The clang of metal wakes me up—the slamming of a cell door. Though using the word cell for the pens in this windowless dungeon is giving them credit for more than they deserve.

I’ve counted around six hundred shift changes since I got here. Assuming the guards work half-day shifts—and they seem to—and that my count is anywhere near accurate, with no good way to keep track, I’ve been here about a year, including the months before I started counting shifts.

At first, I marked the days on the back wall of my cell in my own blood, from a scratch on my hand. But they hose down the cells once a week, which kept washing my hashmarks away. And it seemed reckless to keep reopening a wound, with the risk of infection in a place like this. Especially considering that if I got sick, they would just let me die.

This is death row.

Universal Authority doesn’t invest much in the inmates they’re just going to execute anyway.

“New guy?” Graham asks from the cell across from mine, as the clang of metal fades from my ears. He doesn’t bother to sit up, or even open his eyes. Like me, he’s tall enough that the ceiling of his pen is only a few inches above his head when he stands, which gives him just enough room to stretch out on the concrete floor to sleep. The cells are each a perfect cube made up of concrete floors, ceilings, and walls, except for a front wall of bars. Plus a hole to squat over in one of the back corners.

Below us, a constantly running stream of water washes the waste away, eliminating both the diseases and stench that would come with a bucket, as well as the possibility of clogs and malfunctions that would come with actual toilets.

“Yeah,” I tell Graham. “End of the row, on your side. Skinny kid. Won’t last a week.” I’m not sure why they even brought him here. Most inmates sentenced to death are simply executed at their sentencing, on whatever planet they hail from. It costs money for Universal Authority to transport inmates across the galaxy to Rhodon, and there’s no point in that for murderers who won’t live long enough for their deaths to be exploited.

I’d bet what’s left of my life—to be fair, that isn’t worth much—that the kid at the end of the row killed someone who was incapacitated. Or he shot someone in the back. However he did it, his crime obviously didn’t involve brute force or any great feat of strength or endurance. He was not meant for the enclosure.

The humane thing would be a needle in his vein. Or a club to his head. But they’re not big on humane here.

“Shift change.” Graham sits up and leans against the concrete wall at the back of his pen as the heavy metal door at the end of the aisle opens. The guard patrolling the wide aisle taps the curved screen strapped to his wrist and looks visibly relieved to realize that his shift is over.

“Anything to report?” the new guard asks, while he holds the door open for an inmate pushing a metal cart. Dalton’s coming on duty. Fuck.

I don’t speak the common language, but I understand what the guards are saying to each other, because it’s a variation of the same things said at every shift change, which Graham has translated for me hundreds of times.

“Nothing interesting,” the outgoing guard replies. Then he adds a statement I don’t understand, and Dalton replies with more unintelligible syllables.

“They’re talking about the new prisoner on the end,” Graham says. “They think he’s too skinny, and they’ll have to bulk him up.”

Dalton makes an impatient gesture at the inmate pushing the cart, and the outgoing guard squeezes past them and out the door.

There’s rarely more than one guard on duty on F block because under normal circumstances, there isn’t enough work here for any more than that. This place is designed so that we have no physical contact with each other, or with the guard on duty. And there’s nothing in our cells except a soft, refillable water pouch and the clothes we’re wearing.

Black boxer briefs. That’s all we get.

While the inmate with the cart starts serving gruel at one end of the row, Dalton marches down the aisle, careful to stay within the set of parallel red lines painted along the center. Within those lines, he can’t be touched by inmates reaching between the bars. Though he can be touched by something thrown between the bars. And there’s only one thing inmates have to throw, other than our water pouches.

The last time someone threw a handful of shit at a guard—if memory serves, it was at Dalton—he was hosed down under a high-pressure stream, then beaten to death while he was still wet, by six guards wielding electrified batons.

Now, the only people who fling shit are men tired of waiting to die. Those who’re ready to get it over with. Those unwilling to die for someone else’s entertainment.

I understand the impulse. But if I’m going to die here, I’m going to take as many guards with me as I can.

While I wait for my meal, I drop to the floor of my cell for a set of pushups. Exercise is required at the Resort. Sit-ups. Pull-ups from the bar stretching across the top of every cell. And, of course, the endless running in place. Because they want us in good shape, but they’re unwilling to let us out of our cages. The whole thing requires a delicate balance. Guards hold back your food and water if you don’t exercise enough. But if you do too much, you burn more calories than can be replaced by the high-calorie, nutritionally sound but tasteless slop served once a shift in this shithole.

Dalton stops in front the new guy’s cell. “Name?”

I know that word too.

The new kid is only three down from me, so I can see him standing in the center of his cell, arms crossed, silently refusing to answer. Then he backs out of sight, and when Dalton’s gaze tracks downward, I gather that the kid is sitting against the rear wall.

The guard taps something on his wrist device. “William Truman,” he reads from the screen. Then he says more words I don’t understand.

“He’s eighteen, in Earth-standard solar units,” Graham translates. “Convicted of stabbing his father to death in his bed.”

By F block standards, killing one man in his sleep hardly even registers as a crime. The man two down on my other side raped and murdered twelve women in an eight-month period. The man to Graham’s left killed and ate five people at a terraforming outpost on a largely unpopulated planet. And the man at the far end on my side was part of the maintenance crew of a small freighter who chopped up every single crew member on his ship, then packaged the parts and delivered them to the victims’ families.

“Dalton wants him to do pushups,” Graham adds.

Finished with my own pushups, I turn over to start a set of bicycle crunches, while, across the aisle, Graham does a handstand against the rear wall of his cage, then dips into the first in a set of vertical pushups.

I finish my crunches just as the inmate pushing the cart stops in front of my cell. He pours several big scoops of gruel into a large paper bowl, then he sets it on the ground and uses a stick with curved piece on the end to push it across the red line toward an open slot at the bottom of the door to my cell. The bowl stops within arm’s reach.

“Any news?” I whisper as I reach through the slot and pull my meal into my pen, and Graham translates my question into the common language.

The server is a short, thin man wearing a clean standard-issue prison uniform. Which means he’s not on death row; he’s just unlucky enough to be serving his time here, instead of in the open population. Or maybe he considers that lucky. Here, his day is dictated to him by a work schedule, but he doesn’t have to fight for food and shelter.

He says something I can’t understand, then moves on to the next cage.

Graham’s feet thump to the floor of his cell, then he squats and reaches through the slot to claim his own meal. His gaze finds mine as he translates. “You’re up. Tonight.”

I nod, and though the knowledge that my execution is hours away shouldn’t be good news, the thrill it sends through me is undeniable. I knew my time was close. I’ve been here longer than anyone left on F block.

I lift my bowl and pour dinner into my mouth. Gruel isn’t really solid enough to chew, and we don’t get spoons, which means we drink most of our meals. The slop has no true flavor, except for the bitter aftertaste of whatever protein and vitamin supplements they add to keep us from losing muscle mass.

After all these months, I can hardly even remember what real food tastes like. Mattresses are more a fantasy than a memory. And I would cut off my own arm for one glimpse of the sun, instead of the stark white overhead lighting. Though I can’t understand what most of them are saying, my neighbors seem to feel the same way.

“You ready?” Graham lifts his paper bowl to his mouth.

“Does it matter?” Tonight’s the night, whether I’m ready for it or not. And the truth is that there’s no way to get ready for what’s coming, other than eating the gruel and staying in shape. And visualizing the hell I’m going to unleash on whoever’s been selected as my executioner.

“No,” Dalton growls when the inmate with the cart tries to feed the kid at the end of the aisle. I can’t understand the rest of his words, but I know what he’s saying.

No food until you exercise. A skinny kid won’t last in the enclosure.

But the kid isn’t hungry enough yet to cooperate.

I finish my meal and drop the paper bowl down the waste hole, where it’s washed away in a stream of foul water. Then I stand and grab the bar overhead for some bent-knee pull-ups while I try not to think about anything.

For the first few months I was here, I tried to think about everything. To remember every song I’ve ever known and book I’ve ever read, word for word. To remember every punch I’ve ever thrown and every girl I’ve ever touched, to keep from going crazy, trapped in my own head. But living in the past, mired in all the things I’ll never have again, began to slowly chip away at my sanity.

Now I find it much more calming to think of nothing but the next motion. To count reps and focus on form. On isolating individual muscle groups and maximizing the efficiency of the exercise.

From the cells around me come grunts as the other inmates work out. I doubt some of them even know why that’s required. The guards here don’t tell us anything, and if it weren’t for the inmate pushing the cart, I wouldn’t have any idea why I was shipped across the galaxy instead of given a lethal injection at my sentencing.

A little later, the inmate returns, this time pushing a much smaller cart. When he gets to my cell, I stand and take off my shorts, then I slide them through the slot at the bottom of the cell door. The inmate rakes them over the red line, then picks them up and drops them into a cloth bag hanging from the cart. Then he plucks a clean pair from the stack and pushes it across the floor toward my cell with his stick.

Several of the men in cells talk to him, well aware that the working inmate is their best bet for contraband, or information, or just a few minutes’ entertainment to break up the monotony of day after day spent staring at the same featureless walls and hostile faces. Eating the same slop. Threatening the same guards.

On his way out the door at the end of the aisle, the inmate has to push his cart around the bowl of gruel still standing in front of William Truman’s cell, just out of his reach.

The hours pass slower than ever while I wait for them to come for me. Even if I weren’t planning to fight my execution, I would look forward to it for the change of scenery alone.

I stop pacing my cell when I notice Graham watching me. Wasting the energy is stupid anyway, considering what’s coming. When I sink onto the floor at the back of my cell, he gives me a respectful nod. “Give them hell,” he says in my language.

And I fully plan to.

After me, Graham has been here the longest, which means he’s next. We’ve never discussed my plan, or the fact that he clearly has one of his own, but that knowledge hangs there between us, and it’s good to know that if I fail, he’ll still be there to take up the fight.

Dalton marches down the aisle for the hundredth time during his shift, glancing into every cell over and over, to make sure we’re not up to anything. And that we know we’re constantly being monitored.

He stops at the end of the aisle, and for a second, I think he’s going to give poor William Truman some food. Instead, he yells something I can’t understand, his face flaming red.

A second later, a stream of urine arcs between the kid’s bars and hits Dalton in the face—a feat only possible because of the relatively low gravity on Rhodon.

Dalton sputters, then shouts as he backpedals out of the stream. Over the red line. Out of my field of vision.

His shouting intensifies, and the man in the cell across from the kid’s laughs, then grunts. A thin spray of blood arcs across the floor.

Dalton reappears between the red lines, holding his baton. Blood drips from the end of it. For a moment, he stands in the puddle of piss, breathing deeply, not like a man trying to get his temper under control, but like a man welcoming the rush of rage.

He lifts his left arm and taps something on his wrist screen.

The kid’s cell door swings open. Dalton pushes a button on the end of his baton, and it begins to hum with electricity.

He rushes into the cell, baton raised.

The kid backs up, eyes wide. Dalton brings the baton down like a hammer. The first swing breaks the kid’s arm with a meaty-sounding thunk. He screams as the guard swings again, and again, and again.

Dalton breaks both of the kid’s arms, his collarbone, and several ribs. Inmates up and down F block hoot and howl, eager for a show, even those who can only hear what’s happening, and I make myself watch. Without flinching.

Violence is what put us here, and it’s what will take us out, when the time comes. That’s the nature of this place and of everyone in it. Including the guards.

In most cases, the only difference between the guards and the inmates is the uniform each wears.

Soon, the smell of sizzling flesh rises through the air. The kid stops screaming. But Dalton doesn’t stop swinging. No one comes to stop him.

When he’s finished, Dalton steps back into the aisle, between the red lines. He’s winded and covered in arcs of blood splatter. I can only see the kid’s legs, because the rest of him is blocked by the concrete wall of his cell. But his legs aren’t moving.

Dalton taps his wrist again, but instead of closing the cell door, he says something into the screen.

“Cleanup on F block,” Graham translates for me.

A few minutes later, two guards come in, guiding a levitating stretcher. A thin, uniformed inmate follows, pushes a cleaning cart.

The guards lift William Truman onto the stretcher and push him down the aisle without bothering to cover his body or strap him down. Then the inmate hoses down the aisle, spraying blood and urine into the cell at the end, where he presumably washes it down the waste hole.

In mere minutes, it’s as if the kid never existed.

My neighbors shout riotous cheers, not for the guard who killed an inmate, and not for the inmate who peed on a guard, but for the fact that today, something happened. That they had something to see, other than the face across the aisle and the backs of their own eyelids.

They’re still cheering an hour later, by my best guess, when the door at the end of the aisle opens again and four more guards come in. Dalton is with them, and he’s changed his uniform, but instead of resuming his post, he stays with the guards who stop outside my cell.

“It’s time,” he says, and I don’t need Graham’s translation to understand.

My cell door swings open, and two of the guards aim pistols at me while Dalton steps forward with a set of wire cuffs.

I could fight him, and I might be able to kill him before the other guards fire. Especially with him blocking their aim. But as satisfying as it would be to take Dalton out, I don’t want to die in this dungeon. I want to see the sun one more time. I want to feel the wind.

I want the satisfaction of taking out my own executioner, forcing the warden to send in a whole squad to hunt me down.

If I’m going to die, it’s going to be on my own terms. In a blaze of fucking glory.

So, I let Dalton pull my hands behind my back and tighten the wire cuffs around my wrists, and though I can’t understand his words, I know from Graham’s previous translations that he’s telling me that if I try anything, he’ll run an electrical current through them.

As they pull me out of my cell into the center of the aisle, I give Graham a nod of goodbye. “Give ‘em hell.”