For a second, I think it might be a shower, which is horrifying, even though I know it happens in regular human prisons. But this one has no showerhead, which I hope is a good thing, even though I’m definitely not willing to bet on it…

I walk through the door and try not to wince at the sound of her closing—and locking—it behind me. “Stand in the center of the room, arms at your sides. And don’t move.”

“What is this place?” I do as she says but keep looking around, hoping to find some hint of what’s about to happen.

“I said not to move.”

I freeze in place. “Okay, but can you at least tell me—”

“Close your mouth.”

I snap my jaw shut so fast that my teeth clack together. Just in time, it seems, because a huge wind kicks up out of nowhere. It buffets me from all sides, making it nearly impossible for me to follow her repeated warning to “stand still.”

Just when I think I’m about to blow away, the wind dies down, and fire takes its place.

“Do not get off the X,” the woman orders.

I do what she says, forcing my feet to stay on the black painted X even as smokeless flames dance across the floor just out of reach of me before licking up the walls to the ceiling. It’s like no fire I’ve ever seen before, the individual flames so hot, they’re burning blue, and I know that one slip, one wrong move, and I’ll end up incinerated.

It seems to go on forever, until I’m terrified I’m going to burn just from the heat in the room alone. But then, all of a sudden, the heat just disappears.

“Follow me,” she instructs again, and I do on wobbly legs.

I still want to know what just happened to me, but to be honest, I’m too scared to ask. Every time I open my mouth in here, something worse happens.

The next station requires a clothing change—out of the cute sundress I wore to graduation and into the black jumpsuit that’s going to be my prison uniform until I finally manage to get out of here. My phone and earrings are taken now and put into a bag along with my dress.

I expect her to take my promise ring, and my chest tightens. But she just turns to me and asks, “Do you wish to keep the ring?”

I know I’m not supposed to ask questions, but I can’t stop the words that rush out. “I can keep my ring? But I thought no jewelry?”

She stares at me hard, and I think she’s not going to answer, but then she says, “We make exceptions for promise rings to prevent people from having someone incarcerated to cancel a promise. The Aethereum is not a personal escape clause.”

My heart is pounding in my chest, and I stare at the ring, twisting it around and around my finger. I still don’t know what Hudson promised me. Do I want to hold him to his promise? And what about when we escape and I go back to Jaxon? Is it fair to hold him to his promise then?

Twist, twist, twist.

“Choose quickly, Miss Foster.”

I take a deep breath and reach for the ring…and can’t do it. Removing it now would be like giving up on Hudson. On us. And I know I will have to eventually to save Jaxon, but I can’t do it today. I’m not ready to lose him yet.

“I’ll keep it.”

107

Un-Solitary

Confinement

We stop at two more stations, both of them as scary in their own way as the first one, before she leads me down one more dark hallway. This is the longest we’ve had to walk, and I’m beginning to hope that all the intake procedures are finally done, but then she leads me into one more room.

My stomach clenches as I pass through the door after her, terrified of what might be coming next.

It turns out that what’s next is the bureaucratic part of intake, considering this room is filled with desks and filing cabinets. I should probably be reassured, considering that part, at least, looks like every other government bureaucratic room in the world. And maybe I would, except for the fact that the entire room looks like something out of a Transylvania horror movie…and the creatures sitting behind the desks look even creepier.

Eight black desks are lined up in two rows running the length of the room. The laptops and file folder holders on each one should have lent an air of normalcy to the space, but the pointy black nightmare chairs behind each desk—and the occupants of said chairs—take even that away.

The intake guards, or whatever you call them, are the creepiest-looking people I have ever seen. Zombies? I wonder as I eye their grayish, nearly translucent skin and yellow eyes. Or something even more menacing?

Their cheeks are sunken, their long hair gray and greasy looking, and their fingers tipped with two-inch-long razor-sharp talons that click ominously every time they make contact with the keyboards.

“Have a seat.” The whisper is paper thin and directed at me, though I’m not sure where it came from—at least not until the woman who has escorted me this far orders, “Go to the first desk on your right. This is the last step.”

“Last step of what?” I ask, hoping to stall a little. Everything inside me is screaming at the idea of sitting in front of one of those things, whatever they are.

“Intake,” she answers through narrowed eyes, and it’s the first question of mine other than the promise ring that she’s answered. And, her look says, it’s going to be the last.

When I don’t immediately start moving, she walks toward me with narrowed eyes. And this time when she tells me to move, her tongue comes out in warning. I nearly scream when I realize it’s forked…and black.

I start walking, not sure which is worse at this point—dead-looking desk guy or snake lady—but deathly afraid I’m about to find out.

But I’m barely halfway to my assigned desk when the door opens and Hudson walks in, escorted by a man in a black suit and sunglasses who looks remarkably like the woman I’ve been stuck with all this time.

“Grace!” he says, relief practically dripping from the word.

He’s dressed in the same black jumpsuit that I am—and looks better in it than I do, I’m sure—but his normally perfect pompadour is currently sticking straight up. There’s also a line of soot running down his left cheek, and his knuckles are all scraped up.

“I’m okay,” I tell him, starting toward him instinctively.

But the woman is there between us, tongue out in warning as she orders me to “ssssit,” in a tone that brooks no more disobedience.

So I do, hightailing it over to the super-creepy-looking guy manning the first desk to the right.

Hudson ends up sitting directly across from me, and he looks a lot more composed than I feel, despite the disheveled hair. When I finally manage to catch his eye, he gives me a reassuring smile and a little nod, and it works…a bit. And when Flint walks in a couple of minutes later, his afro blown out bigger than I’ve ever seen it, courtesy of the wind/fire room from hell, we both breathe giant sighs of relief.

The woman, whoever she is, disappears once Flint is seated—and so do the two men who obviously escorted Hudson and Flint through their own hellish intake procedures.

The moment they’re gone, we all relax a little, because while these guards are really creepy to look at, they don’t seem overly motivated to do anything but their jobs.

“Are you okay?” Hudson asks Flint once the door shuts behind the scary woman and her two compatriots.

“Yeah. You?”

He nods, and so does Flint.

“What just happened to us?” I whisper. “And, Hudson, were you able to…you know…take care of your cuffs?”

Hudson shakes his head, looking down at his hands. “I’ve never seen cuffs like these before. I didn’t know which rune to remove.”

“This whole place is ridiculous,” Flint adds. “I’ve been thinking about it. I’m pretty sure the flames were magical delousing, making sure we had no extra magic hitchhiking on us that the bracelet couldn’t neutralize.”

“And the imaging in the last room was to map us for identification,” Hudson says. “In case something happens to us.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured, too,” Flint says after clearing his throat a few different times. “I don’t know what any of the rest was.”

“Silence, please,” the intake officer checking in Flint demands, his raspy voice sending shivers all the way through me.

We shut up for a few minutes, but I can tell Flint and Hudson are worked up about something, because they keep exchanging looks. Which only manages to freak me out more, which I definitely don’t need at the moment.

“What were those people?” I ask, almost afraid to hear the answer. “Her tongue—”

“Basilisks,” Flint answers grimly.

“Basilisks?” I repeat, horror moving through me.

“Silence!” a second prison intake officer growls in a way that makes even Flint close his mouth.

Long minutes pass with no sound but the eerie clicking of those nails on the keyboard. The not-silent silence grates on my nerves, and I can tell I’m not the only one by the way Flint’s leg is bouncing up and down and the way Hudson keeps tapping his thumb and middle finger together.

Finally, when the silence has stretched all of us near to our breaking point, Flint asks his intake officer, “So what happens now?”

He doesn’t look away from his laptop screen as he rasps, “Now we assign you to a cell.”