Chapter 6 · Six Minutes, No Door

"Let go." I twist my wrist inside his grip and it doesn't move an inch.

"Say it again." Knox doesn't even look at my hand. His eyes are on the tray, on the match stem sitting in its little plastic cradle like it's the only thing in the room that matters. "Say you'll write undetermined."

"Let go of me first."

"That's not how this works."

The steel table's still wet under my hip, sprinkler runoff pooling cold against my spine where my shirt rode up an hour ago and never came back down. My skin's got his fingerprints on it in places I can feel and one place I can't see, low on my hip, already going purple. I know it's there because he keeps looking at it like a receipt.

"Six minutes," a voice yells through the wash corridor door. Metal on metal, a wrench or a pipe, testing the seam. "Hale, you copy? Six minutes and we're cutting the hinge."

Knox doesn't turn his head. "They won't cut it."

"You sound real sure for a guy who's not the one holding the tray."

"I'm holding you." He says it flat, like a fact on a form.