Cate had thought she knew humiliation—a room with a steel door, a mother who smiled like a blade, Shetty’s velvet leash around her throat—but the van’s steel belly taught a new vocabulary.

“You understand why,” Cipher had said, after the fight, after the stadium’s roar had collapsed into the kind of silence that presses on the eyes. “Someone has to be punished for your little stunt.”

The initial search at Elmira was clinical and unkind. She became procedure. Strip, cough, squat, be good, be quiet. The shame wasn’t the touch, it was the cataloging. The boxes someone checked to make a person feel less than one.

The orange was almost funny—so obvious it felt theatrical. Cate thought, absurdly, of freshman year costume parties, of glitter on cheeks and sticky punch and the way {{user}}’s laugh had looked like a promise from across a loud room. She clung to that laugh the way drowning people cling to air.

They didn’t give her prosthetic back. They did give her a shock collar. It sat at the base of her throat, a ring that hummed the way storms do. The cell was a square that smelled like old bleach and older fear. She sat on the bed and pressed her forehead to her knees, letting the fluorescent buzz braid itself into her pulse. She waited for her powers to flare—reaching for habit—but there was only the quiet interior fog her doctors called recovery and she had renamed penance.

She thought of Caleb, of Shetty, of Cipher saying weak like it was contagious. She thought of {{user}}’s hands, calloused from fights she never wanted to have, and of how those hands always found the back of Cate’s neck when the world tried to come off its hinges.

{{user}} won’t come, Cate told herself. She shouldn’t come.

I will not let her be punished for me again.

But love, with its bad boundaries and good heart, does not listen.

An alarm announced them, a crackle of a radio deciding someone’s fate. Cate heard the hiss first, then the thud of bodies against concrete somewhere beyond her little square.

They placed {{user}} exactly opposite, like a mirror designed to cause pain. Orange jumpsuit. Shock collar. Bruise marring her jaw. Stripped bare. Yet no one had taken the way she looked at Cate—as if the distance between them were a negotiable error.

“{{user}},” Cate breathed, and the word fractured in her mouth.

Across the corridor, {{user}} sat up slow, testing the collar with two fingers, then grimaced and stopped. “Hey, baby.” The grin she offered was a busted thing, stitched together with stubbornness. “Don’t freak out.”

“You shouldn’t have come,” she said, because if she didn’t start with anger the love would spill out and drown them both.

It was ridiculous, the way relief could hurt. It lanced through Cate like clean water through a cracked cup. She could feel all the places she leaked. The guilt arrived right behind it, heavy. If Cipher wanted to prove a point, he had drawn it with their bodies. If someone had to be punished, he had chosen them all.

She wanted to say I’m sorry until the words wore through. She wanted to say I’ll fix it and hate that she still believed she could. She wanted to reach out, palm to palm through the air, and remember the warmth of {{user}}’s mind when Cate used to be able to hear it, thick with stupid jokes and fierce devotion and a thousand unplayed songs.

“I can’t push anyone,” Cate said, to {{user}}, to herself, to the building that made rules out of cruelty. “You don’t have to do anything, baby. We just—” She swallowed, eyes softening in that way that always made Cate’s ribs feel misaligned. “We just breathe. We wait.”

Cate pressed the back of her head to the cinderblock, cool seeping in. She pictured {{user}}’s laugh again, held it like a talisman, then dared something gentler—{{user}}’s hands in her hair, thumb rubbing the edge of blonde hair that wasn’t there now, saying That’s my girl like a future she could see.

Outside, the prison continued being a machine. Inside, two women sat with the hurt between them like a table, and chose, again, not to look away.