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  Footsteps came closer and a guard appeared, unlocked Noah’s cell and then took a step back. He looked wary despite his body armor and the club on his belt. When Noah saw the prisoner being escorted, he understood why.

  Blood Dog. Noah assumed it was him because he was being ushered into the cell, and because of the big red Doberman tattooed on one cheek. He was a ridiculous and terrifying example of humanity. Vostok, the guard, was a big guy with a good couple of inches on Noah and muscles to match, but this guy would have loomed over even him. Like Sergeant Burns, he was covered in tattoos and wore a tank top to show them off, but there the similarity ended. Blood Dog must have weighed twice as much as Burns, being built like a wrestler who’d eaten fifteen cows and then hit the gym non-stop for a year. His scowl was infinitely more convincing than hers, plastered across a face that didn’t so much sit on top of his body as protrude out of it, a solid mass of muscle with little distinction between head, neck and the upward sweep of his shoulders.

  “What the fuck you looking at?” he growled as he stepped into the cell.

  A dozen answers leaped unbiddenly into Noah’s mind. Many of them clever, but it wouldn’t have been smart to utter them out loud.

  “Nothing,” he mumbled.

  “What you doing with my bikes?” Blood Dog crossed the cell to loom over Noah, even as the key rattled again in the door of the cell, locking them in together.

  “Your bikes?” Noah looked around in confusion. What in high hell was this guy talking about?

  “My bikes.” A finger fat as salami pointed at the old magazine Noah had discarded to get into bed. Now that he paid more attention, he saw that its once glossy pages were covered with pictures of bikes, some of them tearing down highways under men in leather jackets and neatly kept beards, others sitting in studio imitations of workshops underneath young women with less facial hair and a lot less clothes.

  “Sorry.” Noah rolled out of his bunk and bent down to scoop up the magazine. As he moved his tired and battered muscles screamed in protest, stiffening up so that instead of bending down into a neat crouch he sprawled on the concrete, landings on top of Blood Dog’s magazine and further crumpling the already old and fragile pages.

  “You think you’re funny?” Blood dog growled, in a tone that made it clear what he thought of funny people, and that it was a thought funny people would regret. “You some kind of wise guy?”

  A booted foot nudged hard at Noah’s arm, making him wince as it knocked against his bruises. The intensity of Blood Dog’s presence filled the space of the already enclosed cell, closing him into an ever smaller fraction of the room. A room whose concrete floor now filled most of his vision, the wall occupying the rest only inches from his face, the door closed and locked and not to open until who knows when. It was all way too much. His heart was pounding like it might burst any moment, the whole space drawing in closer and closer and closer.

  He closed his eyes, took a series of deep breaths.

  “What you doing now wise guy?” Blood Dog nudged him harder with his foot. Noah winced. “Working up some more funny, huh?”

  “No funny,” Noah managed to say.

  He pushed himself up onto all fours, then onto his knees. Then he opened his eyes and picked up the magazine, held it up towards Blood Dog.

  “I’m real sorry,” he said. “We’ve clearly got off to a bad start here. My name’s Noah, they’ve put me in here to–”

  “My bikes.” Blood Dog snatched the magazine, stepped back so he could look at it in a better light. Noah took the opportunity to hurriedly get to his feet.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “I didn’t know they were your bikes. If I had, I’d obviously have shown them more respect, on account of how they’re mighty fine bikes and you’re… Well, you’re you.”

  Blood Dog scowled again.

  “What’s that mean?” he said. “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing.” Noah backed up against the bunks as Blood Dog once again towered over him. This close he could see the tattoos in more detail despite the poor light in the cell. There was the red dog emblazoned across one cheek and an Italian flag on the other. The word ‘HATE’ in gothic letters down one side of his neck, and an automatic pistol on the opposite side, a trail of empty shell casings cascading from it down onto his shoulder and what looked like it might be the start of a dead body sprawled across his chest. And though Noah couldn’t make them out with their owner glaring down at him, it was clear that the tattoos carried on across the top of Blood Dog’s head.

  What kind of lunatic got a tattoo of a dead body? And not a good tattoo either, from what Noah could see.

  “Let me tell you what you haven’t heard.” Blood Dog was so close that the stink of decay and old cigarettes washed across Noah on the thug’s hot breath. “I ain’t from around here. I’m from up where they make proper gangsters, see? And down here, around you faggoty-ass rednecks, that makes me the boss, the fucking don of all you raggedy little douchebags who think you count as gangsters. That’s made me the boss since I got to this piss-hole town, and it’ll make me boss again once this trial shit is done and they let me out of here. You understand, wise guy?”

  “Absolutely, yes.”

  “Yes who?”

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Good little redneck.”

  Was this guy for real? Noah felt like he was facing some cartoon of a Mafiosi thug, or some weird exaggerated vision brought on by exhaustion and muddled memories of gangster films.

  Then Blood Dog’s fist hit him in the gut, and as he puked up what little there was in his stomach he knew the guy was for real.

  “Top bunk’s my bunk.” Blood Dog stepped back to avoid the vomit. He looked like he might be about to laugh. “Bottom bunk’s for my bikes.” He took the magazine, laid it carefully in the center of the bottom mattress, smoothing down the cover like he was straightening the sheets over a sleeping child. Noah hoped like hell that this guy had never been near a real child. “You can sleep there too, long as you don’t disturb my bikes.” Blood Dog turned back to glare at him. “Understand?”

  Noah nodded, wiped a trail of puke from the side of his mouth. “Got it.”

  “Good.” Blood Dog patted Noah’s cheek, then turned and swung himself up onto the top bunk. The whole frame creaked beneath him and among all the pain and the acidic taste of bile in his mouth another thought occurred to Noah – the bottom bunk might not be such a great space to sleep anyway. Could any bed frame hold up under the weight of Blood Dog? And if it gave in, what would happen to the guy underneath?

  “What’s your name, wise guy?” Blood Dog asked, lying back with his hands beneath his head.

  “Noah.”

  “That’s a pussy name. I don’t like it. I’m gonna call you Pukey. You OK with that Pukey?”

  “Yes,” Noah said. It wasn’t like he could stop this guy calling him whatever he wanted. He’d take the name Pixie Rainbow if it saved him from more beatings.

  “Yes who?” Blood Dog growled.

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Good boy, Pukey.”

  Noah sank down against the wall, staring out through the bars at what passed for open space in the hallway beyond.

  This was why he hated people.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LIVING IN HOPE

  BLOOD DOG WAS a snorer. And not just any snorer, but the kind of colossal, echoing snorer whose night time sounds shook the very walls of the cell. Noah wouldn’t have said it was the worst noise he’d heard all week – after all, there had been the thud of Burns’s club against his body, the clang of endless gates slamming shut behind him, and of course the noises Blood Dog made when he was actually awake. But any other week, maybe any other day, it would have been considered Noah’s worst noise.

  He opened his eyes, then remembered why he had kept them closed. This cell might never get properly lit, but it somehow never got properly dark either. With his eyes open he could see the mattress above bulging under the
weight of his cell mate, threatening to bust through the wire mesh that held him in place and crush Noah beneath three hundred pounds of writhing muscles and crude tattoos. To his right, the wall pressed in against him both visually and physically. He hadn’t dared move Blood Dog’s magazine for fear that the muscle mountain would wake up first and start the day by beating anyone who’d touched his precious bikes. That left Noah with half a mattress to sleep on, and the bigger half left him pressed up against the wall, which made him twitchy as all hell, but was better than risking rolling out of bed into a pile of his own puke.

  Sleep was hard enough to find with all that was going on in his own room, but to top it all off the next cell held a screamer.

  It hadn’t taken long, now that he had a second night to assess his surroundings, to work out that the pained screaming he’d heard came from more than one inmate. There was still the background shouting, the confused, incoherent yells of men and women waking from nightmares. Noah figured he’d be one of them soon enough the way things were going. But cutting through that was another sort of scream, the sort that came from real, coherent pain.

  Some of it was arguments, prisoners yelling back and forth at each other, continuing fights that the guards had broken up during the day. That died down within an hour of lights out, an inability to reach each other preventing the arguments from ever reaching any climax, leaving the contenders to trail off into disappointed silence.

  Then there were the repeated noises, the ones that started with a panicked yelp or a plea for mercy before descending into rhythmic grunting and muffled cries. Those sounds filled Noah with a terrible, gut-gripping horror for what his future held. But there was a sense of shame as well, as he remembered Mary the wheelbarrow lady from Tyrone’s caravan and her own cries following him through the forest as Half-Skull did his dirty work. Could Noah have done something to save her? Probably not. Would anyone step in to help him if he fell victim to the same hideous crime here? Again, probably not.

  But for all of the deep torment caused by those muffled sounds; for all of the dreadful grunting noises Blood Dog made in his sleep, like two pigs getting down with a baboon; for all of the nightmares that left people screaming and mumbling somewhere in the darkness; for all of that, the most immediate and pressing noise keeping Noah awake came from the next cell over. Because that noise, more than any of the others, that noise was persistent.

  Whoever was in the next cell clearly had a lot on his mind. As the rest of the cells fell quiet, he was still muttering away to himself, his voice sometimes rising until another prisoner yelled at him to shut up. Which was how Noah learned that the mutterer’s name was Iver, the way that other prisoners spat his name at him like a curse.

  Iver’s muttering might almost have been soothing if it had stayed nice and low like a bedtime story or the babbling of a brook; it could have eased Noah down into sleep. But, of course, it didn’t stay quiet. That would have been too easy. Once the rest of the inmates were asleep, with no-one but Noah left to hear or protest at the sound, Iver’s voice rose and fell – sometimes steady for long stretches as he jabbered to himself, sometimes jerking up and down from one word to the next. It was like listening to a broken radio as the dial was turned from station to station, unable to keep ahold of a channel, the subject skipping from fragments of songs and poetry to chanted nonsense to rambling discourses on medicine and books.

  If he was this confused and distressed to listen to, Noah dreaded to think what it was like to be inside Iver’s head. No wonder the guy couldn’t sleep, with all this shit tumbling helter-skelter through his brain, not leaving him any rest behind the darkness of his eyes. With the walls pressing in on his own jittery mind, Noah could understand that kind of distress, could understand how it might chase away any hope of sleep.

  And without sleep to help him through the night, Noah figured he might as well try to get some space. He rose from his bed, carefully avoiding crumpling the precious magazine, and winced as a creak of the wire frame disturbed Blood Dog. The criminal’s snores fell silent for a moment and Noah clenched in fear of another confrontation. Then Blood Dog shifted, rolled onto his side, and started to snore again, the noise even more choked and bestial than before. No human soul should make a sound like that, but based on everything else he’d seen, Noah really wasn’t sure Blood Dog had a soul. Hell, he might not even be human.

  The moment of danger having passed, Noah rose to his feet, careful not to stand in the spot where he’d puked. It didn’t seem likely the guards would clear that up. He wondered if they’d even give him the tools to do it himself, or if they left their prisoners to wallow in filth. Burns had said that she had ways to make him cooperate.

  He closed his eyes and pictured Burns – her tight, curvy body, those tattoos running like a half made promise downward toward what was hidden beneath her clothes. If he could maybe work out what she wanted to hear, maybe avoid another beating, yet somehow find a way to keep the interrogations coming, then maybe, just maybe, he might actually enjoy being in here.

  Blood Dog gave a strangled grunt, rolled over again, and settled into a more rhythmic snoring. Maybe ‘enjoy’ wouldn’t ever be a part of this picture.

  Noah took the two steps over to the iron bars that formed the door of his cell. If he pressed himself up against them and shifted his face so that the bars weren’t in his eye line, then he could almost believe he was in the hall, that there was space and air and a high ceiling with a sky beyond. A breeze brushed his skin, the part of it not pressed up against the cold metal, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

  Up close like this he could hear Iver more clearly, rambling away to himself only a half dozen feet and two steel doors to the right. A few of them seemed to be pleas for rescue, a repeated refrain rising like a guitar riff through the wilder sounds of an old rock song. Over and over the same phrase bubbled through the bass beat of murmured curses and the screeching solos of his ranting screams:

  “They’ve got to come for me.”

  “They’ve got to come for me.”

  “They’ve got to come for me.”

  And then Noah heard it, the one word guaranteed to get his attention tonight, to hook him in and draw him closer to anybody’s thoughts on any subject.

  “Dionite.”

  Iver was talking quietly now. Noah tried to lean forwards, to move his ear closer for a better listen, but once you were pressed up against the bars of a cell there really was no further to go. He would need a different approach.

  “Hey!” he hissed, trying for the delicate balance between loud enough for Iver to hear him and quiet enough to leave Blood Dog sleeping. “Hey, Iver!”

  “Hey what hey who hey you hey Jude.” Iver appeared at the bars of his cell. Noah caught a glimpse of pale dreadlocks against paler skin, of intricate tattoos and shapeless rags like so many of the prisoners were draped in. Bright eyes twitched back and forth, catching the light coming in through the windows in the ceiling, as wild and bewildered as Iver’s words.

  “Hey man,” Noah whispered. “Over here.”

  Iver looked over towards him, his gaze filled with hope.

  “Did they send you?” he asked. “Have you come to rescue me?”

  “Who’s they Iver?” Noah asked. “Is it the Dionites? Are you a Dionite?”

  If he could find out more about these people maybe he could give Burns what she wanted, or at least persuade her of his uselessness as a source. After the pounding he’d taken earlier, he felt very motivated to make that happen.

  Iver’s brow furrowed in suspicion.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do I know you? I don’t think I know you, and I know lots of things. Wild things and wonderful things, body things and brain things. Do you know how to stitch up a hole in a broken heart? I did that once. Oh yes, I did. I was sure and steady, Coltrane smooth, Miles inspired, and I strung that poor muscle back together and it beat like the music like do-wop-de-do and he lived. Or maybe he didn’t.

  “Di
d you live? Or are you another ghost, another Moon ghost come to haunt our purgatory?”

  “I’m not a ghost, Iver. Just a wanderer looking to get himself settled in some.”

  “Are you Walt Whitman? You have Walt Whitman hair and a Walt Whitman beard, but darker, like shadows. A negative of Walt Whitman. A scan on the wall. An x-ray that’s never penetrated, not got through flesh to bone, not broken the innards open like they want to break me open. But they won’t. None of you will. You’ll see! You’ll all see! They’re coming for me!”

  “Shh!” Noah glanced over his shoulder in panic as Iver’s voice rose, but Blood Dog still looked and sounded to be asleep. “It’s OK, it’s OK, I’m not with them. Look, they’ve locked me up too, right?”

  Iver nodded, smiled.

  “That, sir, is logic,” he declared loudly, then clamped a hand over his mouth. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “They don’t like it when I talk. Back in the tribe they like it when I talk, they let me talk all I want about whatever I want, but not in here. Here they hate the wild ways and the wild people and freedom.

  “I used to hate the wild ways, the parent ways, the ragged loose-living ways, but I was wrong. This is what happens when you turn your back on tradition.” He pointed up towards the night sky, the debris belt even blurrier through the filthy glass ceiling. “Real tradition. Pre-civilization tradition, that flows like Mingus and sings like Simone. Tradition that’s ways not rules, know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Noah hadn’t a clue, but saying that wouldn’t get him what he wanted. “So you live in the wilds, huh? Is that where the Dionites live too?”

  Iver stretched up on tiptoes, peered down at the floor of the prison hall.