Read The Killing Floor Blues for Free Online

brain’s been corrupted by violent media and rock music.”
    Lancaster sighed. “While I’m certain it has, I find your explanation a bit far-fetched. Are you afraid of reprisal? Just tell us what really happened. We can protect you from Simms.”
    “I started the fight,” I repeated.
    The trustee finished. The window gleamed.
    “All done here, boss,” he said as he slunk out the door.
    Lancaster folded his hands on the desk. “Normally, we have several means of addressing inmate-on-inmate violence. Loss of privileges. Time in administrative segregation. Criminal charges and additional years on your sentence. And if I truly believed you started that fight, we’d be pursuing one or several of those corrective measures. As it happens, I don’t. But if you insist on refusing our protection, I just hope that the next time we speak, it isn’t in the infirmary.”
    *     *     *
    The prison yard made me think of a carton of Neapolitan ice cream. Instead of strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla, the yard split along racial lines, but the invisible border between each color was just as real.
    I didn’t like it, but then again, I didn’t like Neapolitan ice cream either.
    The setup wasn’t too shabby. A couple of weight sets alongside a jogging track, picnic benches here and there, a few two-seater tables with chessboards set into the plastic tabletops. I could imagine I was on a college campus, if it weren’t for the fences, the gun towers, and the razor wire.
    Paul walked the track, smoking a cigarette, keeping to himself. He gave me a wave and I wandered over. He shook his head at me.
    “Wow. You just jump right in with both fists, don’t you? Gonna have a beauty of a shiner there, too.”
    I touched the skin under my eye and winced. Puffy and raw.
    “Well, shit,” I told him, falling into step as we walked along the oval track, “there goes my modeling career. Hey, read something for me?”
    I tugged the last sheet of my paperwork from my pocket, folded into a neat square, and unfurled it.
    “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