire. No surprises there. Neither was the gate that opened to let their vehicle through. The main cell block itself was a rectangular structure in the center of the compound, built with only a utilitarian vision in mind. No windows. Only one door, as far as Nova could see, and as far as the blueprints had told her. She had known what to expect, but somehow it still astounded her. The dreary hopelessness of it.
She was not led directly into the cell block, but rather into a smaller building that did have windows, though they were narrow and caked with years of mud flung up by the island’s relentless wind. A man at a desk talked briefly to the warden before filling out a line in a register. He turned the page to Nova and asked her to sign in the box.
Feeling numbed to her core, Nova stared at the words on the page while one of the guards opened the cuff on her right hand, freeing her fingers so she could hold the pen. The date and time blurred on the paper, but the name was in sharp relief. Nova McLain. Seeing it gave her a jolt, to know they hadn’t yet figured out her real name.
It was followed by a prisoner number, 792, and her alias. Nightmare.
Her hand trembled as she took the pen, which was strapped to the desk in case anyone decided to try and stab the administrator with it.
Before they could stop her, she scratched out Nightmare and scribbled Insomnia.
“Hey!” said the man behind the desk, starting to grab the book away, even as Nova hastily signed her name in the empty box. He and the warden exchanged scowls.
“It’s fine,” said the warden. “Let’s just get this done. You’ve assigned a cell yet?”
“Got a few options,” said the administrator, still looking sour over Nova’s small act of rebellion. “She going into solitary like the last one?”
The warden snorted with contempt. “Please. She puts people to sleep. It’s just about the least threatening ability we’ve got on this island.”
The man behind the counter grunted. “Cell B-26 it is.”
Once signed in, Nova was taken to a tiny concrete room and handed a striped jumpsuit. The cuffs were removed fully and Nova rubbed her wrist, not just because of the soreness brought on by the restraints, but to confirm that the emptiness she felt was real. Her bracelet was gone. Adrian really had taken it from her, the last connection she had to her father.
A female guard stood by while she changed, instructing her to put all her belongings in a bin that appeared in a small slot in the wall. It didn’t matter. They could burn her clothes and fancy Renegade-issued boots for all she cared. The one thing that mattered had already been taken.
Well, the one thing besides her freedom. Her family. Her future.
She ground her teeth, chastising herself for thinking it. She hadn’t even been there a day. Hadn’t even seen her cell. It was too soon to be giving up.
She was just stepping into the jumpsuit when something punctured her in the back, right between her spine and left shoulder blade. She cried out and spun around. The guard was holding a device that looked a bit like Nova’s homemade stun gun.
“What was that?” Nova yelled, reaching for the burning spot on her back. She felt something hard embedded into her skin.
“Tracker,” said the guard in a bored voice, setting the gun to the side. “Prisoners used to try and escape. Now, we almost welcome it. They don’t get far with those, and it can liven things up around here for a day or two.”
Nova shoved her arms through the sleeves and did up the buttons. “You could have warned me.”
“Oh? And you would have just stood still and said, ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ when I was done? You’d be the first.”
Cuffed again, with the same guards flanking either side, Nova was finally led through the muddy yard and into the cell block. Since Ace had been captured, she had spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it must be like inside Cragmoor Penitentiary, and now she tried to be amused that, after everything, she was being given a VIP tour. She knew the exterior shell of the original building had been relatively untouched, but the interior had been demolished and reconfigured a number of times since they had started housing prodigies. She knew that the prison was constantly being altered and remodeled to contain new superpowers and the many complications they afforded their captors.
But nothing she had read had given much indication as to what the interior of the prison was actually like, and she had pictured tiers of jail cells stretching the length of the building, linked by narrow walkways and high rails.
The reality was nothing like that.
Walking into the cell block, she was greeted by a vast open space stretching from one stone wall to the next. Until her gaze traveled up, to where the ceiling was reinforced with steel beams nearly five stories overhead. The cells, each one a single solitary box, were suspended from the beams by thick cables.
There was a narrow walkway, but rather than connecting the cells, it lined the perimeter of the wall around them, where the guards could make their rounds and keep watch on the inmates.
If there were prisoners inside the suspended cells, she couldn’t see them from below. The place was silent as death, a silence made more complete by the wind howling against the outside walls, and then their footsteps.
Cell numbers were stenciled with spray paint onto the stone wall, and they paused in front of B-26. Her guard nodded toward a room on the second level, surrounded by black tinted glass. A second later, the grating noise of gears echoed around them, and one of the cells began to descend. Nova watched its slow approach, a part of her wishing that it would just fall and crush her and end this whole ordeal before it even started. Again, she cursed herself for feeling so hopeless. She was an Anarchist. She was Ace Anarchy’s niece. She was never hopeless.
But it was hard to convince herself of that now, when the cell hit the floor with a clang and she found herself scanning an enclosure a third the size of her bedroom at the house on Wallowridge, and even that had felt cramped.
One of the guards nudged her in the back. Her lips tightened and she thought about asking if they were going to let her keep the pretty new handcuffs. But her mouth was dry and her heart wasn’t in it.
What did a few pounds of chains matter at this point?
The chains clanked as she stepped into the cell. Dark. Cold. Devoid of comfort. It felt a little bit like stepping back into the subway tunnels, but this time, there would be no reprieve from the endless gloom.
Her feet crossed the threshold, and a set of bars slid shut behind her with a reverberating thud. She turned and took in the horizontal metal grate, probably iron. Then a second series of bars, these vertical, slammed down over the first. She gulped. Carbon fiber, she guessed, probably an extra precaution for any inmates who could manipulate metal. Then she heard a hum and saw a faint flicker of red light along the edges of the cell. Her eyebrows lifted. Lasers, too?
Sweet rot.
It seemed hilarious, all of a sudden, that Nova had dreamed of breaking into this place. She’d not only dreamed of rescuing Ace from here, she’d actually thought she could succeed. She hadn’t known how, but failure hadn’t seemed like an option.
Now she realized how useless all her plotting had been.
They were never going to rescue Ace.
Just like no one was ever going to rescue her.
As soon as the cell was secured, an internal device on her chains clinked and the cuffs fell from her wrists, landing in a pile at her feet.
The noise of cogs and gears echoed around her and the cell began to rise upward. The guards dropped away below and all she could see beyond the bars was the cell block’s exterior wall. Thick stone and mortar.
Though she knew that there were other cells suspended in the air only a few feet away from her own, it made no difference that they were there, or whether or not they were occupied.
She was alone.
She had only ever felt truly alone one time in her life—in the moments that followed the murders of her parents and Evie. After she put their killer to sleep, she had stood over his unconscious body, gripping the gun still hot from his own hand, ordering herself to kill him. Kill him. Kill him. She had been alone then, and she had known it. No family. No one to take care of her. No one to help her be brave. No one to help her through this.
Until Ace had come and she had remembered—no, she wasn’t alone. She still had family. She still had Uncle Ace, and it was all she had, and she had grasped on to that small piece of comfort as tightly as her trembling little fists could.
Now Nova surveyed her cell. Gray walls, made of what material she couldn’t guess, but something told her it might be chromium. There was a sleeping pad as thick as a pencil in one corner. A washbasin against the wall, and a toilet with a small holding tank in the corner. It was so cramped that her feet would be on the mattress pad as she did her business.
Not knowing what else to do, Nova sat down on the mat and tried to think of all the choices she had made that had brought her here. All the mistakes. The failures.