Read Prisoner of Glass for Free Online

him the iPhone.
    And with that, she stumbled off to bed.

    ELSPETH WOKE with a start.
    It was the middle of the night still, she was sure of that.   Close to 3:00 AM.   Even without a clock, her sense of time was impeccable: she could always wake at any hour and know within a minute exactly what time it was.  
    The Prison was in cacophony.   When she reached her bars, she saw that everyone else was already at theirs, hollering and yelling.   The howl of the crowd even drowned out the ever-playing movies (this time it was an obscure black-and-white film).  
    The guards had brought an old man out of his cell — a cell very close, Elspeth saw, on the same level as her own and just where the curvature began, giving her a close up view.  
    “No!” the man cried out.   “I will not!   Not this time, not again!”
    “No avoiding it, Milton.” the guard snarled at him.   “You know that.”
    “I’m not going willingly this time!” Milton yelled.   “I will not —!   I can not!”   Then he turned to the guard, pleaded with him: “Maybe this time they won’t notice me.   Maybe they’ll let me go!”
    The Prison’s parakeets and parrots were in an uproar as well, squawking and circling, not able to stay still.   They seemed to sense danger near the old man and had retreated to the far walls.
    “It’s an abomination!   It’s not natural!” Milton pleaded again.   “You can’t throw me over the edge this time!”   His eyes stared at the ground far, far, below.   The inner south pole of the Prison was lost in shadow: none knew what awaited down there, but it was certainly not good to land on.
    The guards eyed each other uneasily.  
    “You’d rather face them , then, would you?”
    Milton’s eyes snapped up, wet with fear.
    “Either we take care of this, or they do.”
    Milton stood then and folded his arms, knees shaking visibly.   “I can’t fall again.   Not that.   Anything but that.”
    “So it’s them.   Okay then.   It’s your choice.”
    Milton nodded vigorously.   “Yes.   Yes!   Lock me up, put me in the cell, and lock it! Please!”
    The guards looked at each dubiously.   They muttered between themselves, and then one of them shrugged.   They did as he asked, and then departed.
    They were only halfway along the bridge to the Panopticon when the air popped with a new presence.
    It came from nowhere: a will-o-wisp, a handful of smokeless, soundless flame.   Then it divided in several bobbing, floating tongues of fire.
    The crowd roared with approval or terror.   Elspeth gasped.   The guards ran, closing the door of the Panopticon behind them quickly.
    At first, they floated slowly, aimlessly, like balloons lost by a child.   They were pretty as Christmas tree ornaments, magical as faery stars descended to earth.   They were waiting for something.   And then, the clock slipped forward a tick: Elspeth felt it in her scalp.   Some threshold was reached, and the things bolted towards Milton’s cell.  
    Instantly they burned brighter, like a great quantity of halogen set afire.   Their mood was went from tinkling and dancing to menacing and vicious: a wronged sprite.  
    They slipped between the bars of Milton’s cell.   He screamed piteously — “Not again!   Not again!” — and then fell silent.   Splashes of blood and hunks of flesh and cloth rolled out from between the bars.
    Milton had been taken apart at the seams.   It was like a pack of piraña had devoured him, filleted him while he lived.  

    THE MORNING brought a dense mist — and an earthquake.
    Long before the shriek of the Panopticon rudely sliced through the endless film loops, and the parakeets and parrots skrawked and clawed in the open air, the entire prison shook with a violent wrench.  
    Instinctively, Elspeth leapt out of bed and headed for her bathroom door frame, screaming for Oscar to follow her.   But there was no door frame, and there was no Oscar.   At first, she was