The yard was a rectangle of poured concrete surrounded by walls that had been built to communicate something specific about permanence. Nyx walked out through the gate from the interior corridor and looked at them immediately, not with alarm, but with the measurement she brought to anything that needed crossing.

Guard towers at the corners, elevated platforms with sightlines running the full length of every wall below. Ground-level patrol walking a slow perimeter loop. She read their timing in two passes of the eye.

The compass was running warm. Interior, northeast of the yard. Proxy was somewhere in there taking the building apart with his eyes, which was its own variety of useful. The direction was quiet and that was all it needed to be. She put it down and kept walking.

Jinx was beside her, slightly too close, in the way of someone managing an open space by reducing the amount of it that applied to them.

"There are a lot of guards," Jinx said.

"There are," Nyx said.

Jinx looked at the towers. Then at the perimeter patrol. Then at the other inmates scattered across the yard, everyone making the same assessment without making it obvious.

"That’s not... I was kind of hoping you’d say something more reassuring than that."

"I wasn’t planning to," Nyx said, and kept walking.

Jinx kept pace. She had the specific energy of who understood she was not wanted and had decided not to care about it, which was at least more interesting than someone who understood it and fell apart. Nyx found it marginally tolerable, which was roughly where she had been and had not moved from.

A sports court occupied the near section of the yard. Concrete, painted lines faded past legibility, basketball hoops at either end with no nets. A few inmates were around it, present rather than playing.

As she passed, Nyx tracked the guard coverage around the court. The ground-level patrol route pulled closer to the wall on the eastern side, leaving a gap in the sightline from that direction. She noted it and continued.

"So what are we doing," Jinx said. "Are we just walking?"

"I’m checking the yard," Nyx said. "You’re walking."

"Right." A pause. "What’s the difference, exactly?"

"One of us is getting something out of it."

Jinx appeared to find this answer both accurate and annoying, which meant she had understood it correctly. She stayed quiet for a while, which Nyx appreciated.

They moved along the perimeter, far enough from the wall to look like general circulation rather than inspection. Nyx watched the guard towers without looking at them directly, a habit she had learned years before the island, in contexts she had not been asked about since and timed the sightline sweeps.

The towers covered fixed angles. The sweeps overlapped at the corners, which meant the corners were the worst option. Between towers, the midpoints of each wall had the narrowest gap in combined coverage, and the ground patrol filled most of it.

"You’re not scared at all," Jinx said. It was almost a question.

"What’s there to be scared about walls," Nyx said.

"No, I mean... forget about it." Jinx muttered.

They reached the far end of the yard, the corner farthest from the nearest tower. Nyx walked along the base of the wall at a pace that said she was doing nothing in particular, because she was doing nothing in particular.

She dragged the tips of her fingers along the concrete as she walked.

The surface was consistent for most of its length. Cold, slightly rough, exposed by decades of weather, the texture of original construction. She walked four meters along the base of the far corner and felt the change before she fully saw it.

The color shifted into a slightly different shade of grey, the kind of difference produced when a section had been poured at a different time with a different batch, repaired and matched but not perfectly.

A meter and a half of wall, maybe two, that had been touched after everything else. She walked past it at the same pace and did not look at it directly and did not stop.

She would tell Proxy.

"What was that?" Jinx said.

"Nothing," Nyx said.

Jinx looked at the section of wall behind them. Then at Nyx. Then back at the wall.

"You made a face," she said.

"I didn’t."

"A small face," Jinx said. "It was short but I noticed it."

"I didn’t make a face," Nyx said pleasantly. "If I had found something worth sharing, I would have said so."

The expression on Jinx’s face said she had understood that sharing was not the relevant category here. She was quiet for a moment and then said, "I know I’m just following you around. I know that doesn’t actually help me do anything."

"It doesn’t," Nyx said.

"But being by myself will just get me killed, even if near you... might mean the same."

Nyx considered this as they turned toward the outdoor gym.

"That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said since we met," she said.

"I have sensible moments," Jinx said, in the tone of someone who wished they occurred more frequently.

The gym was the standard kind. Pull-up bars, fixed benches, a squat rack frame without a bar, equipment that said the facility wanted inmates to have an outlet for physical energy rather than any genuine commitment to their development. Most of it was welded or bolted to the concrete.

Nyx walked the perimeter of it with her hands behind her back, watching rather than touching, letting her eyes do the work her implants would normally have handled more efficiently.

On the far rack there weight plates, cast iron, standard size, sitting in slots that were fixed to the frame but the plates themselves were not. Two metal collars hanging loose on the end pegs, the kind used to secure weights to a bar that was currently absent.

She measured them with a look. Dense, heavy, the right size to disappear inside loose clothing if someone was careful about how they walked back.

She noted the location and moved on.

One man was already at the far end of the gym when she reached it. Tall, lean rather than wide, the kind of large built for reach. His forearms showed the profile of cyberware mounts beneath the skin, ridges from wrist to elbow that the uniform sleeves did not quite hide, the hardware sitting offline but still somewhat present.

He had been watching her move through the yard since she came through the gate. She had noted him then and not assigned him importance yet.

He looked at her the way some people look at weather they find mildly inconvenient.

"You’re wasting your time," he said, with the ease of someone delivering information.

His eyes moved from her face to the muscle on her arms, her size and height.

"You’re not built for this sort of workout, even less with no chrome."

He said it the way someone explains a rule to a child who has wandered into the wrong room. "Just flesh. Go find somewhere to sit down, little girl. Let the people who matter sort it out."

Nyx had been looking at the weight rack.

She looked up.

The fire was not in her implants. Her implants were offline. The fire was older than the implants, it had been there before any of them, and it would still be there if every last one of them were gone, and it burned now with the quiet certainty of something that had been waiting patiently for the right time to be given to it.

She looked at him, and it was very clear from the look that she had heard every word he said, and had already found a place to put all of it.