The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(11)

“They have a literacy class here, meets every Tuesday.” Paul reached for the page. “You should look into that.”

“Here,” I said, tapping the corner of the sheet. The dates still blurred in my vision, like newsprint smudging under a gob of liquid soap. “How much time passed between my arrest and landing in here?”

“You tell me. You lived it.”

“Humor me. What does it say?”

Paul shrugged. “Four months, give or take?”

I tapped another line. “When was I brought into custody?”

“September sixteenth.”

“And what day is today?”

“The seventeenth,” Paul said. “Why? What’s the big deal?”

“Paul, how could four months have passed between yesterday and today?”

He blinked. Squinted at me.

“It…didn’t. That doesn’t make sense.” Suddenly on edge, he pressed the page back into my hand. “I don’t do riddles.”

“Not a riddle. How could I have been tried and convicted if I was just arrested—”

He held up a hand, grimacing like he felt a migraine coming on. “Please, drop it, okay? My head is killing me.”

This was bad. I’d hoped that whoever was behind all this, screwing with my memory and my sense of time, had kept it localized to me and anyone involved with putting me behind bars. I’d never met Paul before today, and even he couldn’t push his brain through the teeth of this trap. Under normal circumstances, most people would assume a time discrepancy like that was a typo or a filing mistake, but that’s not what was happening here. Anyone thinking about my trial just couldn’t parse time at all. And thinking too hard earned them an instant burst of sinus pain, encouraging a change of subject.

How many people had been affected? The whole prison system?

The whole planet?

More important question: who had the power to weave a curse like that, and what had I done to piss them off?

Prince Sitri. This deal had his name written all over it. One of his little games, maybe: drop me in prison, bury me deep, and see if I could claw my way out. Exactly the kind of dick move he’d pull if he was bored enough, or if he wanted to make some kind of point.

And what if the point is “Caitlin isn’t coming to help you”?

I shoved that thought into a mental box already cluttered with all the things that kept me up at night. Not a lot of room left in that box.

I was good at two things: leading my crew, and magic. Now my friends and family were on the far side of an electrified fence, and I couldn’t work a ritual in a place with zero privacy and guards standing watch around the clock. If there was a better way to keep me caged, I couldn’t think of one.

Despair started to creep around the edges of my mind, like lead weights tied to my wrists and ankles. I shoved that into the box, too.

Dig deeper, I told myself. There’s no such thing as a no-win situation. Think fast, fight hard, and breathe free air again. No matter what it takes.

“Back in processing,” I said to Paul, “Emerson told us that nobody’s ever escaped from the Iceberg. That true?”

“No, but…well, sort of. It’s compli—” He froze, eyes darting left. “Oh shit, hold on, here it comes.”

I saw it too. Two guys from the black corner of the yard, shirts tied off around their waists, marching hard and fast with murder in their eyes. Coming up on a skinny Latino with a full-chest tattoo of the Virgin Mary, all on his own by the chess tables. A lone gazelle, separated from the herd and blissfully unaware of the doom heading his way.





6.




“We’ve gotta do someth—” I started to say. Paul put his hand on my chest.

“No, we don’t,” he told me. “This is prison, okay? You want to survive this place? Here’s the best advice you’ll ever get: never get involved in other people’s fights. That makes it your fight.”

I wouldn’t have gotten there in time anyway. I watched as one of the attackers looped his arm around their target’s throat, hauling him back and off-balance. The other reached under his tied-off shirt and yanked out a shiv—a jagged spike of metal wired to a broom-handle hilt, cheap and nasty and built for violence. The blows rained down fast and frantic, punching the spike into the Latino’s chest and stomach and mutilating his tattoo, turning the Virgin Mary into a murder victim. If he prayed to her, it didn’t help him any.

A klaxon whined from the gun towers, shrill as fingernails on a blackboard and loud enough to set my teeth on edge. Paul dropped to his knees and hissed, “Down! Do exactly what I do!”

I followed his lead, kneeling on the jogging track and lacing my fingers behind my neck. Around us, from one side of the yard to the other, everyone—including the two assassins—was doing the same. The killer dropped his shiv and knelt down beside his victim’s corpse, waiting patiently as the hive doors burst open and uniforms flooded the yard. The klaxon fell silent.

“Don’t even breathe funny until they give the all clear,” Paul warned in a low voice, “and if you’ve got an itchy nose, live with it. Seriously, I can see the tower behind you. Jablonski’s up there and he’s staring right at us.”

“Us? Why? We had nothing to do with it.”