A large cut is nastily stitched across his cheek bone down to the upper corner of his lip and his bare arms and hands are bruised and scraped. A thick layer of bandaging is wrapped around his elbow, making him hold his tray entirely in the other hand. His eye is still slightly purple and what looks like paper cuts litter the backside of his neck. I can feel his pain radiating in the small space between us. He is in need of some medical strength pain relievers.

Axel's fists are clenched at his sides. I stick my hand out before I'm able to think, saying, "It's okay. I know him." At first, he looks confused, but quickly loosens his fists and gestures to Bender to take a seat as he takes one himself. "I was beginning to wonder if you'd survived or not."

Bender looks nervous, but I know he's not. Axel is glaring him down and Axis is staring at him curiously, knowing she's seen him before somewhere. "Me, too," he clears his throat. "Another few hours and I would've been for sure."

The twins throw sidelong glances at each other as Bender digs into his lunch.

"You're the new guy," Axis says bluntly, something I'm beginning to associate her with.

Bender bobs his head. "Yeah, I guess so. Only shoved into a cell yesterday afternoon." He must've been with the doctor getting patched up the past couple of days.

"Are you feeling better?" I say despite the fact I know he's not.

His voice cracks embarrassingly as he croaks, "Yeah, fine. Fine." I nod as another glance is traded between the twins. We throw our things away five minutes later after weaving through the crowd of prisoners also headed to the disposals.

Once again, we shuffle along with the slow moving crowd out a door opposite the one we came through the first time. I've always hated walking in crowds; I can always feel their every stress and emotion emanating from them and through me in a disgusting rake down my spine. I also hate that I can't turn it off, that I'm forced to enjoy the intimacy of the strangers' emotions bumping into me. On occasion, however, I do take the true pleasure of sending a little gift of paranoia to the ones who have no issue with the problem of personal space.

I feel a hand on back and from the amount of pain I feel I know unmistakably that it's Bender. As we round a corner, a peek over my shoulder confirms my guess. Axis and Axel are a few feet ahead me, a group of very tall men separating us. Out of spite, I reach out and tap a finger against the elbow of the one directly in front of me, sending a sense of jealousy through him. The amount of absolute hatred that sticks to his face as he turns to a better looking man next to him is priceless. He pushes through the crowd at lightning speed in an attempt to escape the other guy; this allows for Bender and me to slip into his wake until we catch up to the twins.

A hastily written sign reads NEW PRISONERS with an arrow pointing towards an open door on the left side of the hall. Axis pushes me towards it. "You have to go. Flirt enough with the guards and you'll get a better job," she says as she gives me one last shove towards the door.

I lead Bender through the door where a room opens up before us. A very large man stands at the front of the room with various guards lined up on each wall. Only two other prisoners occupy one of the three tables. We take a seat at the table closest to the door, his movements still accented with subtle grunts.

"Within the last week, you lucky group of people have ended up here," the man at the front says with a curled smile. His skin is dark and his eyes are deep set, almost too far back distinguish pupil from iris from sclera. "My name is not important, but I will assign you your clinic and have one of the guards train you properly and intensively. You will find we don't take kindly to half-done jobs." He rattles off a list and waves a careless hand in the general direction of a guard, me with Chubby and Bender with Too-Skinny-To-Be-Walking.

I follow my guard out the door we came in through; the hallway is now empty. I take note that he walks heavily on his right leg. I've been assigned to Uniform Assembly and we walk down the hall, turn left, then right, and then upstairs before going through a door labeled UA in dark black letters. He guides me down the center of the room which is lined with industrial sewing machines and peppered with prisoners all either operating a machine or toting basketfuls of white material back and forth across the room.

"Oy!" my guard shouts, pointing across my vision to someone on my right. His arm is an inch from my face and I resist the very prominent urge to brush my skin against his and send a nasty chill down his spine.

A familiar voice asks, "Me?" and the guard rolls his eyes as he nods his head sharply. Axel comes jogging up from behind the guard's lowering arm, sweat glistening from beneath the edge of his cropped hair. His pupils widen as he glances at me and subconsciously rubs his face against his shoulder. He's bouncing on the balls of his feet with a nervous tick.

The guard motions an annoyed hand across the room, leaving us to follow behind him. He cuts through the middle of the room and completely ignores the prisoners he bumps into as he does. He punches in a code at a keypad and the door makes several mechanical clicks as it slides open. He walks inside still limping heavily.

Axel lets me through first and I'm met with a heavy basket being thrown into my arms. "You," Chubby points at Axel, "train her for machinery operation." Axel looks worriedly at me as the guard takes a seat by the door and rubs his knee. "Now."

I watch as he points out different parts of a large sewing machine like the ones in the other room, waves of nervousness rolling off of him the whole time. "And never get close to this part right here in the crease," he's saying, "because it tends to grab on to clothing and suck it in." Maybe that's why he's nervous: killer sewing machines.

The next four hours go about like that: me pretending to pay attention and him pointing out which spots might catch material and Jax typing furiously on his Glas, a phone that had fallen out of style because a) it was too expensive for any to afford and b) easily broken due to its being made completely out of glass. When we're released, Axel and I are covered in grease from the sewing machine: a nasty contrast to the immaculate prison.

Axel keeps pushing a conversation, asking me too many questions than I wished to answer. His depression from the day before has lessened considerably; I'm guessing he has bipolar depression, something my father had for years. (Of course, I helped him, because I couldn't stand to see him in pain.)

"So, what do you do for a living?" he asks as we round a corner.

I shrug half-heartedly. "Computers," I say, thinking back to Slate and his incredibly fast hacking. Rixton also had Pinn Tenancy's job down as a computer technician, just in case any of those lazy Station guards decided to do background check on me, which only happened once. I don't trust him enough yet to tell him what I actually do; his gossipy ways have already been made clear to me. "You?"

"Logger." Well, that explains the build. "Axis did it, too, but she was more into technical side of it: setting the laser edge and projecting the fall point and such. She loved it," he says, nostalgia appearing in the unfocused look of his eyes.

"How long have you been here?" From the ease of direction the twins have displayed, I'm betting at least a couple of months.

"Three years and two months," he rattles off like he's been counting every single day and adding it to the growing list of imprisoned days.

"Four days," I say, almost snorting at how pathetic it sounds after three whole years. We near the end of the hallway we entered and I spot a smiling Axis standing in front of a man with buzzed hair and too large muscles. Her hands are balled against his chest and he's holding her wrists in his hands, using them as leverage to pull her towards him. Axel tenses beside me and I look away as we approach the two, and I know immediately that this is "the lover" that Axis disappeared to yesterday.

I stand emotionless and uninvolved a few feet away as Axel shakes hands with the man. I hear him call him Kneads, a common name from Unit 1. He has the look of Unit 1 person: pale grey skin and watered down looks. Standing beside Axis, they heavily resemble the pieces of a chess game: one side as dark as the Administration's intentions and the other as light as the conversation between strangers.

Kneads is playing with her fingers as she talks; Axel is listening intently, hands in his pockets and rocking on the balls of his feet. As we're standing there in a loosely constructed circle, I see Bender limping from a room and down the hallway in the opposite direction.

I pat Axel on the back to let him know I'm leaving and jog down the hallway after Bender. I grab his elbow as I fall into step with him and keep my pace slow for his sake. His pain is making me hurt with its intensity.

"You can fix this," he half whispers as he limps along. His tone is darker than I have associated with Bender's seemingly light personality.

My head jerks back in surprise. I wonder if he knows what my deviant is (which is impossible since I've never even thought to myself exactly what it is). "What?"

"I know what you can do. And I know that this is something easy for you to make go away. This pain, I mean." His hand squeezes his thigh to keep it shuffling alongside his other leg.

I shake my head in shocked silence. "How-"

"Did I know?" he finishes for me, smirking slightly. "I know everything."

"Is that your-"

"Yes. And before you ask, I do know how to get out of here. The thought of escape has been running across your mind since you've been in here. There are exactly fourteen different possibilities to escape with varying degrees of stealth and success rates." He glances back with raised eyebrows before limping into an empty room to our right and gestures for me to follow him. He shuts the door after taking a quick look down the hall and keeps the light off as he checks to see if we're alone. Besides a shifty looking mop in the corner, we are. He lowers his head towards mine until I can feel his breath fanning lightly across my forehead. "I know where your sister is."