Carl let his gaze shift briefly to the speaker. “Yeah, that seems to have worked out well for you.”
The big Aryan bristled, surged forward. Dudeck lifted a hand and pressed him back without looking away from Carl.
“No call to get all riled up, Lee,” he said softly. “This here—”
“Jack!” It was a hissed prison whisper from the door. The lookout, gesturing furiously. “Jack! COs coming.”
The change was unreal, almost comical. In seconds flat, the two Aryans in front of Carl hit the front pew side by side, shaven heads bent in an attitude of prayer. Back by the door, the lookout moved two rows down and did the same. Carl stifled a snort and found a front seat of his own on the far side of the aisle from Dudeck and Roy. The mesh surged and pounded for release. He kept peripheral awareness of the two men and waited, head down, controlling his breathing. If the correctional officers passed by without stopping, the fight was going to kick off again right where it got paused, only by then Roy would have calmed down and the chances of goading him back up to interference levels would be lost. Carl had planned to fuck with the big Aryan’s head just enough to get him in Dudeck’s way, and then use the confusion to shank them both. Now—
Footfalls at the back of the chapel.
“Marsalis.”
Fuck.
He looked around. Three COs, two from the B wing day crew, Foltz and Garcia, both hefting stunwrap carbines and scanning the pews with seasoned calm. The other guy was a stranger, unarmed, and the phone clip he wore at ear and jaw looked shiny new with lack of use. White male, forties or older. Carl made him for admin-side, and probably senior. There was gray in his hair and the face was lined with middle-aged working weariness, but his eyes lacked the laconic watchfulness of the men who walked the galleries. The fact that Carl didn’t know him wasn’t in itself of note—South Florida State was a big prison—but the appeal-and-counter game had taken him across to admin close to a dozen times now and he was good with faces. Wherever this guy worked, wasn’t somewhere Carl had been or seen.
“Chew doin’ here, Marsalis?” Foltz’s jaws worked a steady, tight-jaw rhythm on the gum in his mouth. “You ain’t no believer.”
It didn’t require an answer. Garcia and Foltz were old hands; they knew what went down in the chapel. Foltz’s eyes tracked across to Dudeck and Lee. He nodded to himself.
“Findin’ racial harmony in the Lord, are we, boys?”
Neither of the front-pew Aryans said anything. And back at the door, the third supremacist had the butt of Garcia’s carbine almost at his ear.
“That’s enough,” snapped the new face. “Marsalis, you’re required in admin.”
A tiny surge of hope. Meetings with Andritzky, the UNGLA rep, were alternate Tuesdays, late morning. For someone to turn up this late in the week unannounced, it had to be progress. Had to be. Someone somewhere had found the key log in the Republican logjam of xenophobia and moral illusion. Pressure applied, it would break up the jam and set the whole legal and diplomatic process flowing downstream once more. The trigger line of code that would crack Carl Marsalis out of this fucking prison glitch and send him home.
Yeah, you’d better hope, soak. He let the shank slide out of his sleeve and land gently on the pew beside him. He tucked it back against the upright with his fingers and got up, leaving it there, invisible to anyone, including the Aryans, who didn’t have a clear angle of vision on where he’d been sitting. Seventeen, he remembered, and felt a faint chill at the thought. He didn’t have the finances or the juice to buy again if this didn’t work out and they sent him back to B wing to face Dudeck and the supremacist grudge. And mesh or no mesh, without an edged weapon he was probably going to get hurt.
Suddenly the hope in his belly collapsed into sick despair and a pointless, billowing anger.
Reggie Barnes, I hope you fucking die on that respirator.
He walked up the aisle toward the COs. Dudeck turned to watch him go. Carl caught it in peripheral vision, swung his head to meet the Aryan’s gaze. He saw the hunger there, the deferred bloodlust, and summoned a stone-faced detachment to meet it. But beneath the mask, he found he was suddenly falling-down weary of the youth and fury in the other man. Of the hatred that seemed to seep not just out of Dudeck and his kind, but right out of the prison walls around him, as if institutions like South Florida State were just glands in the Republican body politic, oozing the hate like some kind of natural secretion, stockpiling it and then pumping it back out into the circulatory system of the nation, corrosive and ripe for any focus it could find.
“Eyes front, Dudeck.” Foltz had spotted the sparks. His voice came out rich with irony. “That ain’t how you pray, son.”
Carl didn’t look back to watch Dudeck comply. He didn’t need to. Whichever way Dudeck was now looking, it didn’t matter. Carl could feel the Aryan’s hatred at his back, pushing outward behind him like a vast, soft balloon swelling to fill the space in the house of worship. Faith-based prison charter. Each man to his own personal god, and Dudeck’s was white as polypuff packing chips.
Sutherland’s voice, deep and amused, like honey ladling down in the back of his head.
Nothing new in the hate, soak. They need it like they need to breathe. Without it, they fall apart. Thirteen’s just the latest hook to hang it off.
That supposed to make me feel better?
And Sutherland had shrugged. Supposed to prepare you, is all. What else were you looking for?
The hope and despair played seesaw in his guts all the way out of B wing and across the exercise yard to the administration building. Florida heat clutched at him like warm, damp towels. The glare off the nailed-down cloud cover hurt his eyes. He squinted and craned his neck in search of omens. There was no helicopter on the roof of the building, which meant no high-ranking visitors in from Tallahassee or Washington today. Nothing in the gray-roofed sky either, and no sound or sense of anything going on in the parking lot on the other side of the heavy-duty double fence. No journalistic flurry of activity, no uplink vans. A couple of months back, not long after he was transferred up to Florida State, Andritzky had leaked details to the press in an attempt to generate enough public embarrassment for a quick release. The tactic had backfired, with the Republic’s media picking up almost exclusively on Carl’s UNGLA covert ops status and the death of Gabriella at the Garrod Horkan camp. UN connections, fruitful leverage in any other corner of the globe, here only played directly into a longstanding paranoia that Washington had carefully nurtured since Secession and before. And it didn’t help that Carl was the color of the Republic’s deepest atavistic fears. Served up through the id-feeding Technicolor TV drip that passed for national news coverage, he was just new dosage in a regime already 150 years screen-ingrained.
Black male, detained, dangerous.
For now, that seemed to be more than enough for Republican purposes. Neither Sigma nor the Florida state legislature had seen fit to leak details of Carl’s genetic status so far—for which he was duly gratefuclass="underline" in prison population here it would have been tantamount to a death sentence. There’d be a line out the fucking cell block for him, young men like Dudeck but of every race and creed, all filled with generalized hate and queuing up to test themselves against the monster. He wasn’t sure why they were holding back; they must have the data by now. It was no secret what he was, a little digging at Garrod Horkan camp, or into UNGLA general record, or even a trawl back eight years to the Felipe Souza coverage would have turned it up. He assumed the Jesusland media had backed off and muzzled themselves in time-honored compliance with governmental authority, but he still couldn’t work out why. Possibly they were holding back the knowledge as a weapon of last resort against the UN, or were afraid of the widespread panic it might trigger if it hit the public domain. Or maybe some worm-slow process of interagency protocol was still working itself out, and as soon as it cleared they’d have their vengeance for Willbrink via that long line of shank-equipped angry young men.