Women Who Learned Not to Look
No officer came forward.
That was the first truth Hollowgate taught properly: cruelty with an audience could still be called discipline if the right people looked away.
Maeve stood, leaving the fallen tray where it was. She was smaller than Tasha by nearly a foot. Narrow-shouldered. Pale. Hard-muscled in the way of women who had learned to live on little and run when there was nowhere to run.
Tasha laughed once to invite the room back onto her side.
“You think you’re special?”
Maeve looked at the food on the floor.
“No.”
“Then kneel and clean it up.”
A woman near the window whispered, “Don’t.”
It was barely sound. More breath than speech.
Maeve heard it anyway.
She turned her head just enough to see the woman: Denise Ward, forty-six, sentence half-served, cheek hollowed by prison and asthma, hands wrapped around a cup she had not lifted. Denise’s eyes flicked from Maeve to the officers, then to the serving hatch.
Fear mapped the room better than any floor plan.
Maeve bent, but not to kneel. She picked up her fork from the table and placed it neatly on the bench.
Tasha’s face tightened.
“That all?” Tasha asked.
“For now.”
The two words landed cold.
Tasha shoved her shoulder into Maeve’s chest. Maeve took the impact but did not step back. A bruise under her collarbone answered with pain. She kept her breath flat.
One officer finally moved half a step.
“Briggs,” he said without force.
Tasha did not look at him. “Problem?”
The officer stopped.
That was the second truth.
The officers were not all corrupt. Some were simply tired, afraid, compromised, or waiting for retirement behind locked mouths. In prison, that could do almost the same damage.
Maeve glanced up at the black dome in the corner. A camera watched the canteen with the unblinking uselessness of a thing owned by the people who decided what mattered.
Tasha followed her gaze and smirked.
“Cameras break,” she said.
Maeve looked back at her.
May you like
“So do stories.”
For the first time, Tasha did not answer.
