The uniform was grey.
Not the soft, forgiving grey of his cashmere sweaters or the cool silver-grey of his bathroom tiles back home. This was institutional grey. Lifeless grey. The kind of grey that existed specifically to remind you that you were no longer a person with preferences.
Ruaan held it away from his body by two fingers and stared at it.
The officer who had handed it to him was already halfway out of the changing room.
"This is it?" Ruaan called after him.
No answer.
He looked down at himself. Looked at the uniform. Looked back at his ivory silk robe, which they had bagged and tagged like evidence of a former life.
.
.
Cell block C smelled like the changing room, which had smelled like the holding room, which had smelled like the entrance. Ruaan was beginning to understand that Blackmere had simply committed to one unified scent and saw no reason to apologise for it.
The officer walking him through the corridor — not Coffee Stain, a different one, older, rounder— moved at a pace that suggested he had somewhere better to be.
Ruaan kept up easily.
What he couldn't keep up with were the stares.
It started subtle. A pair of eyes through a cell door. A group near the far wall going quiet as he passed. Then less subtle — men turning fully, tracking him with a kind of open, unhurried attention that made the back of his neck prickle. Not all of it was threatening. Some of it was worse than threatening.
Hungry was the word for it.
Ruaan kept his face neutral and his chin up and told himself it was simply because he was new. That was all. New people got stared at. It meant nothing.
He absolutely believed that.
"What's that block?" he asked the officer, nodding toward a corridor branching left, where the uniforms were a different colour.
Silence.
"And those men near the yard — their uniforms are darker. Is that a different—"
Silence.
"The bell that rang earlier. Back in processing. What was—"
Silence.
Ruaan counted three more steps and made a quiet, executive decision. He was a fast learner. This man was not going to answer him, had never planned to answer him, and asking a fifth question would achieve nothing except confirming that Ruaan had not yet understood his situation.
He understood his situation.
He simply didn't like it.
He stopped asking.
---
Cell 109 was at the end of the lowest corridor.
Of course it was.
The officer stopped in front of it, entered a code, and the door swung open with a heavy clank that Ruaan felt in his back teeth. He stepped inside. The cuffs were removed — the officer unclipping them with the brisk efficiency of a man releasing livestock into a pen — and before Ruaan could turn around, the door was already closing.
"Good luck," the officer said.
The door shut.
Ruaan stood completely still for one moment.
Then he turned around.
The cell was — and he chose this word carefully, as a man who valued accuracy — a hole. A genuine, dedicated, thoroughly committed *hole.* The walls were grey in the way that suggested they had once been a different colour and had simply given up. The floor had a crack running from the left corner to somewhere beneath the furthest bed that Ruaan's eyes refused to follow. There were four beds — the word *bed* doing extraordinary heavy lifting here — three of them occupied by men who looked like they had recently lost an argument with something large.
All three of them looked up when he walked in.
One had a split lip, badly healed. One had bruising along his jaw, yellow-green and fading. The third had his arm wrapped in a makeshift bandage that Ruaan chose not to examine too closely.
They looked at him.
He looked at them.
He was going to ignore them. That had been the plan — walk in, find his space, establish immediate emotional distance. Two years was two years and attachments were liabilities and he didn't know these men from anyone.
Then Split Lip said, quietly, "Hey."
And Bruised Jaw lifted his chin in greeting.
And Bandaged Arm gave a small, tired nod.
Three men who looked like they'd been through something genuinely terrible, greeting the new arrival like it cost them something to do it but they were doing it anyway.
Ruaan exhaled through his nose.
"Hey," he said back.
He walked to the furthest bed — obviously his, the one no one had claimed, the one closest to the wall with the suspicious stain — and stopped.
The mattress had a depression in the middle that suggested the previous occupant had been much larger than Ruaan. The pillow had no case. The blanket was thin enough to read through.
He sat down carefully.
The mattress made a sound.
He stood back up immediately.
His eyes moved to the toilet in the corner — there was no partition, no curtain, nothing between it and the rest of the cell — and then he registered the state of it and his stomach performed a full, athletic revolt.
He turned to Bandaged Arm, who was closest.
"Did any of you do that?"
Bandaged Arm shook his head quickly. "No, no. That was — the guys from block D, sometimes they come down here and use ours because they don't want to mess up their own."
"They come in here—"
"They can," Split Lip said, not unkindly. "We can't stop them."
Ruaan stared at the toilet seat again. Something inside him quietly wept. He looked away before it could get worse.
"Why?" he asked. "Why can't you stop them?"
The three of them exchanged a look. The particular kind of look that passes between people who share an understanding that someone else doesn't have yet. Bandaged Arm scratched the back of his neck.
"Did the officers not tell you anything?" he asked. "About how things work here?"
Ruaan thought about the officer who hadn't answered four consecutive questions. He thought about the officer before that, who had pointed at a uniform and left.
He thought about Harolin Crowe, who had told him his life would be miserable and then walked out like he'd said something completely unremarkable.
"No," Ruaan said. "They did not."
Another look between the three of them. Then, like a decision had been made, Split Lip shifted on his bed and said, "Sit down then."
.
.
They talked for twenty minutes.
Ruaan sat on his terrible mattress and listened, and the more he listened, the more a specific cold feeling settled in his chest and refused to leave.
Blackmere wasn't a regular prison. He'd gathered that much from the stares in the corridor, from cell 109, from the different coloured uniforms he'd clocked on the way in. But the structure of it was something else entirely.
Hierarchy. Real hierarchy, with ranks and uniforms to match. The lowest wore grey — his grey, the grey he was currently wearing. Above them, dark blue. Above that, black with a white trim. The top three wore black. Full black, no grey in sight.
Getting up the ranks meant the Thursday games. Every week, unexpected, different every time. Win and you climbed. Lose badly enough and you fell. The top ten losers each week were punished — Bruised Jaw didn't elaborate on punished and Ruaan decided not to push it.
The higher your rank, the more you had. Better cells. Better food. Access to the yard on your own terms. The ability to move through certain corridors without being touched.
And the top ranks could call anyone they wanted to their cell.
Ruaan had been following all of this with the focused attention of a man building a mental map. He stored every detail. Hierarchy. Games. Thursdays. Uniforms.
Then Bandaged Arm said, call anyone they want to their cell, and something in his tone made Ruaan pause.
"Define call to their cell," Ruaan said.
Bandaged Arm glanced at Split Lip.
"Mating," Split Lip said carefully.
Ruaan looked at him.
"...Are you telling me," Ruaan said, slowly, "that the top ranks can take anyone they want as a—"
"Sex slave," Bruised Jaw said bluntly, apparently done with euphemisms. "Yeah."
The cold feeling in Ruaan's chest deepened considerably.
"Right," he said. "Okay. I'll just — avoid them. Keep my head down. Stay out of sight."
All three of his cellmates looked at him with an expression that he recognised. It was the expression of people watching someone say something they wish were true.
"You're wearing grey," Bandaged Arm said gently, gesturing at Ruaan's uniform. "Everyone who sees you already knows you're at the bottom. It's not about hiding. They come to you."
"Then I'll move up the ranks."
"Easier said—"
"I'll move up the ranks," Ruaan repeated, quieter, and something in his voice apparently communicated that this was not optimism but a statement of intent, because all three of them went slightly quiet.
A beat of silence.
Then Split Lip leaned forward and said, in the careful tone of someone delivering genuinely important information, "There's one more thing."
Ruaan looked at him.
"Cullen Ray," he said. "Top rank. Number one. Has been for eight months." He paused. "He likes pretty boys."
The three of them looked at Ruaan.
Ruaan looked back at them.
"...Is it a crime," he said, mostly to himself, "to be pretty?"
Nobody answered. Mostly because the bell rang.
The sound split through the cell block with zero warning — and all three of his cellmates were on their feet before the echo died. Moving to the door with a speed that looked painful given their various injuries, pressing up against it, waiting.
Ruaan blinked. "What—"
"Dinner," Bruised Jaw said, not looking back. "If the grey uniforms don't get to the hall first, there's nothing left."
"Nothing left—"
"Move fast or don't eat." The door clicked and swung open automatically and all three of them were gone, half-running down the corridor with the focused urgency of men who had learned this lesson the hard way.
Ruaan stood in the cell doorway.
He watched them go.
He looked down at his grey uniform, at the corridor stretching ahead, at the distant sound of other men moving, other doors opening, the whole machine of Blackmere lurching into its routine.
He was Ruaan Calder. He did not run.
He had also not eaten since the cannolo that never was, which felt like it had happened in another lifetime.
He looked at the ceiling.
"Two years," he muttered to himself. "I can't even run. This is how I'm going to survive for two years."
He started walking.
Fast. No... Faster.