Sage's POV
The cell was stone on all four sides.
No torch this time, just a thin strip of light coming through a gap at the top of the door, pale and grey and barely enough to see by. A chain ran from an iron loop in the wall to a cuff around my left ankle, long enough that I could reach the bucket in the corner and the thin mat on the floor and nothing else.
I sat on the mat with my back against the wall and my knees pulled to my chest and I counted the stones in the wall opposite me the way I had counted the lights in the facility ceiling. It was the same impulse. Find something to organise. Find something the pain could not touch.
There were forty-three stones.
I counted them three times to be sure.
The burning had settled into something chronic, no longer the white-hot flare of t
