20
DAY THREE
In a way, the slot was a place of dreaming.
Or nightmares.
Kaz stared unseeingly as the first grey haze of pre-dawn light filled the room. She contemplated the thin line that separated dreams from nightmares. When she was little, there had been a clear division. Dreams were fun, and sometimes strange, but always interesting. Nightmares were terrifying. She remembered waking up screaming, calling for her father. He always appeared, ready to save her from the monsters tormenting her.
Kaz blinked.
As she grew older, the line between dreams and nightmares weakened. She woke with a sense of unease, or dread, although she could never pinpoint why. She couldn’t name what old terror continued to haunt her every night, now that there was no one to save her.
And then she came to Wentworth, the place of nightmares itself, and everything had gotten… worse.
Kaz rolled over onto her back, staring up at the ceiling.
But it had gotten better, too, in a way. There was life, even in this fucked-up place. It might not be good life, but… it was life.
She sighed, exhaling heavily.
Maybe she should be thankful for the slot, she thought with dark humour. It had given her two long, uninterrupted nights to contemplate everything that had happened since she had arrived here—her incarceration, her fights with Bea, the death of her father, her deal with Joan, Will’s revelation that Joan had turned her in, fighting Joan, becoming Top Dog, and… finding Bea’s dead body.
It was as if everything that had happened to her in these last months revolved around two people: Bea… and Joan.
Everything, really, had always been about Bea and Joan. The rest of them—inmates and guards—had circled around the two, like moths around a twinned flame. And they had all burned themselves on that heat.
But now, only one survived.
Kaz had finished crying for Bea sometime in the dark hours of that first long night. She had made her vow that she would make someone pay. First, though, she would force Will Jackson to reveal what he knew. She suspected that Bennett knew, too, but there was no way she’d be able to get that information from the Governor. No, she needed to go straight to the source.
Once she’d settled her mind on her plan, repeating it throughout the hours to cement it in her brain, she found her thoughts drifting to the other flame.
How did Joan Ferguson fit into all of this?
Truthfully, she had avoided thinking too directly about Joan. Ever since she tried to kill Bea, her mind continually slipped, skidding away whenever she was confronted with the memory of Joan. Somewhere in that second night, though, when she was too exhausted to censor her thoughts any longer, Joan appeared again.
If Kaz had cried for Bea on the first night, she cried for Joan on the second.
They weren’t tears of sadness or desolation, as they had been for Bea. Her tears for Joan were hot, angry, full of shame that they even existed—that they were even falling. Joan was a monster. She had used Kaz—she had used them all, with no thought to how her actions would affect any of them. She had perverted everything Kaz had tried to build with her women, using it instead as a weapon against Bea, and probably against Will Jackson, too. Kaz hated Joan with a passion that ran deep into her core. She wanted to scream at her, scrape her fingernails deep into her skin, draw blood, destroy her.
But—and here the shame threatened to overwhelm her—but some sick part of her missed Joan, too. She missed the Joan who had been hurt so terribly—hurt in a way no woman should have to endure. She missed the Joan who knew all the answers, whose quick mind was glorious to watch. She missed the Joan who had saved that suicidal girl—had that been just an act, somehow, too? But mostly she missed the Joan who had listened to her darkest confession; who had held her, comforting her through that night, never once judging her.
It is possible to love and hate at the same time.
The slot was a place of dreams and nightmares.
***
Corridors away, Maxine lay in the same position as Kaz, staring at the ceiling and watching the anemic morning light grow slowly brighter. She, too, had barely slept, although both her body and mind continued to feel exhausted. Her blankets had long been kicked to the side, and she lay with one hand across her absent breasts, the other tucked into her underwear, gently cupping the last remaining physical reminder of her womanhood.
Biological sex meant nothing, she told herself. It was her perception of her gender that was important. She was a woman. She had always been a woman, even when her body hadn’t quite matched. This was no different.
But it was, she thought, and a sob escaped from between her clenched teeth. For that brief time, her body and her mind had finally come together.
She had been beautiful. She had been perfect.
Now that was gone.
Now she suffered through hot and cold flashes of guilt and shame. All this time when she should be mourning Bea, remembering her, she kept thinking about herself: her body, her disease, her death.
Had the hormones that made her physically into a woman actually caused her cancer?
If she hadn’t been at the hospital for chemo, could she have saved Bea? Could she have prevented her death?
Selfish. She was so selfish. Everything was about her. She hadn’t protected Bea, hadn’t saved her. And even now, all she could think about was herself; what she had lost. What she might still lose.
She squeezed her eyes shut for the thousandth time, praying for sleep to take her away from it all.
As always, no sleep would come.
The morning light grew brighter.
***
The first full rays of sunlight spread themselves across the city.
Vera Bennett, curled against the long hard body of Jake Stewart, clenched her eyes shut as she burrowed her face back into her pillow.
Will Jackson stumbled home, stinking of smoke and alcohol and assorted sins.
Joan Ferguson woke with a smug smile, opening her eyes to her lovely, clean, heavily-disinfected home, and the promise of her Governorship.
Derek Channing also woke with a smug smile, lazily stretching his limbs and sighing contentedly.
Unbeknownst to Joan, he was also thinking of the Governorship.