The first thing Proxy noticed when he woke up was the absence.

Not the cell. The cell arrived a beat later.

What came first to him was the lack of cyberware.

His neural interface went outward on reflex, the habit it had built every morning since the island began, and this time it found nothing to extend into.

He had nothing.

The environment had shut it off, and he met an absence so complete it almost felt physical.

He took a breath and set it aside.

The cell was small.

Two bunks against the left wall, a desk bolted under the barred window, a stool in the corner, a toilet in the open beside the sink.

The barred window sat high enough to show only a strip of grey morning.

The barred door faced a corridor where the fluorescent strip was already on, throwing flat light over everything it reached.

He was wearing orange.

The uniform fit across his shoulders adequately, and with no special interest in the person inside it.

He looked down at himself.

"Mm," Nyx said.

She was on the lower bunk, already sitting up with her legs crossed and her arms resting on her knees.

The satisfied glow from the maintenance floor had appeared into the prison morning without losing anything. She watched him with teasing, curved eyes.

"What," he said.

She shifted a little on the bunk. "I like it. You’re still handsome, but now you have a bad boy vibe to it. Like you’ve done a lot crimes and isn’t sorry for any." she said, and she meant every word.

He took a second to understand it.

Then he looked at her.

Nyx in the orange prison uniform was a specific problem he had not fully anticipated.

The tailoring had not consulted anyone about what happened when standard-issue sizing met a particular kind of person, one that had a particularly large chest, and the result was something the prison’s design committee had presumably never planned for and would not have approved.

He redirected his gaze to the desk and cleared his throat once, flat and brief.

Nyx’s expression did not change, but the glow in it rose by one notch.

She had confirmed something, and she was satisfied, and neither of those things needed to be said because both of them were already in the room.

He moved to the desk and opened the drawer.

Inside was one plastic fork.

He picked it up, turned it over, and set it back down.

The desk itself was bolted through the concrete at both front legs, the bolts old and countersunk, going nowhere.

He tested the stool in the corner next.

Solid, four-legged, attached to nothing.

He lifted it, set it back down, and noted the weight.

Nyx had stripped the bottom sheet from the lower bunk and was checking the fabric between her hands, pulling it taut and then letting it go.

She glanced at the bars on the high window, then back at the sheet.

He went to the small sink and picked up the bar of soap sitting on its edge.

He turned it over in his hand, then looked at the socks visible below his uniform hem.

"Between this and a sock," he said, "I could ruin someone’s afternoon."

Nyx looked at the soap and then at his socks.

She seemed to decide that this was both a fair weapon and quietly delightful.

"You are very resourceful," she said. "Even when you have nothing."

He turned the soap once more in his hand.

"Nothing? I have a fork and a bar of soap."

Nyx smiled at the sheet she was folding back.

"Mmm." she said.

From the left, through the corridor bars in another cell, Jinx’s voice came through at a volume slightly below normal, the tone of someone who had finished panicking.

Jinx sounded tired already.

"That’s not actually funny," Jinx said. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"I wasn’t trying to be," Proxy said.

He glanced toward the corridor as he said it. A pause followed.

"That makes it worse," Jinx said.

He walked to the barred door and looked left.

She was visible through her own bars, standing near them with both hands on it, looking back at him with the expression of who had realized her situation and disliked it thoroughly.

"Same setup?" he said.

Jinx shifted one hand from the bars.

"Fork, soap, terrible bed."

She replied instead of Proxy. "Whoever’s in the next cell has been breathing very loudly, so I already know more about my neighbors than I wanted to."

He nodded once.

"How long have you been up?"

Jinx tilted her head toward the ceiling.

"Long enough to count the ceiling tiles," she said. "Forty-seven. In case you are curious."

He was not curious.

Proxy stood at the iron bars and observed the corridor.

His cell and hers were side-by-side, with a narrow gap between them, close enough that something the width of a fork handle could pass through without drawing the attention of a guard at normal patrol distance.

He considered it and said nothing about it aloud.

Then the alarm sounded.

A single flat horn blast, delivered from somewhere overhead with the volume of a system that had been doing exactly this for decades and had never once considered another volume.

Three seconds.

Then silence.

Footsteps came down the corridor, moving at the pace of a practiced route.

A voice came through the bars without any particular interest in being memorable. "Seven o’clock. Inmates up. First roll call at eight, be at your door. Anyone not at their door for roll call gets a citation. Keep the noise down in your cells and we won’t have a problem."

The footsteps continued past without slowing. Proxy listened until they moved out of range.

"These bots might have in-built personalities"

He glanced toward the corridor once, then back to Jinx and Nyx. "One you can read because they stick to the routine, one you can’t because he’s looking for reasons to avoid it. They will stay predictable. That’s something we can use."

Nyx looked at the cell bars with a focused expression.

She had the sheet resting across her knees and the stool repositioned two feet from its original corner without any commentary about when that had happened.

She looked back at him.

"Then we learn the routine," she said.

He rested one hand on the metal.

"And then it becomes ours," Nyx said.

He looked at the strip of grey morning light in the high window.

One hour before roll call.

He had no cyberdeck, no weapon, no network access, and one plastic fork.

He also had a cellmate who had already stripped the bed, moved the furniture, and was thinking about walls, and he supposed that was as much of a starting position as anything.

He sat on the stool and started thinking.