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“Got it?”

“Got it,” he said.

“Can I have yours?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Of course not.”

But I hardly cared anymore. Someone was coming after me and there wasn’t a soul in the world who could stop them, including Keith Hammond. I was on my own.

It was time to go home and dig out the nine-millimeter.

8

THERE ARE TIMES in life when everything a person thinks he knows is challenged. Undercurrents suck him under and threaten to pull him into a bottomless sea. Tsunamis rise up after an unannounced earthquake and sweep away every trace of reason in a matter of seconds. That’s why the wise man builds his house upon a rock.

But what happens if he unwittingly picks the wrong rock with the best of intentions, only to discover that the foundation under that house can crumble?

In Danny’s case, the storm that threatened to test his rock did not roar in like a tsunami in a matter of seconds. It rose slowly over the course of the three days he spent in meditation, and even then it managed only to erode a small part of his foundation.

Personal suffering he could manage, only because he’d faced so much of it through the war. But the suffering of others…​that was another matter.

He didn’t know the names or the crimes of those who suffered in segregation with him, only the odor of their excrement. Inmates came and went during his stay, and the routine became plain.

A code of complete silence was strictly enforced on the meditation floor. Any deviance was handled swiftly. A single loaf of heavily enriched and dreadfully tasting bread was delivered once every day. The water to the faucet ran for five minutes three times a day, signaled only by the hissing in the pipes. The toilet flushed only once a day.

Once every two days, each cell was properly hosed down with the occupant inside. The water and refuse drained through a trap door in the floor, opened during the cleansing. For the day following the bath, the entire wing stank of chlorine and whatever other chemicals they’d put in the water—Pape’s answer to sanitation concerns, which doubled as a mild form of torture, leaving them shivering in the damp cold. There were undoubtedly showers in the wing to meet all requirements set by the Corrections Standards Authority, but Danny guessed they weren’t used except during inspection.

What had the others done to deserve such inhuman treatment? They’d deviated from the rules established by the world in which they lived.

Who made up those rules? A few of them had been established by the warden, the rest of them by the department of corrections. By extension they were all the rules of society.

Why follow the rules? Because the consequence of not following them was painful. They should have all known better. It served them right, people would say. If a law says you stop at a stop sign, and you don’t stop, you are guilty and should pay a price. You run a stop sign, you pay a certain penalty, even if it’s on a deserted road at four in the morning and there isn’t another car within ten miles. Why? It’s the law.

If the law says you cannot look at a guard a certain way and you look at a guard that certain way, you will pay a penalty. Why? Because it’s the law. Looking at a guard wrongly at Basal might be compared to looking at a woman wrongly in some cultures.

Deviant behavior. Do the crime, do the time. Made sense.

After four days of shivering in Basal’s dark hole, however, it made less sense. Not because of Danny’s own suffering, but because of the suffering around him. Still, to maintain order, every society had to establish rules and follow them.

Even then, it wasn’t the plight of those around him that eroded Danny’s rock. It was the face of the young man named Peter Manning.

More specifically, the abuse the boy might suffer at the hands of Randell and his viper, Slane.

Even more specifically, Danny’s own reaction to that abuse. It was clear that any attempt on his part to intervene would constitute a deviation from the established law in this society called Basal. He would be taking the law into his own hands, so to speak, something he’d done before. But by doing so, he’d finally found it lacking. Man did not have the right to subvert society’s laws to enforce his own, even if doing so brought about good.

But therein lay the conundrum eroding his rock. Was it morally right to stand by while another suffered? What of the poor, the diseased, the hungry, the abused, the disadvantaged? Didn’t he have a moral obligation to come to their rescue?

If so, wasn’t he justified in wanting to prevent Randell from harming Peter? If he was required to break the law to save the boy, he would endure Pape’s punishment. At least the boy would be spared his suffering.

And yet this reasoning only delivered him back to the philosophy he’d embraced as a vigilante, saving the abused who were overlooked by the law.

Danny lay on the concrete slab, and he thought of the boy, and he thought about Renee, and he wept because he knew that if it were Renee up there instead of Peter, his wrath would know no bounds. And yet Peter was deserving of as much love as Renee. So, for that matter, was Randell.

But love wasn’t administered by a gun. He knew that. In his very bones he knew that. Randell was a monster because he’d been loved by hard steel instead of a warm heart his entire life, and such love was not love at all.

The facilitators came for him on the evening of the fifth day, the captain, Bostich, and a CO Danny hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting. They asked him to stand outside his cell and dress before cuffing him, which was itself a humiliating show of superiority. But Danny did as they asked, and they led him from the hall of silent, tormented deviants.

“I’ll take it from here,” Bostich said, locking the steel door that led down to the meditation floor.

The other guard nodded and stepped away.

“This way.”

Bostich led Danny to a sparsely furnished office in the administration wing and closed the door behind them. He motioned toward a gray metal chair next to the desk.

“Sit.”

Still cuffed, Danny sat.

Bostich leaned back on the desk, crossed his arms, and returned Danny’s stare. The dark-eyed man with bleached hair looked like he’d come out of the womb angry and hadn’t yet found a way to punish the world for accepting his birth. Danny felt compelled to glance away. A clock on the wall indicated that it was 8:37 p.m. They’d timed his release to coincide with lockdown. Why? Danny didn’t yet know, but he was sure that every detail in Basal was carefully orchestrated for maximum effect.

“Look at me,” Bostich said, then continued when Danny faced him. “I’m going to give you the same speech I give every member after their first stint in meditation. If you think that was hard, think again. If you think that was unfair, you should have thought about that before you did whatever you did to get here. The only one who decides what’s fair is God, and in Basal, the warden is God. Is that clear enough for you?”

“Yes.”

“And if you think opening your mouth about your sacred experience down there’ll bring attorneys running to set things straight, well then you just don’t understand the nature of your predicament, do you? You talk to any member about your time below and you go back down. You talk to anyone on the outside about it, ever, and anything can happen to you. The only thing protecting you in here is the warden. Am I clear?”

Danny had no reasonable choice but to answer in the affirmative.

“Good. I won’t lie. The warden thinks you’re good for this place, that you can somehow be a model citizen headed for early release. Me, I hate you. I don’t trust you. I see you and I see a knucklehead, and the only knuckleheads in my prison are the ones I know I can trust. One more stunt like you pulled back in the cafeteria and you’ll wish you were never born.”