Four years later.

"Time for morning count! Please get up, get dressed, and stand at your door with your ID. Failure to do so will result in a shift lockdown."

Internally, I groaned. The announcement—which was given daily around the same time every single day—came too soon. I had entered deep sleep only a couple of hours ago when the screamer and banger from a couple of cells over had finally stopped. Even though it was just a deflated and flimsy mattress, cotton sheets, and two wool blankets, I had adjusted to it, and it was the most comfortable area in my cell. My body protested as I sat up and blindly reached for the pair of red pants on the floor. I pulled them on as I stumbled over to the cell door and leaned against the wall. My eyes drifted shut as I waited for the officers to walk by with their count sheets.

I knew I didn’t even have to follow through with the procedures; instead, if I wanted to, I could have just remained where I was. For administrative segregation inmates like myself, the country protected our daily one hour out of our cages. Shift lockdowns for failing to comply with count procedures didn't apply to us.

Five minutes later, I heard the approaching footsteps and the pass-through door slamming shut to separate the different custody levels during the day. Seconds afterwards, an officer peeked inside of my cell. He knew exactly where I would be because he had been assigned to the pod for the past five months. His metal nameplate read Silverton. He was one of the newer officers working at the detention facility. His uniform was still crisp, as if it had a weekly dry cleaner's appointment, and his boots were always polished. His hair was shaved close to his skull, and his facial expressions were always gruffly serious, informing me he had some military background and had pursued the law enforcement path. He would be one of the ones who would disappear from pod life when he was snatched up by the patrol bureau. In the pod, he was one who hadn’t yet lost his motivation from all the drama that came with managing female inmates. I had been here long enough to see the transformation of the fresh-eyed, eager officer into the jaded robot with a severe temper. If they lasted long enough, they transformed into the apathetic and lazy officers.

Officer Silverton's glance lasted three seconds before he moved on to the cell next to mine. I didn't know her name, but at least she was quiet. Some of my past neighbors were disruptively disobedient and required the officers to extract them from the cell. I had been present for cell floodings, feces being thrown on the officers, and attempted escapes. My current neighbor was nothing like the others. I had nicknamed her Mousey. Her voice was so soft I could barely hear it when she spoke to the officers. She was dressed in blue, which alerted me she had been classified as low risk. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes, and projected an aura of innocence. I wondered what she had done to first get herself incarcerated, and then how she had ended up in segregation. I would never receive that information, as other inmates were prohibited from approaching my cell. Not that it had stopped them at the beginning. Several times, I had urine and feces flung underneath my door.

The sound of keys tapping against the cell door was followed quickly by, "Saheli, get up!" This was another common occurrence in the morning. There wasn’t much that the officers could do in this dayroom to enforce the count rule.

I pushed away from the wall. It was all part of the routine of the past four years as my case progressed. That was all what jail was: a routine. You learn it, you accept it, and you don’t dare deviate from it.

When my breakfast was brought to me—consisting of gruel, a blueberry muffin square, a sausage patty, and black coffee—I mindlessly fed myself. I had learned to look past my disgust with the gruel’s consistency as I used the red rubber spoon to transport it from the tray to my mouth. The nurse and her escorting officer appeared at my cell soon after. Its food slot tray was unlocked and yanked down. I accepted the medley of medication, brought the pile up to my mouth, took the swig of water, and pretended to swallow. I had perfected concealing the medication deep in the pit in between my teeth and jaw, so that when I opened my mouth and lifted my tongue, the officer would be none the wiser.

When the officer and nurse walked away, I spat out the medication. There were the standard depression and anxiety pills, which I flushed down the toilet. I kept the two hard narcotic pills and placed them with my hidden stash in the wall. When they searched my cell, the officers never scrutinized the wall where I had dug out a thin line deep enough to conceal the pills. It was difficult to get to unless you were laying supine on the bunk, and officers never did that. Besides that, I kept my behavior polite and my cell even cleaner. Both kept the cell searches to a minimum.

The dayroom television was on the national news to provide distraction. This morning, it was loud enough that I could hear it from my cell. In the middle of the announcements about Queen Elizabeth II supporting a new prime minister rising to office and coverage on a Los Angeles manhunt for a gunman, there was a blurb about me. The jury’s still out about Briara Disraeli, the perpetrator behind the Union Station Massacre. It’s been three days since the jury left the courtroom to begin deliberations. There seems to be some confusion whether she was truly insane at the time of the incident, and if the defense did their job, Disraeli will be acquitted of murdering one hundred four people and injuring many more. If the defense gets the jury to declare Briara Disraeli innocent by the reason of insanity, it would be quite a feat since they were missing one of their key witnesses. I narrowed my eyes at the last part and suffocated the betrayal I felt rising within me over the reminder.

I started pacing my cell. I tried reading a book, though I couldn't concentrate. Then mid-morning, the announcement came.

"Disraeli, get ready for court," the civilian employee communicated through my cell’s intercom. I answered with a simple okay. My stomach twisted in on itself.

The jury had finally reached a verdict.

I turned to face the small mirror nailed to the wall over the steel toilet. The mirror was scratched in the lower left corner by some previous occupant and was about the size of a paperback novel. My reflection was blurry, as the mirror was not made of real glass. I ran my plastic comb down the length of my hair, unraveling a few tangles. When that was done, I placed my hair up into a bun. Normally, I kept my hair in braids or down. My attorneys had recommended pulling it back in order to convey professionalism in the courtroom. For the most part, that was all the preparations I could do at this point. Makeup was unavailable.

Soon, it was time. They had to shut down the entire dayroom for me. Despite what I had been accused of, they had a responsibility of keeping me safe. Even if the jury declared I was guilty. I was not the most popular inmate in the Denver City Jail. There were many who hissed insults at me and banged on their cell doors when I walked by. It had happened so much that I had become accustomed to it. I had learned how to keep my body language impassive, understanding that the others only wanted to prompt me into reacting so that they could write home and gossip about the crazy girl who was in cell A8. Yet, behind their cell doors, they could not hurt me. It were girls like Mousey, who stared at me with empathy written across their faces, that disoriented me.

Officers met me outside in the main area of the pod. I immediately turned to the wall and kicked up one of my legs. Steel encircled the ankle with the matching piece encircling the other ankle. A metal chain connected the two of them, slowing my pace immensely. One officer patted me down. Two female officers—the same ones who were usually assigned to me—escorted me to where my courtroom clothes were. They waited outside of the bland changing room as I changed into the suit my attorneys had procured for me. We had repeated the same steps repeatedly in the past three months that everyone knew what they were doing, what their tasks were. Once I was dressed in normal clothing, we were ready to proceed to the courtroom.

For a day and a half, I had waited in my cell for the jury's verdict. I had tried to keep myself busy and my mind off my fate, which was being held in twelve strangers' hands. My attorneys had faith that they had done enough to convince the jury that I had truly gone insane in those moments of the massacre. Although they had tried to instill their faith in me, I was uncertain after watching the jury's faces throughout the trial. The witnesses’ accounts, victims’ painful stories of how their permanent injuries would affect the rest of their lives, and crime scene photos were too much. I had struggled against visibly crying during the prosecution’s parade of witnesses and gory photos. There was no way that the jury would be on my side. They had been deliberating for twelve hours, and according to my attorneys, the extended length was in my favor. They were hoping that they could rescue me from life in prison and instead make me a permanent resident of the state hospital.

Within twenty minutes, I was sitting with officers, the audience, my attorneys, and the prosecution. My attorneys were kind to me, as they had been at the start. Ava gave her usual chipper "hello", while Lucas smiled at me. As we waited for the jury, they spent the time working on their laptops. Judge McKenna and the court clerks divided their attention between their monitors and cell phones. All I could do was wait for the jury to be paraded in. Skye, who was sitting in the pew directly behind the defendant's table, gave me a meager thumbs up and smiled. My smile in return was shaky. You're going to be okay, she mouthed. I nodded. My twisted stomach contradicted her words. I suddenly wished I had skipped that breakfast gruel.

After fifteen minutes of waiting, the jury returned to the courtroom. I studied their faces like I had been taught. Their gazes were directed everywhere but at the defense table. The courtroom and its side conversations hushed as the jury took their seats.

Judge McKenna addressed them. "Will the jury’s foreperson please stand?" A woman in the front row of the jury box stood, the verdict papers clutched in her hand. She was middle-aged, and I would have wagered that she had at least a couple of children she had to care for at home. Her hair had been styled into curls that bobbed behind her shoulders; she wore a fuchsia button-up sweater and black slacks. "Have you arrived at a verdict?"

The woman hesitated before she announced, "We have, your honor." The bailiff collected the papers from the woman and passed them to the judge. Judge McKenna glanced at the papers before making the declarations. "On count one, murder in the first degree, the jury finds the defendant guilty."

There were one hundred three other counts, plus the assault charges. Nothing would change with the verdicts. If they had found me guilty on the first count, I would be found guilty on the rest of them. It was over. I tuned out the rest of the verdicts. Frozen, my gaze lingered on the massive tubs filled with trial paperwork Skye had helped my defense team organize. I had spent countless hours with them over the past couple of years going over every piece of paper in those tubs. Some were copies of the evidence the defense had entered into the trial. Others were copies of the prosecution's discovery. There were the papers recording the different motions set into place prior to the trial. My team had fought a long and uphill battle for me, only to be defeated by the American criminal justice system.

When I was little, I never thought my future would encompass spending life in a prison cell.

My birth had been undocumented. There were a couple of police reports and newspaper articles recording the occurrence of a woman fleeing the hospital with her newborn daughter. After a week, that became old news when no one could find the mother and newborn. It was unprecedented, as women did not have too much energy to walk, much less flee after hours of labor. Yet, my mother had a warrior mindset. She had been alone for the duration of her pregnancy and lacked a permanent residence. As I developed in her uterus, my mother disappeared into anonymity within the landscapes of large European cities like Paris and London. She took long train rides from Madrid to Florence to Zagreb. She spent the end of her second trimester in Russia before vacationing in Bali at the beginning of her third. She waddled around for as long as she could around Dresden's old cobblestone streets. By the time her nine months were up, my mother was in Denver, Colorado.

She was staying in a hotel downtown when she got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Before she could even sit down on the toilet, a gush of water left her and landed in between her feet. For seconds, she stared at it, perplexed. Then the realization occurred to her, and she packed up her meager belongings. She checked out of the hotel, assuring the receptionist she didn't need an ambulance to take her to the emergency room. "The baby won’t be coming in the next hour. I want to enjoy the Christmas lights before I have to deal with that pain," she had added. Even though my mother had entered the first phrase of labor, she left the hotel and waddled the ten blocks to the hospital underneath the trees decorated with Christmas lights.

The emergency room and OBGYN department didn't have any records on my mother. She was a walk-in patient, already in the throes of labor. There was only enough time for the staff to get her name and ensure she didn't have any known medical issues that would compromise the labor. She told them her name was Madeleine Walton, which was one of the aliases she liked to use. When the staff asked her about her prior care, Madeleine had informed them she had gone through her entire pregnancy without any prenatal care. As much as the doctors and nurses wanted to know the reasoning behind the lack of prenatal care, there wasn't much time. The waddling journey from the hotel to the hospital had been a stalling technique to avoid an interrogation by the hospital staff. There was a rush in getting my mother checked into the hospital and hooked up to the machines. While a nurse questioned her about her medical history, another nurse was securing a heartbeat monitor around Madeleine’s belly and attempting to get a last-minute ultrasound done. Another nurse was taking blood samples from my mother, as yet another was trying to discover if Madeleine had any insurance.

With some complications during the birth, I was born on December Twenty-First at three fifty-eight in the morning. I say complications, because as the doctor and nurses were encouraging my mother to push and work past the contractions, she wasn’t even fully mentally there. Madeleine would tell me when I was older that I had died in the middle of my birth. She could sense my soul leaving in the swarm of chaos surrounding her. Nurses held her legs open as the doctor watched for the crowning of my head. Another nurse manned the washcloth to keep Madeleine’s body cool. None of them separated her panicked cries from the screams produced by pain. No one knew—except her—that I would not survive the birth.

Madeleine would later tell me how she rescued me as our own type of bedtime faery tale. She said she retreated into herself and concentrated on pulling my soul back into my fragile form. Over the years, the faery tale became so exaggerated, it became our own joke. She had to battle dragons, vampires, faeries, shapeshifters, and witches to reach my soul, which she could hear crying from afar. She had to battle all these enemies using magic and her wits, only to find that a goddess was protecting me. The goddess handed me back to my mother, who had proven herself as a solid protector. My mother would always finish it with the same phrase: For all the evers, for all the infinities, for all the infinite stars in the sky. That would be the end, and I would fall asleep dreaming of a fantasy realm where magic existed. In the bright light of day, Madeleine was adamant that the dragons and faeries were just fiction, and that she saved me with the power of her mind.

In the hospital room, Madeleine returned to herself with the final push. The doctor caught me in his waiting hands. His face fell with devastation when he noticed I was not breathing. He barked emergency protocol orders. A nurse exclaimed that I had been alive in the womb when they had done that quick ultrasound and was adamant that she had heard a heartbeat. The umbilical cord was cut immediately, and the doctor was rushing me to the resuscitation area when I started crying. Startled, he brought me to the scale to complete a closer inspection. The moment he laid me down, another distraction pulled him and the staff away from me. My mother was never clear about what the distraction was. She would always shrug and claim, "I don’t know" when I turned my curiosity on her, especially when I realized that there was little that could pull health care professionals away from a newborn who had not been breathing when she exited the womb.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

The hospital room empty, Madeleine disconnected herself from the machines. She grabbed a blanket and pressed it in between her legs to staunch the bleeding right before she seized her pants. She threw her bag over her shoulder, swaddled me in the baby blanket, and walked out of the room. I’m not sure how she got out of the hospital without being harassed by at least a security guard. She just walked back out onto Denver’s streets an hour after entering the hospital. It was that easy to ensure that the only record of my birth were those news articles and police reports. My name was not documented anywhere. As far as the universe knew, I didn’t exist, and that was how my mother preferred it.

For the next eight years, I lacked a formal residence. Madeleine declared it was because of the monster lurking in the shadows. Sometimes, I wondered if my mother was paranoid over nothing; psychologists would have diagnosed her with some kind of mental health illness if she ever spoke to them about this monster. She definitely felt like there was something lurking in the shadows; it was in how she would look over her shoulder whenever we were about to board in a crowded train terminal or when she spontaneously told me we were leaving our current temporary home because her instincts had informed her that the monster had found us. She was the one who implemented the rule of never staying in one place longer than seven days. Sometimes, it was difficult to believe her, especially when she dismissed my imagination so easily. The monster had never attacked us. I had never seen any signs of him, either.

You could say that I had a lonely childhood. Madeleine tried her best to ensure I had everything I needed, though sometimes she found that trying to give me everything I wanted was impossible. My childhood friends were imaginary. I may have painted besides a girl in Africa, or helped a boy build a snowman in Switzerland, but I was soon a fragment in their memories, and they in mine.

My material possessions were limited to what I could fit in a backpack. Clothes, hygiene items, books, and toys all had to fit in a backpack, or else they had to be left behind. Once, I tried to leave all my clothes behind; my mother put a stop to it and mandated that all my clothes had to be in the backpack. I threw a tantrum, and the consequence was that I had to leave behind all the toys I had acquired throughout our travels. I quickly learned how to live with less and how to value what I had. It was easier to travel with less, after all. I was always leaving something behind, only to acquire something newer.

My mother had to get creative with my schooling. None of her lessons were formal, and she didn't follow a lesson plan. Whatever she taught depended on where we were for that week, and it was always hands-on. A similar concept was applied to languages. She had the capability of conversing as if she was a native, no matter what the language was. Thus, she always spoke the national language of wherever we happened to be. At first, as a young child trying to grasp the concept of verbal communication, it was a challenge to comprehend why we were always changing our language. It assisted with learning geography, customs, and culture, however.

While other children were learning history from presentations and blurbs in a textbook, I got to wander around the Louvre, the National History Museum in London, and the Uffizi Gallery. I saw the Statue of David and Notre Dame with my own eyes. I touched the Berlin Wall and the sand of Normandy Beach with my own hands. Having to deal with currency exchanges taught me math. Often, my mother would quiz me on the exchange rates and inquire how many Euros we would get from turning in Japanese Yens. We visited zoos, forests, and dinosaur museums to learn about animals.

It wasn’t until later when she went on the offensive with the obscure, lurking monster. Except for those emergent times when we had to leave immediately for the airport or train station, my mother had kept us one step ahead of the monster. For the first five years of my life, Madeleine was not comfortable enough to fight him; her primary concern was getting me to a self-functional age. However, when I started becoming more self-efficient, she threw herself into her research with fierce determination. Almost every single night, Madeleine waited until I went to bed before she spent hours flipping through the books she had found and reviewing her notes. When she couldn’t take the books with her, we spent entire days in libraries.

"Ms. Disraeli, we will schedule your sentencing hearing in three weeks. Let's come back on August 15, 2019, at ten AM,” Judge McKenna addressed my table, drawing me out of my reverie. Disorientated, I realized the jury had already departed. Right on cue, Ava pushed back strands of her blonde hair behind her ears before scheduling the date on her computer. Her jaw was locked with disappointment over the verdict.

Judge McKenna continued, "Until then, I want you, Ms. Disraeli, to think on these past four years, as well as all the testimony you’ve heard in these past three months. I am willing to give you an opportunity to make a statement to the court, perhaps containing an apology for all the lives you took, as well as come forward with what substance you consumed the day of the massacre. I hope you take this time I’m giving you to make the right choice. Despite you not having any permanent recorded history or records until four years ago, despite you not having any family due to your mother passing away when you were eight, I’m giving you a chance to prove yourself. I truly believe that you are a good person at heart, and that drug you took controlled you, ruined your life. I want you to think long and hard about telling me what specific drug it was and where you got it so we can start accumulating intelligence on it to prevent the next massacre."

Judge McKenna stared directly at me. Her gaze was stern and unyielding, yet there was something motherly about it.

Common belief was that I was not acting in my right mind that day, and I had consumed an unknown illegal drug that had caused me to go on a murderous rampage. To prevent it from happening to another person, and thus causing more deaths, the court tried to get me to tell them what drug it was. I could have lied and made up a substance. Instead, I told them the truth. As far as I knew, I had nothing in my bloodstream.

Judge McKenna nodded once at the entire courtroom in dismissal, her shoulder-length brown hair obstructing her glasses. She gathered her pile of paperwork, stood up, pivoted, and departed through the private door behind her seat. With her departure, the courtroom erupted in chatter behind me.

"Come on." One officer—Officer Sterling—behind me ordered.

As I was standing up, Lucas assured me, "We’ll be by to visit this week. Keep your head up."

Skye leaned over the half wall dividing the courtroom. "There are always appeals." She had believed me when I had told her there had been nothing in my system that day. She always believed there was good in me.

My attempted smile came out more as a wobbly grimace. While I appreciated their concern, I didn't know why they would still bother when the entire trial was over, and they had lost. Sterling took control of my right elbow and walked behind me as we walked towards one of the private doors linking the courtroom to the secured area. I was acutely aware of cameramen towards the back of the room, filming my exit. Only a limited amount had been allowed in the courtroom during the trial. Together, they got enough footage to hand over to news outlets. I relied on the compartmentalizing lessons I had learned when I was younger. I was an expert in keeping my face neutral and tears bottled in.

I felt worse for my defense team and all the effort they had put into my trial. Ava, Lucas, and Skye all believed that they could convince the jury that I had had a momentary lapse of insanity. After all, it made a lot more sense than what my original theories were.

After I had returned from the state hospital with my psych prescriptions, Ava and Lucas met with me in a private visitation room at the jail. To my immense surprise, Skye was sitting at the table with them. My awareness of who was watching curtailed my desire to embrace her. I didn't want to cause a black wave of officers to converge on us just because I was hugging my friend. Skye was attired in a suit set that I had seen her wearing whenever she had her mock trial days at school; it was as if she already belonged with the firm. My eyes wide, I exclaimed, "What are you doing here?"

Skye's grin stretched across her face. "What? You aren't happy to see me?" she teased.

"She was the surprise I was referring to when we met before you got moved to the state hospital," Ava advised. "Skye reached out to my father and asked if she could do an internship with the firm. There was some fear over conflict of interest, and the matter of whether we would use her as a character witness. We still decided to bring her on. She's here to handle the administrative aspects of your case."

I blinked against the wetness in my eyes. "What about school?"

Skye produced a one-shouldered shrug. "I'm getting credit for interning here, and I’m transferring to the University of Denver next semester. I figure that I'm going to learn more here than in a classroom. How are you holding up?"

"I'm hanging in there," I answered. "Some days are rougher than others. But if I stay in bed and refuse to eat all day, they tend to take drastic action and I'll end up on suicide watch, which will make things worse."

"We don't want you to die, either," Ava declared. "We've gotten the transcripts and video from your interrogation and your competency evaluation reports." Lucas motioned to the stack of papers already on the table in between us. There were more bins sitting behind him, all of which were filled with paperwork. They had been busy preparing all the documents while I had been gone. An expensive-looking laptop sat in front of Lucas. I had known the law firm taking my case was prestigious and expensive, and I wondered if the cost was worth it considering the evidence against me. "Some of the psychiatrists you spoke to at the hospital noted that it is a possibility you are walking around with undiagnosed PTSD—perhaps from your mother's death—and something happened to set it off, causing the memory lapse at the massacre. Some believe you suffered from a brief psychotic disorder that day."

I stared down at the table. My hands were clasped together tightly in my lap. They turned cold as I realized it was me they were pairing psychotic disorders with. We had separated ourselves: I sat on one side of the table, while they sat on the other as one collective group. Our clothing was obviously different; my red uniform was garish against their grays and blacks. "You mean you want me to put in an insanity plea?" I questioned. The dark tone of my voice reflected my opinion of it.

Ava met my stare straight on. "It's our best approach. We don't believe we will get a plea deal from the DA, unless it's related to a full disclosure of the controlled substances."

"I didn't take anything beforehand," I argued. My frustration boiled my blood.

Skye and Lucas both looked away, uncomfortable. Ava was the only one who could handle confronting me. "I believe you, but the DA is convinced you did. There was something that popped up on your blood work."

"What?"

Ava shook her head. "No one knows. The DA has experts claiming it is some unknown drug in the stimulant category."

"I didn’t take anything," I expressed again. I knew I was guilty of the massacre; still, keeping my innocence intact over this minor issue was important to me. I brought my hands up to press against my eyes. My fingers crept into my hair, pressing against my skull.

"Briara." Skye interjected. Her hand crept across the table, breaching the no man's space in between me and them. "We have some scientists testing the samples, too."

I lowered my hands from my eyes, though not enough to uncover the bottom half of my face. "Who?"

Skye shifted in her seat, suddenly uncomfortable. "Xavier."

I stared at her. "You brought Xavier into this?" My voice rose with the exclamation.

"We thought he would be motivated to help!"

"We have other scientists looking into the samples, as well," Ava offered.

"Xavier hates me," I groaned.

Skye shook her head. "No. He was just hurt, that's all. Remember that text message he sent the night of the incident? He still cares for you!" I remembered his text message quite well, along with the fact that I never responded to it because I felt guilty over having sex with Jay and the chaotic state of my thoughts at the time. My throat constricted over the thought that we would never get to meet over espresso at Killebrew.

"How do you know about that?" I groaned.

"It was all over the news."

"Of course, it was.” I flattened my forehead against my palm. My thoughts were racing. All the sudden, this trial seemed like I was about to climb Everest without any training.

Ava took the opportunity of the silence to steer us back on task. "Think about my suggestion about the plea. If we can get the jury to believe what we do—that you are not guilty by reason of insanity—you could live a better life than being locked up in prison for the rest of your life."

"I will still be locked up."

Ava nodded. "Yes. In a mental institution."

I shut my eyes, as if doing so would quash my lingering fate. A part of me had not accepted that I would be locked up regardless of whether I was declared sane or insane; it had some hope that I would be declared innocent despite the contrary evidence. "Aren't there other leads? Other investigations being conducted?" I inquired. It felt as if my heart was twisting inside of me. Something that would exonerate me? I was afraid to say.

Skye's eyebrow arched, perplexed. My heart twisted over the fact that even she didn't believe I was purely innocent. Yet, she let Ava answer for them. "What other investigations are you thinking of?"

I hesitated. Yet, I was encouraged by the fear of being imprisoned for the rest of my life. I knew I was shooting in the dark. Three curious, perplexed faces stared at me, waiting. I opened my mouth and confided, "Galileo was meeting three men in Denver during my competition. He was concerned about our safety. He believed the men were dangerous. Jay and I were supposed to stay at Union Station."

"Where was the meeting supposed to take place?" Ava asked. She had settled her chin on a platform of her hands while her elbows were on the table. Lucas's fingers moved quickly on the mouse pad of his laptop. Skye's gaze was focused on its screen.

"The Thirsty Lion."

"Galileo was amongst the dead," Ava said, her eyebrows furrowed. "Was the meeting over or was there another reason why he was in Union Station?"

I swallowed. These people are advocating for you, I reminded myself. "The meeting got interrupted. The men he was meeting ended it."

"Why?"

I shrugged, conveying a sense of innocent ignorance. There was some information that should remain omitted. Telling them about the real purpose for being at the competition would open the Pandora's Box of questions. I wasn't prepared to venture down that avenue. "I never got the chance to ask Galileo," I said instead, with the right amount of sadness in my voice.

"Were these men in Union Station at the time of the massacre?" Lucas questioned.

"I don't know." This time, I answered honestly.

Lucas turned his laptop partly around so I could see the screen at an angle. On it, he had the Union Station cameras pulled up. They presented several views. The video was paused. A quick glance at the timestamp in the bottom corner informed me that the video was paused ten seconds before the official time of the massacre. On one of the still frames, I could see myself tripping over my feet, and Jay reaching out to grab me to prevent the impending fall. "Can you see them anywhere here?" Lucas questioned. I bent over the table to get closer to the laptop screen. My eyes skimmed the frames, searching for the three men in the suits. As the seconds disappeared, my heartbeat increased with my desperation. If I could point out the men, I could get the law firm to open an investigation into them, and then maybe my innocence would not be farfetched. Maybe they were behind the massacre and framed me. There was video footage of me destroying everything in the vicinity. Yet, maybe the men did something to me to cause it.

After a couple of minutes, I was forced to conclude no, the men were not on the premises at the time of the massacre. Disappointed and frustrated, I leaned back in the plastic chair. All my hope had vanished for moments as my mind raced. Then I remembered the compass. Galileo had put us in danger of retrieving it; there had to be some significance beyond its navigational purposes. I wondered if it was a weapon of its own kind. I had been clutching it before, during, and after the massacre. Maybe something prompted it to activate. I clung to this desperate denial. I perked up and asked, "What about our property at the hotel? Did they take all of that into evidence?"

"Yes," Ava said, frowning. "It can be rather difficult to get something out of evidence while the case is open, much less the jail allowing you to have it with you in here."

I shook my head. "No. I had something in my hands during the massacre. A compass. I thought it was just a regular compass. Maybe it was a weapon. I didn't know it was a weapon. It was Galileo's. I was just retrieving it for him," I rambled on until I realized I should remain quiet. Even if Ava, Skye, and Lucas were on my side, telling them any more would only prompt more questions about Galileo's missions, which I couldn't answer.

Ava looked sadly at me. "It's already been looked into," she claimed. I stared at her in shock. She pulled one of the big binders towards her. After considering its divider tabs, she chose one of the orange ones towards the back and flipped the binder open to that area. She presented it to me. On the top page, I saw a photograph of the compass Galileo had me steal. Underneath the photograph, a report of double-spaced text started. I lost all reading comprehension as I stared at the page, and Ava launched into an explanation.

"The investigators noticed you were holding something in your hands and could determine that it was the compass. While you were at the state hospital, they performed tests on it. The reports aren't that interesting, unless you are interested in the compass's composition. Basically, the compass is not a weapon." Ava paused. I could feel her stare on my face as she considered her next statement. When she said it, it was in a soft, comforting tone. "Do you truly believe in the deepest part of your heart that you are innocent?"

I blinked. My hands became so cold that I wondered if they would transform into icicles. I could feel Skye's gaze on my face. "It doesn't matter, does it?" I questioned; my voice as soft as hers. "All the evidence says otherwise."

"Then we fight for the insanity plea," Ava declared.

I sat there quietly for the rest of that meeting, and the ones following it, as my attorneys pieced together the defense for my trial. The denial within me had melted into silent acceptance.