The lights in her cell clicked on automatically at seven o'clock and woke her with a knifelike buzzing, as if the ceiling above was full of wasps. She lay unmoving on her bunk, staring at lights above her and watching the circling flies. The room was seven feet wide and fourteen feet long. Her bed was a mattress and blanket with a pillow on a concrete slab. At the far end of the room was a concrete shelf that served as a table and a concrete cylinder she could use as a stool. The window above the desk was four inches wide and eight inches high and looked out onto the prison courtyard. On the floor by the bed was a radio and a few yellowed paperback books.

After a while she sat up and picked one of the books off the floor. The cover said, "Holy Bible". She opened it to the middle, tore out a page in Proverbs, and picked up the edge of her matress to remove a small plastic bag with something dried and green inside. She poured some of it onto the Bible page and replaced the bag under her mattress, then went and opened the window and sat in front of it. She tore a strip from the Bible page, rolled the green shavings in it and put the rest of the page in her pocket. She lit the cigarette between the ends of her fingers and slumped against the table, blowing the smoke out the window.

After a while she glanced up and saw the envelope next to her elbow on the table. She opened it and a cockroach came buzzing out. She had managed to fill the envelope with them. The escapee slithered across the table, jaws clicking, antennae whirring wildly, but she pulled the cigarette from her mouth and pressed the lit end against the roach's back. A light smell of burned chitin rose up and she heard the roach's quiet scream. Replacing the cigarette in her mouth, she held the roach with her pinky as she carefully removed its legs and antennae, tossing them out the window. Then she got up and lifted the corner of her bed again and took out a toothpick. She impaled the roach and put it in the line under her desk with the others. Twenty-one. She had been in the Isolation block for twenty-one days.

A clanking noise from down the hall made her snuff out the cigarette against her forearm and drop the butt between her breasts. A few minutes later the clanking noise was at her door and the food slot was being pulled open.

"Eats, Evgeniya," said the guard. "Last breakfast at the old California Institute for Women, eh? How's it feel?"

Adri blinked. Last breakfast? Today? She had known that her release date was approaching, but she was a little fuzzy on the exact date and her confinement to Isolation for fighting was for thirty days, so she'd assumed it couldn't possibly come before that.

"You fooling with me, Abernathy?" she said. "You better not be fooling with me."

"Fool with a sorry sack like you? Ha!" the other woman sniffed. "My time's not worthless enough for that."

Adri clenched her fists. "You're an abusive slut, Abernathy!"

"Uh-oh, sounds like someone wants to spend her last day here in the restraint room," said Abernathy. "You want that, Evgeniya? I'll get some people to take you there, you know I will."

Adri gritted her teeth and said nothing.

"There we go. I'll take abusive any day over being an evil slut, like you are," said Abernathy. She pushed a styrofoam tray through the slot. "Pills next."

"But I get out today!"

"You get out at noon. Until then you follow my rules like everyone else. Come on. You know the drill."

She pushed a cup through the slot. Adri growled, but knelt in front of the gap and dropped the pills in her mouth, holding them there for Abernathy to see, then swallowed and opened her mouth to show they were gone. It burned her to do it, but she'd seem the wisdom of not fighting it long before. When the guard was satisfied, she closed the meal slot and Adri went to eat her breakfast and look out the window.







Time passed slowly. She slouched at her desk with her chin on her forearms, lay on her bed flipping through the books- a trashy romance novel and a Wheel of Time book with the cove and first chapter missing- without really reading them. She finished her cigarette and tossed the butt out the window, then, realizing they might search her cell once she was out of it, took out the bag of marijuana and stared at it for a long moment before wiping it clean with her sleeve and tossing it into the yard.

Now they had to let her out. Her main source of fun was gone.

The day dragged on. Surely hours had passed by now. Surely they had forgotten to bring her the midday eats and forgotten her outside time and she would be left here forgotten until they needed the cell for someone else. Then they would find her rotting corpse and everyone would realize their terrible mistake. Not that they would miss her personally, but Yennefer would be sure to make each and every one of them regret it in screaming agony before their deaths. The thought made her smile. She balled up the rest of the Bible page and chewed it as she lay on her bed, unable to do more with her supply of MJ tossed out the window. No doubt it would soon find a good home.

A clanking noise outside her door made her glance up.

“Evgeniya?” Acker's voice, not Abernathy's. “Hey. I hear we owe you a trip to the Warden's office.”

She leaped from her bed, crouching to stare up through the food slot. “For real? This is it? You mess with me and I swear I'll birth you, Acker.”

(Threats to kill guards not being much appreciated around CIW, various slang substitutes had been developed.)

“I wouldn't expect any less,” said Acker. There was the click of ratcheting metal. “Okay, cuff up.”

“I'm on my way out!”

“Rules are rules.”

Indeed they were. She escaped the spit hood with a promise to behave herself and was led to an alcove where she was subjected to a last, humiliating search for contraband. When they handed her clothes back through the slot she got her first thrill of freedom: what they gave her was not prisoner wear but jeans and a shirt of the kind you could get at Wal-Mart or target. Quickly she dressed and was led out. It was a frazzled, red-faced Adrijana who plopped herself into a chair in Molly Hill's office, but one with a burning light behind her eyes.

“Adrijana Evgeniya?” the Warden dropped a stack of papers in front of her. “Fill these out, please.”

She stared at the pile in dismay. “It's like twenty pages!”

The warden had the grace to look embarrassed. “They weren't my idea. Anyway, the sooner you get started the sooner you'll finish.”

She groaned but took the pen the warden extended to her and began signing. It took around twenty minutes.

“All right,” said the warden.“Your care package.”

She was handed a drawstring bag with a change of clothes, a bar of soup, a small bottle of shampoo, two tampons, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, three bus tickets, a $100 Wal-Mart gift card, and a brown paper package wrapped in string. She tore that open and blinked in surprise. Inside was the watch, ring, cell phone, and some loose change she'd been carrying when she was arrested, along with the clothes she'd been wearing. She'd been carrying three knives as well, but those were gone, seized as “evidence”. She snorted.

“All right, I think your ride's here,” said Hill. Adri looked up, confused.

“I was gonna go down to the bus stop.”

“No need. Your lawyer called, and there's a car coming to pick you up.”

The words “Lawyer” and “car” rolled around in Adrijana's head for a moment, seeking something to connect to. Hill motioned for her to come to the window. Outside, she was a black Escalade idling by the sidewalk, a muscular man in a black suit leaning against the driver's side door. A very nice Escalade.

For the first time in what felt like forever, Adrijana smiled.

“Your discharge papers,” said Hill, sliding a manila envelope. “Now get out of here. I don't ever want to see you here again.”

She took the envelope, head cocked slightly to the side. She turned it over in her hands. She looked at the warden. “This is it? I'm out?”

“You're free to go.”

“So you're not in charge of me any more. I can do what I want with my own self.”

The warden made a benevolent gesture. “As long as it doesn't bring you back here.”

“And you don't have a say in it any more.”

“As of this moment, you're no longer one of my wards.”

Adri looked at the warden for a long moment, examining her from head to toe. A slow smile crept over her face. Then she flashed both her middle and screamed at the top of her lungs, “THEN F*** YOU AND ALL YOUR B****** AND ALL THIS F****** PLACE!” and ran out of the office.

She didn't remember much of the flight out. She remembered how the hall was gray and the carpet was gray and the people seemed covered in an invisible dust that made them dull and listless. She remembered strutting and singing and yelling and the dirty looks it got her and how she smiled and yelled more because in this hall they no longer had any say in it, in this hall she was free. She remembered smiling sweetly at the guard who opened the gate for her and telling him to go **** himself with sandpaper until his balls fell off and running through the gate to the outside, the wonderful, sunny outside, with the wind on her face and the sky above her head and all the walls gloriously getting smaller every minute. The man in the suit came to attention as she ran towards him.

“Your highness-” he began.

And she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek and shouted, “I'm done here! Let's go home!”

It took a moment for them to disentangle but at last he got into the driver's seat and she sprawled out on the bench seat in the back. The inside of the car was heated to a glorious temperature despite it being warm outside and Adrijana found herself almost purring with excitement. The minifridge was well stocked. She cackled.

“You're doing well for yourself, sister,” she said.

The drive was long. Idly Adri flipped through channels on the TV or scrolled through songs on the tablet. Everything was all too fresh, like a new spring rain, too sharp and bright and wonderful to use in depth. She could only sip at each thing, could only revel at their nearness.

“Let's stop,” she said once. “I want to get out.”

So she did. She ran around and she whooped and attempted a cartwheel that ended with her sprawled on the grass and sent up a blast of fire like a flaregun. Then she got back in the car and they finished the drive, and they came to outside a building of brick and chrome and glass. A mansion.

She didn't knock and she didn't wait for her driver. She burst out of the car with her bag in hand and ran in through the door shouting.

“Yennefer! I'm home!”

Yennefer Evgeniya