The prison bus left its only two passengers at the door of Rothrad Penitentiary. A guard who had accompanied them saw to it that his charges—one a hacker, one a killer—were uncuffed and safely in the lobby of the prison. When the heavy metal door closed behind the prisoners, the mechanism inside it clicked loudly. Locked.
Wyatt Keaveney, who was either in or nearing his late thirties, took a few steps further inside the lobby and surveyed the room. Most of the lobby was cordoned off, save for a path that newcomers were undoubtedly supposed to follow, though the rest of the room was bare. The walkway led straight into the lobby perhaps twenty feet, then the cordons were shifted to the right for another twenty-five feet, leading to a door that presumably would open up to the prison proper, where the two new inmates would find their cells. Before the door there was a metal detector, and a computer system beyond that that Wyatt was unfamiliar with.
Wyatt’s companion, a teenager who had introduced himself as Edgar Sealock, started up the walkway without a glance around the room, without a thought to the absence of guards here. The door had locked behind them, there were no windows—no way out but through. Security cameras, mounted high on the walls, followed the prisoners’ movements as Wyatt followed Edgar down the cordoned path.
For a moment Edgar lingered at the end of the straightaway, straining his eyes in an attempt to see what was hidden behind a partially open door. He guessed it was just a closet, but he couldn’t deny his curiosity. When he leaned against the cordon to get a tiny bit closer, a far-off alarm bell sounded, accompanied by something of a much lower pitch from inside the closet itself. (Something sliding down the wall, perhaps? He wasn’t sure how anything might have fallen, but was sure it wasn’t impossible.) Edgar immediately returned his attention to the walk and hurried to catch up with Wyatt, who had overtaken him while he snooped.
At the end of the line through the lobby they passed through the metal detector and were assigned numbers. These flashed on the computer screen as they passed it, and represented their inmate numbers, they thought. Cell blocks were probably in ranges, Wyatt was sure, as well acquainted with the guts of a prison as he was.
“What’s your number?” he asked the hacker.
“Eleven-fifty-something,” Edgar replied. It had actually been 1153.
“I got nineteen-seventy-two. Good year.”
They walked on, entering an atrium. This room was gloomy; one of the long light bulbs overhead flashed annoyingly. More cameras silently honed in on the new inmates, their glass eyes glancing over the scant furniture that had been arranged neatly. When Edgar ran his hand over the top of an uncomfortable-looking chair, his fingers came up with a layer of dust.
There were two doors at the far end of the room, one closed and one open. Wyatt saw as he neared the open door that this prison was not like any he had encountered before—and he had been transferred several times and seen many high-security penitentiaries since his arrest in ‘72.
Rothrad Penitentiary was a circular building, that much had been obvious when the bus had pulled up to it. The hallway he saw through the doorway was not illuminated wholly. It curved around the edifice’s core in darkness; there were no windows and as of yet no light. As Wyatt and Edgar cleared the doorway and entered this strange hall, the door behind them clicked as its hinges unlocked to let the door shut. The waning triangle of yellowish light from the atrium gave the two prisoners a flickering glimpse of a thin chokecherry wood door on the inner wall of the penitentiary.
Then the atrium door shut with a great deal of finality and left the two in darkness.
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