"Prison is a place where you are forced to face yourself, and it is never a pretty sight."

~ Eldridge Cleaver

ACT II

Chapter VII

(8 years ago)

Year 2046

The plane landed, and they were transported to a heavily guarded bus. Yoki could hardly believe it. How was this happening? Now on the bus to Stonegate, the most brutal high-security prison in the world. It was situated in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by barren salt flats bleached white by the sun. He squinted out the window, trying to see the prison in the distance, but all he could see was flat salt all the way to the horizon. It looked like the surface of the moon.

He knew he should be sad about his parents’ death and the terrible situation he was now in, but he felt totally numb and shut off from the world. He wasn’t Yoki anymore, not really. He was a statue. A block of ice. He was no one and nobody.

There were five other prisoners on the bus, but they clustered together close to the front and ignored him. He’d seen the guard talking to them earlier, and he knew they’d probably been warned about him. He’d heard the guards talking during his trial. They’d said the same things about him over and over: cop killer, mass murderer. He couldn’t argue with any of it. He was both of those things. Whatever madness had seized him when he’d killed all those cops, it was gone now. He wasn’t even sure how he’d done it.

The head guard walked back toward him, swinging his billy club menacingly. He was clearly looking for a reason to attack. Yoki stared straight ahead, trying to ignore him.

“What’s wrong, kiddo?” a guard said, a different one than the last time. “Miss your mommy and daddy?”

Don’t respond. Don’t give him what he wants.

He’d lashed out at the guards a few times when they’d first tried to load him onto the bus, but they’d subdued him easily—and viciously. He didn’t feel like fighting right now. He still had a deep cut on his head from where this guard had hit him.

“They’re not around to save you,” the guard said mockingly. “Not anymore. What do you think happened to them, kid?”

Don’t respond.

“I don’t know,” Yoki said in spite of himself. “Maybe you know something about it?”

“Me? Nah. I wouldn’t hurt a fly. The only people I go after are hardened criminals like you.”

Ignore him.

“Hardened criminals? I’m just a kid.”

“Yeah. And that makes it even worse.”

For the first time since the trial had started, Yoki felt something besides the numb grayness that had taken him over. To his surprise, he felt angry.

“And what do you know about it?” he snapped.

The guard raised his club, but one of the other guards shouted back from the front row of the bus.

“Terrence! Leave it,” he said. “Stonegate will be rough enough. We don’t need to beat him up before he gets there.”

The guard who’d been talking to Yoki sneered but went back toward the front of the bus to joke and laugh with his colleagues. Yoki hated him. He hated everyone who was living comfortably at that moment. He hated everyone who still had a family. Part of him hoped that lightning would strike the bus, electrocuting the guards with karma for the way they’d treated him. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen, that was a childish wish. That wasn’t how the world worked.

Finally, the bus arrived. They were blindfolded and led off to another vehicle. When the blindfold was taken off, Yoki saw that it was a shabby bus, if it could even be called that. The interior was a mess of dried blood, piss stains, and rust. They drove for what seemed like hours into the salt flats before he finally saw it: Stonegate. It was made out of white stone, and it looked just as cold and pristine as the barren land around it. And it was huge. As they got closer to it, it almost blocked out the sun, rising high into the sky above them. It had a bad aura to it. Yoki could tell just by looking at it that it was an awful place.

“All right,” the guards said as the bus slowed to a halt just inside the gates. “Everybody off. Not you, kid. The others get off first.”

Yoki watched the other prisoners get off before him and enter the prison. He sat and waited, curled up against the side of the bus. It was brutally hot, and he could feel the sun beating down on him relentlessly. He was hungry and thirsty after the long ride, but no one offered him anything.

Finally, the head guard came back.

“Now you.”

He entered Stonegate, and the massive door slammed loudly shut behind him. He didn’t even have time to turn around and take one last look at the sky. Inside, everything was white, stark, and clean. The fluorescent lights were bright and merciless. There was nowhere to hide. He’d had a fantasy on the bus that he’d be able to get out of here somehow, stage a prison break, but now he knew that there was no escape. He was stuck here until he died.

“Here,” the guard said, shoving him roughly into a room filled with even more guards. An orange prison jumpsuit was laid out on the chair. “Change.”

“I—”

“Change.”

The guards were all staring at him, their faces cruel and mocking. It was clear that he’d get no privacy. They were going to force him to strip right in front of them. Yoki did, looking them all right in the eye one by one. He refused to let them make him ashamed. He stared down each guard until he looked away. Then, victorious in at least one tiny way, he put on the orange jumpsuit and zipped it up angrily.

“Here,” the guard said, holding up a pair of clippers. “Gotta do it.”

This one was a little kinder than the head guard had been, and he shaved off Yoki’s hair efficiently. He wasn’t gentle, but he wasn’t harsh either. It was just something that had to happen. When they were done, the guards escorted Yoki to his cell: four in front and four behind. It was clear they thought he was dangerous. All of them watched him closely, waiting for him to make a wrong move.

His cell was already full when he showed up. Three burly men were lying on cots, heads shaved just like Yoki’s. When they saw him, they looked at each other skeptically.

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“Is this a joke?” the first one said, glaring at the head guard. He had massive bushy eyebrows.

“This kid’s gonna be in here with us?” said the second one, a red-haired man with one wild eye.

“No joke,” the head guard said. “This kid killed fifty-four cops. He’s dangerous.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true.”

The guards shoved Yoki inside and slammed the door shut behind him. He could hear them waiting for a moment in case there was trouble. Then, they marched away down the hall together. He was alone in the cell with the other prisoners.

“So who’re you, then?” the red-haired man said.

“Yoki,” he said cautiously.

“I’m Gavin.”

“Maxwell,” Bushy Eyebrows said.

“Wolf,” said the third man from his cot. It was clearly not his real name, but the one he went by in here.

“You must be a real tough guy then,” Maxwell said. He made a slicing motion to his throat. “Fifty-four cops, huh.”

He said it like he didn’t believe it.

“I guess.”

“Bullshit,” Gavin said again. “I call bullshit on all of it. This kid didn’t kill no cops. He ain’t killed nobody in his life. Don’t got the guts.”

“Why’s he here then?”

“Beats me. Prolly pissed off some politician and felt better to put ‘em away somewhere the sun don’t shine.”

“No way,” scoffed Wolf. “This kid didn’t do anything. Look at his arms. Toothpicks. He’s not physical enough to do jack shit.”

“You don’t know anything,” Yoki said, trying to keep his voice level. “My dad—”

“Shut up, bitch! You look weak! You’ve got no business being in here with the likes of us!”

“Yeah. You’re gonna die here in Stonegate,” Gavin said. “And I’ll spit on your corpse when you’re dead.”

Yoki spun from one prisoner to the other. He didn’t know how to respond to these guys. The old Yoki would have beaten them up—shown them just how wrong they were. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to do that. The screams of the cops he’d killed haunted him now. He didn’t want to kill anyone again.

“I’m not going to die,” he said cautiously. “I’m going to live. I’m going to make it out.”

Wolf scoffed. “No one makes it out of here, kid, that’s the point of Stonegate. Everyone dies here. Life here is the only sentence that ever gets handed out. We’re going to die here. You’re going to die here. You’ll just die a little bit sooner.”

“You know what?” Gavin said. “This is all one big joke. The guards are testing us, I bet. They wanna see what we do when some loser kid shows up at our door. What are we gonna do, boys?”

“Nothing,” Maxwell said. “I’m bored already. They want to play some kind of dumb game with us, that’s their business. I’m not playing.”

The three men gave Yoki the silent treatment for the rest of the night. They talked to each other, joked, laughed, and played cards—but they all pretended they couldn’t see Yoki at all. At first, it really bothered him to be treated like he wasn’t there. People had disliked him before, but he’d never been treated like a total nonentity. After about an hour, though, he got used to it. Whatever they were playing at, it was better than being attacked. And these guys were obnoxious anyway. He didn’t want to interact with them.

“Bottom bunk, kid,” Maxwell said at lights-out. “Top bunk’s for grown men.”

“Fine.”

He didn’t care what bunk he slept in. It didn’t seem like any were any better than the others, anyway.

He tried to put himself back in the gray numb space he’d been in before, but he couldn’t do it. Something about being in this cold dark room, surrounded by massive criminals, was too much for him. A few weeks ago, he’d been about to go to the prestigious Academy. He’d had a loving family that supported his every move. Now, they were dead and he was here. It was almost too bleak for him to comprehend.

Without meaning to, Yoki had started crying. He buried his head in the thin prison pillow, trying to stay quiet, but tears were coursing down his cheeks and his body was racked with sobs. He started crying louder and louder, until finally—

“Shut up!” Maxwell shouted from above him. “Damn pathetic. What is wrong with you, kid?”

Yoki was crying too hard to respond. The more he tried to stop, the louder he got. Maxwell was right. This was pathetic. It was embarrassing. But he really couldn’t help himself.

“How we end up with some twat loser for a cellmate?” Gavin hissed. “You think he’s gonna cry like that every night? Wah, wah, wah!”

“Tell you what,” Wolf said, voice low and menacing. “If he keeps it up, I’ll kill him.”

“I’ll do it first,” Gavin said. “Gonna stab him right in the neck.”

“They took your shank after you stabbed Whitey that one time.”

“And I’ll make a new one expressly for the purpose of killing this kid!”

“Never, never, wake us up again, you brat,” Maxwell said. “We barely get enough sleep as it is without your sniveling keeping us up all night.”

Finally, Yoki was able to calm himself down. He listened to his cellmates’ breathing grow louder and more regular as they drifted back off to sleep, and he vowed to himself that he’d never cry again, no matter what happened. As long as he stayed here in Stonegate, he’d be like stone himself.

But his first night wasn’t over. He’d almost drifted off to sleep when a trickling sound woke him up. It was Maxwell, peeing on Yoki’s soft prison shoes. He laughed when he saw Yoki was awake.

“Ha,” he said. “See what you get when you mess with us? Keep us awake? Now your shoes will smell like piss until you get them cleaned.”

It was disgusting, and for a moment Yoki debated killing him. After fifty-four cops, what was one loser criminal? But something stopped him. It was his first night in Stonegate, and he didn’t want to give anything away. He didn’t want everyone else to know his true power. And he might need these guys someday. Who knew?

Prison life was dull and monotonous, and he found it hard to adjust to the routine. A loud alarm rang every morning at dawn—or so he thought; there were no windows in the entire building, so it was hard to tell what time it actually was—and they were summoned to an indoor courtyard to get some exercise. Yoki watched the others work out and play ball, but none of them seemed to want to have anything to do with him. On his first day, he tried to join in the game with them, but they just mocked him. Maxwell had already warned them off.

“This kid’s pathetic!” he said as soon as Yoki stepped on the measly drawn basketball court. “Spent his whole first night crying. Kid’s gonna be dead in a week.”

No one in Stonegate wanted to be associated with weakness, so they all avoided him. Yoki was the only kid in the whole complex. He was surrounded by actual hardened adult criminals. He thought over and over again that it didn’t really make sense—none of it made any sense—but there was nothing he could do about it. So he kept his head down and trained, trying to lift weights and go over the routines his dad had taught him. It was hard to do them alone, but he adapted. He didn’t have any other choice.

After exercise, the prisoners went to breakfast, where they were forced to eat at assigned tables next to each other. As usual, they all hated Yoki. He had to watch his food like a hawk to keep them from putting anything disgusting in it—not that the meals were any good anyway. They all tasted disgusting and half-rotten, as if they were being fed garbage. Honestly, Yoki thought to himself, they probably were. The prisoners in Stonegate were famous all over the country for being the lowest of the low.

They were forced to work all day for free: mornings in one location and afternoons in another. Yoki was assigned to the infirmary because he was too small for the guards to want him anywhere else. Stonegate was tough, but they weren’t actively trying to kill him—or at least, they weren’t supposed to be. To his surprise, he didn’t hate the work. Men were constantly coming in wounded from prison fights or surprise attacks, and it was his job to patch them up as well as he could. He wasn’t a trained doctor, but he learned quickly. His new gray, numb personality soothed the criminals somehow. No matter what he saw, he was totally unflappable. And so, bit by bit, he learned patience and the art of medicine.

His afternoon assignment was less pleasant. He was assigned to a shop that made license plates, and the work was mind-numbingly repetitive. The prisoners weren’t allowed to handle real machinery, so they had to punch the letters into all the plates by hand. By an hour in, his right arm was aching—and he could see by looking around the room that the other men were having the same problem.

There has to be a better way.

He started using his left arm, even though it was weaker. It was harder at first, but he hoped that if he kept at it, he’d grow strong enough to be able to alternate arms. That would allow him to work longer without a break.

Dinner was the same slop as they’d had for breakfast. Again, he was assigned to a table full of prisoners, and again they ignored him and froze him out. It was horribly lonely inside Stonegate, but he just retreated into his mind, telling himself he didn’t care. He’d make it out alive. He had to. And when he did, he’d never have to see any of these guys ever again.

After dinner came lights out. The fluorescents snapped off as soon as the cell doors closed behind them, leaving everyone in his cell in total darkness. Every night, he waited for Maxwell, Wolf, and Gavin to attack him, but they never did. They kept giving him the silent treatment, talking amongst themselves and ignoring him. He was getting used to it—and it was better than the alternative. It was funny, though, that none of them realized he could kill all of them without even breaking a sweat. Well, that was for him to know, and him alone. It was like having a private inside joke with himself.

But the worst part was the nights. The real horror began then.