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little games, maybe: drop me in prison, bury me deep, and see if I could claw my way out. Exactly the kind of dick move he’d pull if he was bored enough, or if he wanted to make some kind of point.
    And what if the point is
“Caitlin isn’t coming to help you”?
    I shoved that thought into a mental box already cluttered with all the things that kept me up at night. Not a lot of room left in that box.
    I was good at two things: leading my crew, and magic. Now my friends and family were on the far side of an electrified fence, and I couldn’t work a ritual in a place with zero privacy and guards standing watch around the clock. If there was a better way to keep me caged, I couldn’t think of one.
    Despair started to creep around the edges of my mind, like lead weights tied to my wrists and ankles. I shoved that into the box, too.
    Dig deeper
, I told myself.
There’s no such thing as a no-win situation. Think fast, fight hard, and breathe free air again
.
No matter what it takes
.
    “Back in processing,” I said to Paul, “Emerson told us that nobody’s ever escaped from the Iceberg. That true?”
    “No, but…well, sort of. It’s compli—” He froze, eyes darting left. “Oh shit, hold on, here it comes.”
    I saw it too. Two guys from the black corner of the yard, shirts tied off around their waists, marching hard and fast with murder in their eyes. Coming up on a skinny Latino with a full-chest tattoo of the Virgin Mary, all on his own by the chess tables. A lone gazelle, separated from the herd and blissfully unaware of the doom heading his way.

6.
    “We’ve gotta do someth—” I started to say. Paul put his hand on my chest.
    “No, we
don’t
,” he told me. “This is
prison
, okay? You want to survive this place? Here’s the best advice you’ll ever get: never get involved in other people’s fights. That makes it
your
fight.”
    I wouldn’t have gotten there in time anyway. I watched as one of the attackers looped his arm around their target’s throat, hauling him back and off-balance. The other reached under his tied-off shirt and yanked out a shiv—a jagged spike of metal wired to a broom-handle hilt, cheap and nasty and built for violence. The blows rained down fast and frantic, punching the spike into the Latino’s chest and stomach and mutilating his tattoo, turning the Virgin Mary into a murder victim. If he prayed to her, it didn’t help him any.
    A klaxon whined from the gun towers, shrill as fingernails on a blackboard and loud enough to set my teeth on edge. Paul dropped to his knees and hissed, “Down! Do exactly what I do!”
    I followed his lead, kneeling on the jogging track and lacing my fingers behind my neck. Around us, from one side of the yard to the other, everyone—including the two assassins—was doing the same. The killer dropped his shiv and knelt down beside his victim’s corpse, waiting patiently as the hive doors burst open and uniforms flooded the yard. The klaxon fell silent.
    “Don’t even breathe funny until they give the all clear,” Paul warned in a low voice, “and if you’ve got an itchy nose, live with it. Seriously, I can see the tower behind you. Jablonski’s up there and he’s staring right at us.”
    “Us? Why? We had nothing to do with it.”
    “Rotten bastard’s looking for an excuse to put a bullet in me. Which we are
not
going to give him today. Just stay calm and pretend you’re a statue.”
    The assassins were hauled off in cuffs, their victim on a stretcher already dark with old bloodstains. The wave of guards fell back like a navy blue tide. Then the alarm honked, twice in sharp succession.
    The inmates unlaced their hands and got back on their feet. Cigarettes lit up. A basketball thumped, game back underway. Like one of those old westerns where a bad guy gets gunned down in the saloon, life went right back to normal the second the body was dragged out of sight.
    Except that it didn’t. As I gazed across the yard, I caught a