Werner left at eleven.

He'd been in our cell for two hours. No guard escort, no official reason to be on our tier during lockdown. Brotherhood moved when they needed to. Guards who asked questions about it had a way of finding themselves transferred to worse postings. That's how it worked.

Two hours of compressed theory. Werner talking fast and quiet, me sitting on my bunk trying to absorb everything while part of my brain kept screaming that Kask was coming tonight and two hours wasn't enough. Two hours was nothing. Forty years of traditional Baltic practice versus two hours of crash-course combat theory delivered in whispers in a six-by-eight cell.

Great odds.

"The redirect is your best weapon," Werner said, one last time, standing at the door. "Not because it's powerful. Because he won't expect it. You used the Thurisaz raw in the yard — that he can account for. What he can't account for is the redirect. Kask thinks chaos magic is improvisation without foundation. He doesn't know you can use that improvisation deliberately. Channeled unpredictability."

"Right."

"You've got the materials. Use the salt before he arrives—circle around your bunk, not the whole cell. You don't have enough for the whole cell. Iron nail as a focus, here—" he touched his sternum "—not in your hand. Hands need to stay free."

"I know."

"The anchor working is last resort. If it works, it drags the fight onto your turf. If it fails, you've spent energy you can't get back." His jaw was tight. Not scared exactly. More like the expression of a man watching someone walk into traffic and knowing he can't grab them. "The prison walls are saturated with your intent. Two years of blood and will. That's an advantage he doesn't have a counter for."

"And if none of it works?"

Werner was quiet for a beat.

"Improvise," he said. "Chaos magic. Whatever comes."

He checked the tier through the door slot. Clear. He opened it, stepped through, and was gone.

I sat on my bunk and looked at the materials laid out beside me. The salt, wrapped in a torn piece of t-shirt. The iron nail from maintenance storage, dull gray, about four inches long. Two candles from Axel's supply—one white, one blue—already burned down two-thirds from the crash-course session with Werner, both of us using them as focus points while he talked theory. The small bottle of vegetable oil. Coffee grounds in a zip-lock bag.

Humble stuff. Not a practitioner's workshop. A prison witch's kit.

Books was on his upper bunk. Not reading—he'd put the book away an hour ago, which told me how worried he was. Books always had a book.

"You should sleep," he said.

"Yeah."

Neither of us moved.

"Werner's right about the redirect," Books said. "The concept is sound. Kask will be prepared for you to absorb or deflect. He won't anticipate the return angle being chaotic."

"That's the theory."

"Theory's all we have." He paused. "You held him off twice with defense alone. Tonight you hit back."

"Tonight he's not playing."

"No." Books's voice was honest. No bullshit comfort. Just the truth because he'd always given me the truth. "He's not."

I lay back on my bunk and stared at the ceiling. The tier had quieted down around midnight—cell doors locked, guys settling into sleep or whatever they did in the dark. Somewhere two cells down, Barkov was snoring loud enough to rattle windows. Normal prison night sounds. The whole institution running its rhythms underneath us while everything in Cell 47 waited.

I thought about Kask. Fifty-eight years old. Forty-plus years of practice. He'd broken two of my three wards from eighty miles away like they were tissue paper. He'd left a message in my cell while I slept. He'd felt the Thurisaz from a hundred miles and sent his response before I'd even made it back from the yard.

Little kitten has claws.

Not a taunt. An observation. He was updating his assessment. That was worse than mockery.

I touched the iron nail. Cold metal, rough texture. Grounded me a little.

"Books."

"Yeah."

"If this goes bad—"

"It won't."

"You don't know that."

A pause. "No. I don't." He shifted on the upper bunk. Springs creaked. "But I know you've survived everything this place has thrown at you. Two years of things that should have killed you."

"Kask is different."

"Yes." No argument. "He is."

I closed my eyes. Tried to slow my breathing. Not sleep—I wouldn't sleep. But rest. Save something for what was coming.

The tier went quiet.

Barkov's snoring.

The distant clang of the main gate on a lower level.

The hum of the fluorescents that never fully turned off.

I felt it at 2:17 AM.

Not a warning this time. No testing, no careful probing of the outer layers. The first attack hit like a fist through glass—full force, full intent, no patience for reconnaissance. He'd done his reconnaissance. He knew what I had. He was done being careful.

The blood ward screamed.

I was off my bunk before I was fully awake, hands already moving, muscle memory from two weeks of Werner's yard sessions kicking in. Salt circle—fast, uneven, but closed. Iron nail pressed to my sternum. Both candles lit in the same motion, one flame catching the other.

The blood ward buckled.

Not broke. Buckled. Bent under the weight of the assault like a wall taking a battering ram. I felt it in my nose first—hot copper taste, then the actual bleed starting. Both nostrils. Worse than before.

I didn't wipe it. No hands free.

"Thor." Books was down from his bunk. I heard him land, felt him move to the corner of the cell—out of my way, where he'd stay clear of anything I was doing but could still see me. He'd learned.

The ward buckled again. Deeper.

I stopped trying to hold it rigid. Werner's first lesson: rigid structures break under sustained pressure. The ward wasn't a wall. It was a net. Let the force come in, capture it, redirect it.

I felt the attack energy hit the net.

Held my breath.

The redirect worked.

Forty percent, maybe. Maybe less. But the attack force that should have hit me clean went out at an angle that had no logical direction in traditional practice—sideways and slightly backward, following the chaos pattern I'd fed into the net's weave. Unpredictable geometry. No practitioner trained in structured technique would have set up counters for that angle because no structured practitioner would think to send it that way.

On Kask's end, somewhere eighty miles away in a maximum-security cell I'd never seen, something happened that I felt across the distance like a plucked string vibrating. Not pain. Not injury. Surprise.

The assault paused.

One second. Two.

Long enough for me to pull more will into the blood ward, reinforce the buckled section, re-weave the net where it had frayed. The candles were burning fast—way too fast, the magic eating them. I had maybe twenty minutes before they guttered out. The oil helped. I'd coated the base of both candles. Bought me a little more time.

The assault resumed. Harder.

He'd adjusted. Of course he'd adjusted. Forty years of practice means you adjust in real-time, means you feel a counter-measure and immediately start working around it. The new attack came in a spiral instead of straight—still traditional structure, still Baltic runic technique, but modified. Accounting for the redirect.

Not fully. He didn't fully account for it because he couldn't model it. That was the point. That was what Werner had said. He can't predict chaos because chaos doesn't follow rules he understands.

But he didn't need to fully account for it to hurt me.

The blood ward cracked.

Not buckled. Cracked. I felt it like a fracture in my own ribcage—sharp, wrong, something that shouldn't move moving. The nail against my sternum went cold. Both candles flickered.

My legs stopped working right. I went to one knee inside the salt circle, hand catching the floor, blood dripping from my nose and hitting the concrete in a slow dark pattern. The world tilted. I focused on the physical. Cold floor under my palm. Salt granules scraping my knee. Iron nail pressing into my chest. Real things. Here things.

The crack in the ward was spreading.

Last resort, Werner had said. If it works, you drag the fight to your turf.

I stopped defending.

All the will I'd been pouring into maintaining the ward—I pulled it. Gathered it. The blood ward shuddered, cracked worse, and I let it crack because I didn't have enough for both.

I reached out.

Not with my hands. With everything else. The thing I'd learned to call projection but felt more like a fist made of intention, extending outward, reaching across eighty miles of highway and city and flat Ontario farmland toward the source of the attack. Toward Kask's mind, his consciousness, the thing that was reaching into my cell right now and trying to take it apart.

I grabbed.

He resisted. God, he resisted. Felt like grabbing a rebar and having it push back—not a person, not a body, but structured will that had been hardened over forty years into something close to steel. He hadn't budged when I'd tried this before, not even a little.

But he'd budgeted his energy for a fast end. He'd come in hard and fast specifically because he didn't want a sustained fight. He'd allocated for overwhelming force, not a tug of war.

I dug in. Used the walls. Two years of blood and sigils and intention soaked into the concrete of Cell 47, into the specific brick and mortar of Central North Correctional Centre, into a building that had held me long enough to become part of me or me part of it—I didn't know which anymore. The prison amplified what I was doing. Not dramatically. Not like a lightning bolt. More like the difference between shouting across a room and shouting through a megaphone. Same voice. More reach.

The anchor didn't fully work. I couldn't drag him in—he was too experienced, too rooted in his own space. But I held him. Pinned him in place. Made it cost him something to keep attacking instead of a smooth operation of superior force against inferior defense.

The attack faltered.

Not stopped. Faltered. Became uneven, choppy. A master drummer losing the beat for just a moment because something grabbed their wrist.

I hit him with everything I had left.

Not clean technique. Not the Thurisaz in the yard—precise, shaped, intentional. This was everything at once, chaos made real, improvisation turned into assault. Old sigils from Kraus's grimoire that I only half understood, layered over Werner's combat theory, layered over two years of blood wards that had my actual living will in them. All of it at once. No structure. No proper sequence.

Pure chaos.

He broke contact.

Just like that. The pressure in my head went from unbearable to gone, so fast my ears popped. The air in Cell 47 stopped feeling like the moment before a lightning strike. Both candles went out simultaneously—nothing left to feed them.

I was on both knees in the salt circle. Blood dripping off my chin onto the concrete. One eye felt wrong—not painful, just wrong, like pressure behind it. I found out later a vessel had burst. Not dangerous, just ugly. Made me look like a horror movie extra for the next week.

Books was at my shoulder before I'd fully registered it was over. Hand on my back, steady.

"Done?" he asked.

"Done." My voice came out wrong. Too thin. "He pulled back."

"You're bleeding."

"Yeah." Understatement of the year. Both nostrils still going, slow but steady. The kind of bleed that didn't hurt but wouldn't stop, that just kept producing blood with quiet patience. "I know."

Books got me onto my bunk. I don't remember the moving part clearly—I was there and then I was lying down and Books was crouched beside me with a wet cloth I didn't know he had, and he was being methodical about it. Cleaning my face. Pinching my nose. Not saying anything yet.

Useful things. No panic. No philosophy. Just useful things.

I let him.

The eye didn't hurt. When I mentioned it, he looked at it in the dim tier light and said "Broken vessel. You'll live. Looks worse than it is." Then went back to the nosebleed.

Twenty minutes before the bleeding slowed enough that I could breathe normally.

In all that time, nothing appeared on the wall. No message. No Estonian words. No mocking observation about kittens and claws.

Books noticed the silence too. He was back on his own bunk by then, sitting with his book open but not reading it again.

"He didn't respond," I said.

"No."

"What does that mean?"

Books thought about it. "Could mean he's angry. Could mean he's regrouping." A pause. "Could mean you hurt him."

Not physically. You can't physically hurt someone through magical projection from eighty miles away. But you can cost them. Force, energy, the mental and will resources that a practitioner uses to work—those have limits. Those recover slowly. A master like Kask had larger reserves than me, but I'd forced him to spend from those reserves in ways he hadn't planned for.

I'd made him work for it.

Made it cost.

"Sleep," Books said.

I slept.

Morning came. Then most of Saturday.

I didn't move from my bunk for the first four hours after count. Books told the guard I was sick, which was true in all the ways that mattered. The guard—not Gibbins, some weekend rotation guy who didn't know our cell—looked at my eye, which had gone spectacularly purple and red with the burst vessel, and decided not to push it. Can't exactly catch magic, and a guy with a bad eye and the look of someone who'd been through something staying quietly in his cell wasn't a problem he needed.

I slept in pieces. Woke, drank water Books kept bringing me, slept again.

My magical senses were flat. Like a radio that could usually pick up distant signals now only getting static. The wards were there—I could feel them dimly, the way you can feel a tooth that's been filled, awareness without sensation. But I couldn't have worked anything. If Kask had come at me again in those first hours, I'd have had nothing. The blood ward alone, maybe. The permanent working tied to my life force. Everything else was empty.

Books knew not to talk about it in the morning. He read. He brought food from the meal tray—I hadn't made breakfast count, so he got extra from somewhere, probably bartered something I didn't want to know about. I ate mechanically. Oatmeal gone cold and a bruised apple and coffee that was barely coffee.

Werner appeared around midday. He had a reason for being on our tier today—some Brotherhood business with a guy in Cell 52 that gave him cover. He stopped at our door like he was just passing, looked at me through the slot.

His eyes went to my face first. The eye.

"You held him," Werner said. Not a question.

"He pulled back."

Werner's jaw moved. Not quite a smile. The expression of a man who expected the worst and didn't quite get it. He stepped closer to the door, voice lower. "I felt when he broke contact. From the tier. His signature just... stopped."

"You can feel his signature?"

"Trained under him for eleven years." Werner's voice was flat. "You know someone's magic for a decade, you carry it with you. Even now, when I can barely sense anything, his signature's like a smell I can't forget." He was quiet for a beat. "He burned reserves. Thor. He came in hard and fast and expected it to be over quick, and it wasn't."

"Still not over."

"No." Werner's voice was honest. "But you bought time. And you learned something."

"That I can make him work for it."

"That chaos works. That it costs him something to fight it." He glanced down the tier. "He won't come back tonight. He needs to recover. Figure out what you did. So do you."

"I don't know what I did."

"That's the point." Something in Werner's face shifted—not quite respect, more like the reluctant acknowledgment of someone who'd argued a thing was impossible and watched it happen anyway. "He's going to study chaos magic theory now. Try to find the rules underneath the chaos. Try to predict you."

"Can he?"

"Give him a week."

"And if he can?"

Werner pushed off the door frame. "Then we find another way to be unpredictable." He checked the tier again. "Rest. We'll talk Monday."

He moved off toward Cell 52.

I lay back on my bunk and stared at the ceiling and tried to feel something other than hollowed out. My hands weren't shaking anymore. The nosebleed had been done since early morning. The eye was what it was. But underneath all that, deeper than physical, the place where the magic lived was just... empty. The aquifer after a drought. There was something there, way down. But I couldn't touch it yet.

Books was watching me from the table. He'd moved down there when Werner came—gave us room to talk, now back to reading position. Except he wasn't reading. Book open, eyes not moving.

"Say it," I said.

"You need a week of no magic."

"I know."

"You probably won't get one."

"I know that too."

He turned a page he hadn't read. Habit. "How does it feel? Magically, I mean."

"Empty. Like I've got nothing left to give." I looked at my hands. "Like the well's there but I can't reach the water."

Books nodded slowly. Turned another unread page. "That's what I thought." He set the book down. "You did something last night. The anchor working—Werner said you actually held Kask in place."

"Partly. Didn't drag him in."

"But you held him. Against his resistance." Books was using his thinking voice now, the one that meant he was working something out. "That's not just chaos magic improvisations. That's the prison itself, isn't it. You used the building."

I hadn't explained it to Werner that way. Books had seen it in what I'd described.

"Yeah," I said. "Two years of working in these walls. They held more of me than I knew."

"Hm." He picked his book back up. Actually read this time, or pretended to. Then: "Thor. You need to understand something."

"What?"

"You're not just a practitioner in a prison anymore." Books kept his eyes on the page. "You're a practitioner of this prison. This specific place, these specific walls, this particular building. What you did last night worked because Central North is yours in some way. More than it's anyone else's."

I thought about what that meant. Hadn't thought about it that way before.

"That's a strange kind of home," I said.

"Yes," Books said. "It is."

He read. I lay there and let the afternoon move around us. Count at four. Dinner at five-thirty. The weekend rhythms of the institution, slower than weekdays, fewer programs running, longer stretches in cells. I made dinner count—had to, or it would flag. Moved slowly. Kept my face down. The eye was bad enough that most guys gave me space without knowing why, which suited me fine.

Back in the cell by six. Books had his philosophy texts out—Marcus Aurelius, the prison-worn copy with his notes in the margins. He'd read it so many times there were reads visible in the spine from across the room.

He poured me water from the jug we kept on the table. I drank it. He poured more.

"Kask," I said.

"What about him?"

"Round two. A week, Werner said. Maybe less."

"Yes." Books put the jug down. "We have time to think. Not much, but some."

"I need to get stronger."

"You need to recover first." His voice was firm. The voice that didn't invite argument. "Recovery isn't weakness. It's part of the process. A week of no magic means a week of your reserves rebuilding. You fight him again on empty, he wins."

"And if he comes before I'm ready?"

Books looked at me over his glasses. "That's what the blood ward is for."

Right. The permanent protection. Still there, still working, even when everything else was flat. The one thing I always had.

"Tomorrow," Books said, "I want to talk about the anchor working. What it felt like. How you set it up. I want to understand it better so we can think about how to build on it."

"Building magic through philosophy."

"Building magic through understanding." He almost smiled. "Which is philosophy. But don't tell Werner that. He'll want to charge tuition."

I actually laughed at that. Small, real. The first one since Friday afternoon.

Books looked mildly satisfied and went back to Marcus Aurelius.

We sat in the quiet of the cell. The tier hummed around us—music from Cell 44, an argument from somewhere below, the distant percussion of the kitchen loading dock. Normal Saturday evening. Life inside continuing regardless.

Around seven, Books stood up. Stretched. The methodical stretch of a man whose bones ached and who had made his peace with that.

"I'm going to take care of something," he said.

"What something?"

"Errand." He picked up his copy of Meditations, tucked it under his arm—he took it everywhere, like a talisman. "Won't be long."

I should have asked. I know that now. Should have pressed him, found out what the errand was, paid attention to the fact that Books never had errands on Saturday evenings. That wasn't his pattern. Books's pattern was reading until lights out, philosophizing at me until I fell asleep, then reading some more with a flashlight he wasn't supposed to have.

But I was hollow. Empty and exhausted in ways that went deeper than tired. And I figured it was something small. Books had twenty-five years of prison relationships. He moved through the institution differently than I did—not magically, just humanly. He knew people. He managed small things quietly.

So I said "Okay" and let him go.

I fell asleep before lights out. Not restful sleep—the shallow kind you get after something like that night, where you're not quite unconscious and not quite awake, just somewhere gray in between. Aware of the tier sounds, the count announcements, the machinery of the institution running around me.

I was still half in that gray space when Werner came back.

I heard the door before I was fully awake. Sat up. The tier was dim—after-hours, minimal lighting. Werner was in the doorway, and his face was wrong.

Not worried. Werner didn't do worried the way most people did. He did controlled. Measured. The expression of a man who'd learned in eleven years of practicing Baltic magic that you kept your reaction off your face while you assessed.

That face was on now. Maximum controlled assessment.

"What," I said. Not a question.

"Books is in the Hole."

The words didn't track for a second. I heard them in the right order. Just couldn't make them mean what they meant.

"What?"

"Segregation. They took him maybe forty minutes ago." Werner stepped into the cell, lowered his voice out of habit. "A Kings member—young guy, Ramirez, barely been here six months—got found in the shower block. Beat up. Not critical, but bad enough."

"Books wouldn't—"

"He was the only other person in there." Werner's voice was flat. Just the information. "Guard log shows him entering the shower block at six fifty-eight. Ramirez entered at seven. Found at seven-twelve. Books was still in there when they found the kid."

"He didn't do it."

"Of course he didn't." Werner said it like it was obvious. Because it was. "Books hasn't started violence in twenty-five years inside. He's Switzerland. Everyone knows he's Switzerland." He paused. "Which means everyone knows who did do it. And why."

I sat on my bunk and looked at my hands.

The Latin Kings.

Not Rey—Rey was still in medical, concussed and not walking steady. But his lieutenants. Carlos. The guys who'd watched their leader get launched across the yard by something they didn't understand. The guys who needed to do something about that without being able to directly hit back at me. Not because they were scared, though maybe that too. Because they were smart.

You can't kidnap someone in prison. You can't hold anyone anywhere. But you can beat one of your own guys half to death and point at Books and let the institution do the rest.

No cameras in the shower block. Building this old, the blind spots were mapped by anyone who'd been here long enough. One guard log entry showing Books entering. One guard log showing him there when Ramirez got found. One witness—probably another King, planted there to give a statement—and the machinery engaged. No discretion required. No consideration of whether Books Washington, who'd been Switzerland for two and a half decades, would actually do something like this.

The machinery didn't care about that. The machinery just needed a body and a witness.

Books in segregation. Pending investigation. No timeline on that—could be two weeks, could be six. No contact with general population. No Cell 47. No Marcus Aurelius on the upper bunk, no philosophical questions lobbed at me at eleven PM, no wire-rimmed glasses catching the light when I needed someone to tell me what I was actually asking.

I was alone. Magically drained. No strategist. No moral compass. No father figure. No protection by association.

The Kings hadn't touched me. They didn't need to.

Werner was watching me process it. Not rushing me. Whatever he was feeling about it, he'd put it away. Just the information and the space to understand it.

I looked up.

"How long can he stay in the Hole?" I asked.

"Depends on the investigation. They won't find anything—no evidence, Books didn't do it, Ramirez will probably walk back his story once they put pressure on him. But that takes time."

"How much time."

"Minimum two weeks for the investigation cycle. Could be longer if they decide to charge him. Even with no evidence, they can hold him through the process."

Two weeks minimum. Minimum. While I recovered. While Kask regrouped. While the Kings watched to see if removing Books had the effect they were hoping for.

"Werner."

"Yeah."

"What do I actually do right now? Tonight. With nothing left in the tank and Books in the Hole and Kask coming back in a week."

Werner was quiet for a moment.

"You rest," he said finally. "Because there's nothing else tonight. Just tonight."

I nodded. Stared at the upper bunk. Books's Meditations wasn't there—he'd taken it with him, tucked under his arm when he left. The shelf was empty of it. Small thing. Big empty.

"I want Books back," I said. "I want to sleep for a week and have Kask decide he's got better things to do and I want a lot of things."

Werner didn't say anything to that.

"Tell me what I can actually do," I said.

He pulled the cell door mostly closed. Leaned against the wall. And started talking.