“All you did was postpone the sentence. Bear doesn’t forgive insults like that. Thunder was his attack dog, his muscle. If you broke the dog, you spit in the owner’s face.” “I didn’t have a choice,” Alex answered quietly, wiping his glasses with the edge of his shirt.
“That’s Newton’s third law, Mr. Grant.” “Newton doesn’t run this place,” the old man said with a bitter half-smile. “The woods do.”
“Tonight they’ll kill you quietly, under a blanket. A shiv in the liver or a cord around your neck. Sleep with one eye open, student. Better yet, don’t sleep at all.” Evening count passed under a heavy cloud.
The unit lieutenant, a red-faced man with a stiff walk, paused when he came to Alex in the line. He clearly knew about the afternoon fight. In a camp like this, there were more informants than lice. But he said nothing.
The administration liked it when inmates tore each other apart. It meant less work for the guards. Night came. The bulb overhead was dimmed, leaving only a weak yellow light that threw long, shifting shadows.
Outside the barracks, the wind howled and drove pellets of snow against the iced-over windows. Inside came the sounds of snoring, coughing, and the heavy breathing of dozens of men. Alex lay on his back under a scratchy blanket pulled over his head. From a distance, he looked asleep.
In reality, every muscle in his body was drawn tight. In his right hand, hidden inside his sleeve, he held the only weapon he had managed to find: a long rusty nail pulled from a board under the bunk.
Two in the morning was the deadest hour. Alex heard a rustle, not the ordinary creak of bunks or footsteps toward the latrine, but something careful and creeping. Someone was moving not down the aisle but between sleeping bodies, avoiding the loose boards that squeaked.
Alex began counting his pulse: 120 beats a minute. The adrenaline was high, but his mind stayed cold as he calculated the angle. The steps were coming from the head of the bunk, which meant a pillow over the face or a strike to the temple.
A shadow leaned over him, and Alex caught the smell of rotten teeth and cheap tobacco. He waited. He needed one precise movement, one correct action.
The moment the attacker’s hand, gripping a sharpened spike, rose into the air, Alex rolled sharply to the left, throwing off the blanket. The weapon drove into the mattress stuffed with sawdust, right where his heart had been a second earlier. The attacker, a wiry convict nicknamed Gypsy, another of Bear’s men, didn’t have time to yank it free.
Using the momentum of the roll, Alex kicked out at the man’s supporting knee. Gypsy grunted and collapsed onto the bunk, and Alex was on top of him in an instant. He didn’t stab with the nail. He simply pressed the rusty point against the man’s eye.
“Quiet,” Alex whispered in the calm tone of a college lecturer. “One move and you’ll be learning the world by touch. Understood?” Gypsy froze. In his wide, terrified pupil, the point of the nail reflected back at him.
He nodded fast. “Who sent you?” Alex asked, though the answer was obvious. “Bear,” Gypsy breathed, shaking all over.
“He said if I didn’t do it, he’d put me on a spike himself. Don’t kill me, student.” “Get up,” Alex ordered, pulling the nail back but never taking his eyes off him. “Go to your boss and give him a message.”
“Energy doesn’t disappear and it doesn’t come from nowhere. If he sends anyone else, I’ll come for him myself. And next time I won’t be this generous.” Gypsy scrambled away into the dark, stumbling and shaking.
Alex sat on the bunk with his back against the cold wall, knowing sleep was gone for good. This had only been a probe, Bear testing his reaction. In the morning, when the wake-up signal sounded, the barracks saw a strange picture.
Gypsy sat by the stove, trembling and too scared to look up at the top bunk. Bear looked darker than a storm cloud. He watched Alex not with rage but with a kind of animal calculation.
The boss understood now that this was not just a capable fighter. This was a man with no brakes and no familiar weak spots. But the ending was coming from another direction entirely, one no one had expected.
Right after breakfast, the barracks door flew open with a crash. In the doorway stood Captain Smith, head of camp operations, flanked by four guards with rifles. “Walker!” the captain barked. “Grab your things. Move!”
The barracks buzzed uneasily. A call to the operations office with your belongings usually meant one of two things: solitary confinement or a transfer no one came back from. Alex slowly packed his thin little bag.
As he passed Bear’s bunk, the two men locked eyes for a second. The boss gave him a crooked smile. His look said it plainly: That’s it, student. If I don’t finish you, the administration will.
Alex stepped out into the brutal cold. They led him not to the gate and not to solitary, but straight to the administration building. The place where everyone’s fate in the camp was decided.
He didn’t yet know that word had spread about the bespectacled student who had dropped two hardened convicts. The men who ran this place had heard. And they had very different plans for him. Plans worse than any prison shiv.
Captain Smith’s office felt like an island from another world in the middle of the frozen hell. It smelled not of fear and bleach but of strong tobacco and expensive cologne. A lamp with a green shade sat on the desk, casting the false comfort of a living room.
But Alex Walker, standing in the middle of the office, wasn’t fooled for a second. He knew that in rooms like this, the worst sentences were handed down. Smith, a thickset man with pale, watery eyes, slowly turned the pages of the inmate’s file.
He took his time. In that office, time belonged entirely to him. “Alex Walker,” the captain finally said without looking up. “Twenty years old. Physics student. Son of an enemy of the state.”
“And according to my sources, a specialist in breaking bones for important people.” He snapped the folder shut and looked Alex straight in the eye. “Do you understand what you’ve done, student, upsetting a perfectly functional ecosystem?”
