Chapter 10: No Answers

Miles's POV

Mail call happened twice a week, and I'd stopped expecting anything from it weeks ago. My mother's silence had become its own kind of message, and my best friend's letters had grown shorter each time, careful in a way that felt more like distance than comfort.

So when the guard called my name and held up an envelope, I actually hesitated before stepping forward, half convinced it was a mistake, someone else's letter misfiled under my name. It wasn't. My sister's handwriting covered the front in careful, looping letters, the kind of handwriting a kid works hard at when she wants something to look nice.

I didn't open it until I was back at my bunk, alone, the noise of the block fading into background static the way it did when something actually mattered.

*Dear Miles,*

*Mom said I could write even though she doesn't like to. I miss you a lot. I got a B plus on my math test which is good because math is hard. I still have the blue night light you gave me. I don't need it anymore but I keep it on anyway because it reminds me of you.*

*Everyone at school says stuff about you sometimes. I don't listen. I know you didn't do it.*

*Please come home soon.*

*Love, your sister*

I read it twice, then a third time, my throat tight in a way I hadn't let myself feel in weeks. Eight years old and she still believed in me without a single hesitation, the way only someone that young could, before the world taught her that belief and evidence were supposed to line up. I thought about the night light, still burning in a room I couldn't picture anymore without effort, and wondered if she'd notice when it finally started to feel less like comfort and more like habit.

I folded the letter carefully and tucked it under my thin mattress, in the spot where I kept the few things worth keeping, and lay there staring at the bunk above me for a long time.

She still believed in me. Everyone else, it seemed, had already decided.

---

Vincent found me an hour later, during the yard hour, and I could tell from the set of his shoulders that this wasn't a social visit.

"Another one," I said, before he even opened his mouth.

"Another one."

I took the folded paper without reading it yet, my patience for the ritual worn thin after weeks of the same routine. "You know what, forget the details for a second. I want an actual answer this time."

"About."

"About when. Not vague progress. Not you're making it. An actual date, or something close enough to a date that it means something." I could hear my own voice shaking slightly and hated it, hated that weeks of holding myself together had apparently only bought so much patience.

Vincent studied me for a moment, and something in his expression made me think, for one brief second, that he might actually give me one. Then it passed, whatever it had been, closed off again behind the same practiced neutrality he wore for everything.

"There isn't a date," he said instead. "There's never been a date. I've told you that from the beginning."

"Then tell me what determines it. What has to happen for Julian Hayes to decide I've done enough."

"I don't know that answer myself."

"Bullshit."

"It's not bullshit. It's the truth, whether you believe it or not." Vincent's voice stayed level, no defensiveness in it at all, which somehow made it harder to argue with than if he'd gotten angry. "Mr. Hayes doesn't explain his reasoning to me any more than he explains it to you. I execute decisions. I don't make them."

"Then what am I even doing this for?" My voice came out louder than I meant it to, and a few heads turned nearby before quickly turning away again, the way everyone in this place had learned to mind their own business unless it was profitable not to. I lowered it, but the heat underneath didn't go anywhere. "I've done everything asked of me. Every task. Every stupid errand. I nearly died in my sleep and didn't even get told about it until after. What more does he want from me?"

"I don't know."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have." For a moment, something almost like sympathy crossed Vincent's face, gone as quickly as it appeared. "I understand this is difficult to hear. But you agreed to work without a timeline. That was the arrangement from the start."

"I agreed because I didn't have a choice. You know that."

"I do know that." He said it quietly, almost gently, which was somehow worse than if he'd been cold about it, that gentleness feeling closer to pity than comfort. "That doesn't change what the arrangement is."

I stood there for a long moment, my sister's letter still burning somewhere behind my ribs, the unopened task in my hand feeling heavier than the paper should have weighed.

"Fine," I said finally. "Give me the details."

Vincent handed it over properly this time, and I unfolded it, scanning the instructions with the same practiced detachment I'd developed over the past weeks, filing away the specifics without letting myself feel anything about them yet. It was routine. Another errand, another small piece of a machine I still didn't fully understand the shape of.

I was about to fold it back up when Vincent spoke again, his tone shifting slightly, something careful entering it that hadn't been there before.

"There's something you should know before you head back," he said. "It concerns your case."

My whole body went still, every muscle locking in place at once. "What about it."

"One of the witnesses from your trial. The security guard who testified about the timeline that night." Vincent paused, choosing his next words with visible care, the kind of pause that told me whatever came next mattered more than he wanted to make obvious. "He's disappeared."

"Disappeared how?"

"Nobody's heard from him in four days. His apartment's empty. His car's still in the lot, untouched."

I remembered him from the trial, or what little I'd registered of the trial through the fog of shock that whole week had been. A tired-looking man in a rumpled uniform, reading dates and times off a clipboard like they were the most ordinary thing in the world, unaware that his testimony was helping bury eight years of my life.

The yard around us kept moving, men shouting somewhere near the basketball hoop, a guard's radio crackling in the distance, and none of it registered anymore, all of it swallowed by the sudden roar of blood in my ears. Four days. Nobody had told me. Nobody would have told me at all if Vincent hadn't decided, for whatever reason, that this was worth breaking the pattern for.

"Who would want him gone?" I said. "Why now?"

Vincent's expression gave away nothing, which told me more than an answer would have.

"That," he said, "is exactly what I intend to find out."