Chapter 12
Under escort from my beloved sergeant and one super-powered guard, I was delivered to the visitation room. A spacious area furnished with simple, cheap tables and chairs. A few barred windows and plain gray walls, against which people in normal, colorful clothes stood out like lighthouses in the dark.
Several other inmates were already busy embracing wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers, and children. A few loners were catching up with friends. None of that was what I was focused on.
Near the center of the room, in a small zone of isolation that had apparently formed around them naturally, sat the two most important women in my life — if that framing even applied. My first instinct was to go straight to them, but the moment I caught my friend's face, I stopped dead and didn't know what to do next. Thoughts shot through my head at Formula One speeds, and then without consciously deciding anything, I let them go and just moved toward the people who mattered.
"Amanda… Grandma…"
I got close enough to drop to one knee to hug the old woman reaching her arms toward me, and somewhere in the room a few inmates started laughing.
"Did he just say 'Grandma?' You hear that?" I took it in stride — loud-mouthed idiots will say whatever they want, it's about the limit of their abilities. But my friend, on the other hand, was clearly not in a charitable mood.
"Shut your mouths. Did you not have enough already? One more word out of any of you and your head ends up in his ass, and your buddy's head ends up in your ass — are we clear?" The gold-and-black pupils flared for just a moment, and Amanda achieved a remarkable degree of quiet comprehension from all three of the men involved. Pure domestic bliss, honestly.
"I missed this." The slight tremor in my hands — when Amanda turned and leveled the same displeased, dangerous look at me — stopped the moment she closed her eyes, walked over without a word, and wrapped her arms around my chest with her full inhuman strength. Bones creaked audibly. "Easy — ugh — you're going to — *kff* — actually kill me—"
"You deserve it, idiot." Cheeks faintly pink, she released me from the grip of something that had definitely been enhanced and helped Grandma wheel up to the table. "Sit down. We're going to talk."
"About what?"
Grandma answered that, while Amanda — under Grandma's warm, patient gaze — began unloading genuine treasure onto the table. Food. Real food. Juicy, sweet, salty, spicy — every variety I'd been missing. And when Elizabeth Herby produced a carton of pumpkin juice from the small basket on the back of her chair, the adult near-superhero across from her may have experienced something embarrassingly close to childlike delight.
"How do you drink that stuff?" Amanda shuddered, reached across the table, and liberated a foil-wrapped piece of chicken without ceremony. She unwrapped it, took a ferocious bite, and proceeded to take out what appeared to be significant personal frustration on the smoked meat.
"It's good, actually." I took my time, savoring each piece, aware of the envious looks from other inmates. "So what are we talking about?"
"Take a guess, dumpling." Grandma shook the juice carton with mild dissatisfaction, clearly mourning its lack of alcohol content, then folded her hands on the table. "I think the topic is fairly obvious."
I'm not going to recount the entire conversation — from the gentle reproaches through the more pointed lectures to the moments of outright scolding, delivered in the register normally reserved for badly behaved children. I had never expected to hear certain words come out of Grandma's mouth, but apparently the combined shock of a jailed grandson, no bourbon within reach, and a murky-looking future had done something to the woman's filter. Other inmates eventually stopped finding it funny — there's only so many times the same material lands.
Amanda's contribution, through all of it, was to sit quietly and nod without ever looking away from me. Which was considerably more unsettling than anything Grandma was actually saying. It reminded me of a headsman sharpening his axe.
Strangely though, when the visitation time ran out and Grandma glided toward the exit on her chair, Amanda didn't follow immediately. She lingered for a moment, and then grabbed me again with renewed conviction, squeezing me with everything she had.
"Amanda — *Amanda* — breathing—"
"Sorry." She let go, flushed, and glanced around the room. Every inmate whose eyes found hers immediately discovered urgent reasons to look elsewhere. One idiot actually began whistling in an exaggerated, cartoon manner. "You know, when they told me everything, I didn't believe it at first."
A small smile crossed her face. She looked out through the barred window at the flat, empty ground surrounding the facility, and nodded at something only she was thinking.
"You did good, Herman. You did the right thing. If you'd had that stupid license, nobody would've said a word against you — so don't stress about it." She threw her hands behind her head, pivoted quickly so I couldn't see the color climbing up her neck, and started walking toward the exit. "That's what a real hero does."
She gave me a thumbs up over her shoulder without turning around, and disappeared into the corridor.
I was left alone at a table full of food. I didn't want to eat anymore. The back of my neck was wet, my palms were wet, my control had slipped entirely from the last few words she'd said.
A warm feeling spread through my stomach. Genuine warmth, deep and—
No, that was the spicy taco.
---
Something changed in me after that day. There had been a weight I hadn't fully recognized until it lifted — the unresolved thing between me and Amanda, the fact that she'd never mentioned what had happened to her, what she'd suffered — and when it was gone, it was like having a bag of cement cut from around my neck.
Life found its rhythm after that.
Conversations with Sonar — "conversations" is a generous term. I was one of the few people who had genuinely adapted to his odd habits and his dual nature, and as a result I'd been quietly promoted to the category of potential friend. We became, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, like two old friends. All that was missing was the late-night phone calls and the notebook margins filled with little hearts.
The guy in the cell across the hall — the Black kid who'd been making jokes from day one — turned out to be a decent enough person if you could tolerate his enthusiasm for inventing nicknames. His name was John, though I had private doubts about whether he'd come up with it himself. He gave his last name exactly once and I immediately forgot it — something starting with H. Havoc, Henok, no idea.
Most importantly, the dull days were broken up by visits. Grandma, Amanda, and twice even Leonard.
Grandma still grumbled about me becoming a criminal and every single visit included at least one plea not to get any tattoos, not to gamble for anything, not to drop the soap in the shower. God. After every visit I left feeling embarrassed, grateful, and mildly insane. Even the other inmates had burned through their enthusiasm for mocking it — there's a difference between a joke and a recurring segment.
Amanda came too, though our conversations tended toward lighter territory. That said — and I won't pretend otherwise — the little menace constantly joked that my particular digestive situation was leaving my relevant anatomy polished to a mirror finish, and that by now I should've become the most sought-after individual in the shower block.
Samson was, characteristically, himself. His visit left a strange aftertaste — he conducted a full therapy session for me on credit.
"Well then, Herman." He arranged a few items from his office on the table and passed me the waterproof towel, which he suggested I place under the chair. "Let's not waste time and get started. This is a visit, after all, but there's no reason it can't be productive—"
"Coming from you, that sounds a little too—"
I was trying to find the right word, but my therapist got there first, as always.
"Gay? Faggy? Don't be shy about it." He nodded with complete confidence and began writing something in his notebook — which drove me insane every single time. "I was worried about this, but I hadn't anticipated that the local environment would actually intensify your homophobia."
"What are you talking about?" I shook the moisture off my palms and tilted my head back, bracing for the inevitable twisting of my dignity. "Stop making strange insinuations and provoking reactions — do you have any other technique in your entire practice?"
"Why change what works?" He gave a playful wink and undid the top button of his shirt, accompanied by a sound from me that could only be described as suffering. "See? Works perfectly. But let's get back to business. Like most people, I know prison only second-hand. I've worked with inmates, but I've never personally been inside these wonderful walls."
He leaned forward. My full attention engaged. I could feel with my whole body that this was a trap, but I walked into it anyway — my palms actually stopped sweating for a moment.
"So I wanted to ask you one single question, Herman." He set the notebook and pen aside — where, yes, there were more little drawings of questionable artistic quality, which my twitching eye could just barely make out. "The showers. How are you managing? And is it true that if you drop the soap—"
"Go to hell."
---
Prison life isn't so bad. I wouldn't recommend it as a character-building experience, or whatever pseudo-philosophical garbage people say about wolves and adversity — but given the concentration of incarcerated individuals per capita in the United States, the reality was considerably less terrible than what I'd feared.
"AAAAAAGH!"
The infernal scream launched me out of bed. My heart went from zero to something genuinely concerning, my hands soaked through instantly, and in my mouth a familiar—
"Bleh."
"Disgusting, Herman." Sonar was at the new table, cutting up what appeared to be a mouse with the manner of an aristocrat at dinner. "I thought the morning vomiting was finished."
"If you didn't scream like a rooster at the same time every day, it would be." I pressed a hand to my chest, which ached. "God. I'm not well."
"Your heart rate is irregular," he noted, as if this had nothing to do with him, and returned to his breakfast. "You should see a doctor. Though personally I'd recommend Pilates. Or yoga. And daily meditation is non-negotiable."
"Thank you." I wanted to tell him where to go, but I'd tried that fifty times already and achieved nothing. Sonar was Sonar — which meant that despite the genuinely impressive intellect, the aristocratic manners, the strange charisma, and the constantly rotating catalogue of schemes in his head — he was a bat, and nothing was ever going to change that.
"You're welcome." He finished his breakfast, removed the napkin he'd tucked against his chest, and dabbed carefully at the blood and fur and intestines around his mouth. "I have a request, by the way."
"I'm not helping you wash your back in bat form, we've been over this." I sat up on the bed and let the tension and fear finish draining away, splashing some fresh water on my face. "If personal hygiene is important to you, find someone else. I'm not doing that. The rumors in this place are already terrible enough."
"I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but I do recall discussing it. Hm. Never mind." He stood from the table, straightened his prison uniform, and approached, stopping a meter away with his signature expression of blank, unblinking vacancy.
One minute. A minute and a half. Two. I waited in silence, watching him. Sonar stayed exactly where he was.
A bat brain in a cocktail of heavy narcotics will not produce genius. Let the record show.
"A good acquaintance of mine would like to meet you. He asked me to bring you to our next meeting."
He tilted his head to one side and stared past me at some indeterminate point in space. His white, pupilless eyes seemed to be looking at me and through me and at the entire surrounding world simultaneously — something others had noticed as well.
"Hey, man, what did we say about doing that thing?" The voice came from across the hall. John was hanging from his bars, lazily counting on his fingers like a rap video that had lost its budget. "Every time you pull that stare my entire sack shrivels up into a pair of rubber bouncing balls. I could knock pigeons off a wire."
Sonar blinked — apparently coming back from wherever he'd been — and glanced at our neighbor.
"Sorry. I was thinking, and I—"
"We talked about this. If you need to stare, stare at the wall. At least then you look like a regular idiot instead of a serial killer mid-episode." John adjusted his knitted hat — don't ask, I genuinely did not want to know — and stopped chewing his toothpick. "Ohh, I hear the guards coming. Somebody's got a visitor."
"Probably me." Sonar raised his hand like a well-behaved student.
"Your hot friend again?"
"Not exactly. I mean — most likely, yes, but we're not in that kind of relationship." He scratched his chin thoughtfully, already threatening to stall out entirely. "Could one describe her as a… Hm. I should ask. She's objectively attractive, I've just never actually…"
"Forget it, man." John waved him off with the weariness of someone who'd been having this conversation too many times, disappeared back into his cell, and appeared to be asleep on his bottom bunk within approximately thirty seconds, hat pulled down over half his face.
"Sonar, you have visitors." The sergeant managed to look simultaneously annoyed and genuinely baffled as he studied my cellmate, clearly not fully believing in what he was experiencing. That raised an interesting question — who exactly was this person coming to see Sonar? "They said you can bring one friend."
Well. That was interesting, strange, and unexpected in equal measure. Whoever had arrived for Sonar thought it was acceptable to casually disregard the facility's internal regulations. My throat felt tight, and my palms were already wet again. I didn't love any of this — though what I loved even less was the fact that the moment the sergeant finished speaking, the werebat fixed me with his unblinking stare and waited for an answer to a question he'd technically already asked.
"All right. As long as there's no trouble?" I glanced at the sergeant, who clearly disliked everything about this situation but wasn't arguing. He didn't say a word — no warnings, no lectures, no threats about the consequences of escape attempts — just silently walked us to the room.
And this time it genuinely was a room. Separate from the general visitation area, with an actual couch and the minimum necessary furniture. I'd only heard about this room before — it existed primarily for wealthy inmates and for married ones, so I'd had no personal business with it.
I was still turning over the question of who exactly Sonar's mysterious *good acquaintance* was when a not-particularly-hard elbow found my ribs, right outside the door.
A moment of stillness. The door swung open with a heavy thud, revealing a clean, well-maintained little room.
My first impression was that there was a bright sunny day visible through the window. Then I blinked a few more times and my eyes adjusted well enough to make out the actual source of the room's brilliant lighting.
"How in the — how are you *in prison* with friends like this?" I shoved Sonar in the shoulder and pointed at the very surprised blonde.
She was, without false modesty, stunning. Bright golden hair falling across a considerable chest. A white-and-blue fitted costume with a large pointed yellow collar. A simple blue half-mask over her face.
A red gemstone sat between her collarbones, catching the light, pulling the eye — I was actively working to keep my gaze at face level, for reasons of personal safety.
But beyond the extraordinary appearance — recognizable to literally anyone in California — the woman in front of me was surrounded by what I could only describe as a divine aura of sheer power, barely contained, pressing outward from every edge of her and held in place only by will.
We stood in silence for a few seconds before the superhero — the face of a dozen major advertising campaigns, a prominent figure in the city, and objectively one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen — spoke.
"Hello. You must be Herman." She straightened her hair with a light touch, smiled with the full radiance of someone who had never once doubted their effect on a room, and extended her hand, giving Sonar a welcoming nod. He was, somehow, completely unsurprised to see her. "Sonar's told me about you. And I have a proposal that I think you'll find interesting."
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