He made it to the hall.
Barely.
Ruaan arrived at the tail end of the grey uniform crowd, slightly out of breath and joined the back of the food line with what little dignity he had left. The hall was large, loud, and aggressively unpleasant — long metal tables bolted to the floor, benches on either side, fluorescent lighting that made everyone look slightly ill.
The smell of whatever was being served mixed with the general Blackmere scent and produced something Ruaan's nose registered as a personal attack.
He took his tray. He looked at its contents.
He looked for a long moment.
"This is food," he said to no one in particular.
The man behind him said, "Move."
He moved.
His cellmates had saved him a spot at the end of one of the long tables — Bandaged Arm sliding over without being asked, Split Lip nodding at the space beside him. Small gesture. Ruaan sat down and told himself it meant nothing and then ate a spoonful of whatever the grey-brown substance was and decided that the cannolo was going to haunt him for the full two years.
The hall was its own ecosystem.
He saw it immediately — the way the tables were divided, not randomly but by rank. Grey uniforms clustered at the far ends, nearest the walls. Dark blue in the middle sections. The black uniforms were nowhere in the main hall at all, which he filed away for later. The further from the walls you sat, the more space you had, the louder you were, the more food on your tray.
He watched a man in dark blue backhand a grey uniform across the face so casually that it took Ruaan a moment to register it had happened.
The grey uniform's tray clattered. Food everywhere.
"The fuck is this?" Dark Blue stood over him, not even raised voice, almost conversational. "I said bring my full tray. Where's the bread?"
Grey Uniform scrambled. "They — they ran out, I swear, I asked—"
"You asked." Dark Blue said it like it was the stupidest word he'd ever heard. He picked up what remained on the tray, looked at it, and dropped it onto Grey Uniform's head. "Ask better next time."
He walked away.
Grey Uniform sat on the floor covered in food. Nobody at the surrounding tables moved to help him. Some didn't even look up.
Ruaan stared.
"Don't," Split Lip said quietly beside him, without looking up from his own tray.
"I wasn't going to do anything."
"You had a face."
Ruaan didn't respond to that. He turned back to his tray and focused on eating something that might have been a potato if he were generous with his imagination. Around him, the noise of the hall rolled on — metal scraping, voices overlapping, laughter from the middle tables that had a particular edge to it.
He was gathering information. That was what he was doing. Watching, cataloguing, building his map of how this place actually worked versus how it looked on the surface.
The staring hadn't stopped.
He'd clocked at least six men at different tables who kept glancing over with that same hungry attention from the corridor. He ignored all of them. Professionally. Thoroughly.
"New meat always gets stared at," Bandaged Arm said, apparently reading his expression.
"Especially if they're—" he paused, seemed to search for a word.
"Pretty," Bruised Jaw finished, mouth full.
"I was going to say notable."
"Same thing in here."
Ruaan put down his spoon. "How long does that last?"
"The staring?" Split Lip considered. "Till something more interesting shows up. Or till someone claims you."
"Nobody is claiming me."
"That's what the last guy said."
"Who's the last guy?"
The table went quiet without warning.
Not gradually — all at once, the way conversation stops when something shifts in the air. Ruaan looked up from his tray.
A man was approaching. Grey uniform like the rest of them, but the way he moved was wrong — too careful, like his body was a negotiation he was constantly losing. He sat down two spaces from Ruaan without making eye contact with anyone. His tray was fuller than everyone else's at the table. There was bread on it. A small cup of something that looked like juice.
Silence stretched.
Then someone at the far end of the table coughed and conversation crept back in and Ruaan leaned slightly toward Bandaged Arm.
"Who is that?" he said quietly.
Bandaged Arm dropped his voice. "Finn."
"And?"
A pause. Bandaged Arm glanced at the man, then back at his tray. "Cullen's current."
Ruaan looked at Finn again. The vacant eyes. The careful way he'd lowered himself onto the bench. The extra food that nobody had questioned.
"Current," Ruaan repeated.
"Yeah."
He understood. He looked back at his own tray and kept eating and said nothing.
---
They didn't have to wait long.
A dark blue uniform appeared at the edge of the grey section, scanned the tables, and walked directly to where Finn was sitting. He bent down and said something close to Finn's ear — short, maybe two or three words — and straightened back up.
Finn looked at his tray. At the food he hadn't touched yet. At the bread.
He stood up and left without a word.
The dark blue uniform followed.
The tray stayed behind, full and untouched.
Ruaan watched Finn's careful walk all the way to the far door and then turned back to the table. Around him, the moment the door closed, everyone seemed to exhale at once and the conversation cracked open like something that had been held under pressure.
"Called him again," someone muttered.
"Fifth time this week. It's just Tuesday," another voice said. "Cullen can't get enough."
"Can you blame him?" A man two seats down with a loud voice and the kind of face that was always half a second from grinning — leaned forward with the energy of someone who had been waiting to talk. "Finn's got that face, you know? Cullen's been running through him like—"
"Ten times a day, minimum," someone else said.
"Easy. Easy. I'm telling you, that man does not get tired."
"That's why Finn walks like that," Heavyset said, nodding sagely. "You seen it? The walk? Like his hips forgot what direction they're supposed to go."
Laughter down the table. Low, ugly, the kind that was halfway genuine and halfway nervous.
"It's been three weeks," Split Lip said. "Kid can barely sit down."
"Three weeks with Cullen, I'd be in a wheelchair."
"You'd be dead."
More laughter. Ruaan ate his food and listened and kept his expression somewhere between neutral and disinterested and stored every single piece of information quietly in the back of his skull.
"It's the size," Heavyset said, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial register that still carried halfway down the table. "You know what Cullen's working with? I'm telling you, it's a problem. A genuine structural 'problem.'"
"Facts," someone confirmed seriously.
"That's why Finn can't—"
"It's not even the biggest in here."
The table paused.
Everyone turned.
The man who had spoken was skinny, older, sitting near the end, a quiet type, who hadn't said much until now. He shrugged under the attention and poked at his food. "I'm just saying. Cullen's not the biggest."
"Who's bigger than Cullen?" Heavyset demanded. "In this whole block, who—"
"Not in the block." The man shrugged again. "The officers."
Silence.
"Officer Crowe," he said plainly, like he was reading off a grocery list. "You've all seen the man. You've seen the size of him. I was in the communal showers three months back and I'm not going into details but what I will say is that Cullen should feel very average about himself."
"How do you even—"
"I said I'm not going into details."
Ruaan put his spoon down.
Not dramatically. Not loudly. It just stopped moving and stayed there against the tray while something in his brain snagged on a word and pulled.
"Harolin?" he said.
The table looked at him.
Heavyset grinned. "Oh, so the new one's interested—"
"Not in that," Ruaan said. "I'm asking who he is."
"Who he is?" Heavyset looked briefly confused by the distinction. "He's Officer Crowe, the one who—"
"I know what he looks like," Ruaan said, which caused a brief round of eyebrow raises that he ignored completely. "I'm asking about his rank. His position. Why he's here."
The table settled.
The older man at the end spoke again, more seriously now. "Private General. That's his real rank. Military, not corrections. A man like that should be placed somewhere that matters — some government facility, high security, somewhere with actual resources. Not Blackmere."
Ruaan looked at him. "Then why is he here."
"Requested the transfer himself."
A beat.
"Nobody knows why," the man continued. "Officers don't talk about it. And you don't ask Crowe directly about anything unless you want that look." He paused. "You know the look."
Ruaan knew the look.
"Two years," the older man said. "Same length as a standard sentence. He'll be here the same time we are, then he's gone."
Ruaan picked his spoon back up and looked at his tray.
'Crowe,' he thought.
'Harolin Crowe.'
He turned it over once. Twice. The surname sitting in his mouth like something he'd tasted before and couldn't place. He ate the last of his food without tasting it and let the table's conversation drift back to Cullen and Finn and all the associated commentary, and he nodded in the right places and said nothing, and underneath all of it, the name kept turning.
'Crowe. Crowe. Harolin Crowe.'
.
.
He was still turning it over on the walk back.
Through the corridor, past the stares he'd already learned to wall off, through the cell block entrance and down the grey-painted hall to 109. His cellmates moved around him in the familiar pre-lights-out routine — Bandaged Arm rewrapping, Bruised Jaw claiming the wall side, Split Lip pulling his terrible blanket up. Ruaan sat on the edge of his own mattress and unlaced his shoes with automatic hands while the name circled quietly in the back of his mind.
'Crowe.'
He lay back. Stared at the ceiling.
'Crowe.'
The lights dimmed. The cell settled into its nighttime sounds — distant coughing down the block, the creak of old plumbing, someone's shallow breathing evening out into sleep.
'Harolin Crowe.'
He'd heard it once, somewhere but didn't remember where and when. And suddenly, it came.
It didn't come gradually. It arrived all at once and sudden.
'Crowe.'
'Mara Crowe.'
He remembered the documents. His lawyer's handwriting on lined paper. A name on a police report he'd skimmed and signed and buried and never thought about again. A girl with a fractured wrist and a face he barely remembered and a name — a name — he had seen written down and dismissed without weight because it had not mattered to him at the time.
'Mara Crowe.'
The cell was dark and quiet and completely still.
Ruaan sat up.
Slowly. The mattress creaked beneath him but his cellmates didn't stir. He sat upright in the dark with the blanket pooling around his waist and stared at the wall opposite and felt something cold and very specific settle into his chest and stay there.
'Private General. Requested the transfer himself. Two years. Same timeline.'
His voice came out barely above a breath.
"Did he come here," Ruaan said to the dark, "for me?"
The question sat in cell 109 and offered nothing back.
Ruaan wasn't able to sleep after unravelling that mystery.