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medicine on prisoners.
    They provided food at least. There’d been some sort of slop before lights out, dished in plastic bowls so old and scratched they were probably no more hygienic than the poorly cleaned toilet in the corner of the cell. His stomach had been growling by then and he wolfed the lot down, only stopping at the end of licking the bowl to wonder if they’d put anything harmful in it. But why take him alive if that was their plan?
    The bowl still sat by the bars of his cell when two soldiers marched in through the cold gray light and the silence that had finally fallen somewhere in the deep of night. Noah was waking up – the dawn would do that for you if you lived in the wild – and when they stopped by his cell he propped himself up on an elbow, watching them as casually as he could.
    “Mornin’ ladies.” He rubbed his sleep crusted eyes, gave an exaggerated yawn. “I believe I ordered breakfast with my wake-up call?”
    If these two thought he was funny, they didn’t show it. It made Noah miss the Russian fellow from the day before. At least he knew how to laugh.
    A heavy key turned in the lock and the cell swung open.
    “Come with us,” one of them said. “Sergeant Burns wants to see you.”
    “You didn’t say the magic word,” Noah said, sitting up and stretching his arms.
    The guard reached him in two swift strides, slammed a metal club into his side.
    Noah crumpled over as pain blazed through him.
    “That magic enough for you?” she said.
    He eased himself to his feet, wincing as he moved. Had that click been a rib cracking?
    “After you,” he said through gritted teeth.
    “Oh no, wise-ass. After you.”

    The room they took him to looked like it had a long history of interrogations. Shattered remnants around the edges of the hole showed where observers had once watched conversations through one-way glass, and the animosity unleashed against that window had clearly extended to a hatred of the space itself. The table bolted down in the center of the room was charred and a little warped in one leg. It took a certain retarded determination to try to set fire to a metal table, and Noah almost admired whichever prisoner had tried it.  
    Then there was the mural on the wall, a stylishly rendered lightning bolt crossing over an ankh. He’d have admired it a lot more if it didn’t seem like another part of this place’s craze for religion.
    No-one cuffed him or clapped him in irons. He was kind of disappointed to find that they didn’t even consider him worth tying up, though relief outweighed that by a fair amount. Where there were free hands there was hope, as his Grandpa had never said.
    They pressed him into a plastic chair and left him alone, taking long enough when closing the door that he could see the guards lurking outside, all with metal beating sticks at their sides, one with a musket.
    “This is what I expected to wake up in,” he said to the world in general. “Dim light through a barred window, distant dripping noises, maybe a rat or two just out of sight.”
    “You expected to wake up?” A woman’s voice emerged from the room beyond the broken mirror. Noah squinted to make out her shape in the shadows, an indistinct patch amid a larger darkness.
    “I don’t have high standards,” he said, “but that’s one of them, sure.”
    “I wouldn’t be getting any expectations if I were you.” She moved suddenly forward, vaulted through the broken window and landed surely on her feet. But even though the sudden movement made Noah jump, it sure wasn’t the most striking thing about her.
    Whoever else this Sergeant Burns was, she was the most beautiful woman Noah had seen in the best part of a decade. Her eyes were the green of a forest on a fine spring morning, and Noah knew he was in trouble when he started thinking poetically. But how could he help it? She had wavy auburn hair tied back to reveal tattoos that ran from her neck across her shoulders and down her arms.