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Behind the limestone, they bolted in a second skeleton of steel.

The windows that look so romantic from the lawn are reinforced to stop a body thrown at full sprint; I know, because a girl named Priya tested it the autumn I arrived, and the glass simply held her like a butterfly under a pin while the orderlies took their time.

Every interior door is a slab of magnet and ceramic that breathes open with a buzz and shuts with a thud you feel in your teeth. The corridors run long and white and patient, lit by the fluorescent tubes I loathe with my whole heart—that flat dead light that flattens everyone beneath it into evidence, into a thing on a slide. There are no shadows here that the staff didn’t put there on purpose.

The smell never changes.

Bleach over something older. Old fear, scrubbed but never quite gone, the way blood lingers under floorboards no matter how many times you mop.

And under the antiseptic, the truth of the place:a dozen suppressed designations leaking through the seams of their medication, each of us a flavor pressed thin into recycled air.

Someone two doors down runs to citrus and gunmetal.

The new girl in the east wing is all bruised peonies, sweet and beaten, the scent of an Omega who still flinches.

Mine drowns them all.

Strawberries gone soft and warm. Whipped cream. Vanilla bean and cotton candy and, underneath, the deep dark weight of chocolate ganache, of pink velvet cake left to bloom. Walk past my door and you’ll think someone propped open a Valentine’s parlor at midnight, sweet enough to ache a tooth. It’s part of why they keep me sedated more often than the charts admit. An Omega who smells like dessert and behaves like a scalpel makes the staff nervous.

I find their nervousness nourishing. I eat it for breakfast, most days, with the pudding.

Blackthorn runs like a watch, and like a watch, it runs on repetition. There is a metronome buried in this place. I hear it everywhere—in the buzz-and-thud of the doors, in the click of the meds cart wheels, in the dead tick of institutional time that swings the same arc through every identical day. I burned a man’s life down to the rhythm of a metronome once. I find it soothing now. I find it a promise.

Six o’clock, the lights come up whether your eyes consent or not.

Then pill call, which is my favorite small theatre.

The cart arrives with its rows of little paper cups, each crowned with its rattling cargo, and Nurse Ofori or one of the others stands over you and watches you swallow, then asks you to lift your tongue and waggle it like a child who’s been good.

The trick, for those of us who object to being chemically blurred, is in the timing—the dry click of a tablet tucked high against the gum, the convincing gulp, the open and honest mouth offered for inspection.

I am very good at the open and honest mouth.

On the days I want my edges, I keep them. On the days I want to be soft, stupid, watched-over, and underestimated, I let the fog roll in and play my part beautifully.

Compliance is just another costume.

And skillfully enough, I own it in every color.

Breakfast in the communal hall, where everything is plastic and nothing has a point. No metal forks. No glass. No mirrors that aren’t bolted and polished steel, so we all greet our reflections warped, which I’ve always found more honest than the alternative.

Enrichment, they call the next block, as though we’re zoo animals being given a frozen treat to bat around—and we are, that’s exactly what we are, I simply respect the honesty of the word.

Group therapy. Worksheets about coping wheels. A counselor who believes, against three years of mounting evidence, that I might one day color inside the lines of my feelings.

And then play time.

That’s my name for the rec hour, not theirs; theirs is something bloodless and clinical, supervised social integration or whatever the manual decreed that decade.

The principle is simple.

Pack a room with the most volatile Omegas the courts could find, hand them puzzles, paperbacks, and a television bolted too high to reach, and let them mill about under the eyes of four orderlies whose entire job is to make certain the milling never sharpens into something with edges.

Most days it doesn’t.

Usually it’s checkers, muttering, and a woman named Constance who narrates a soap opera that stopped airing in the nineties.

The days it does—the screaming, the hair, the bitten ear, the takedown—those are the days the staff earn their pay, and they earn it fast, with restraints, a syringe, and a quiet that settles over the room like snow afterward.