A round onyx plate mounted next to the door reminded of the glory days of a by-gone era of a technological boom. The nightly lockdown would be lifted at six sharp, and to earn the full day’s pay, everyone had to be scanned in before the siren sounded.Ī solid metal door with rust spots opened and closed with each arrival. People like her, custody helpers that took care of the inmate population’s most basic needs, their shoulders hunched in the cold wind that blew right through their clothes. Other figures were walking in the darkness making their way toward the back entrance. Gemma hastened her uneven steps down a pitted sidewalk that weaved through the tumbledown neighborhood. Not the job she had dreamed about when she was a little girl, to be sure, but life was what life was, and sometimes survival meant having to adjust one’s expectations. Copious amounts of reinforced concrete had been poured in a precise fashion to resemble a medieval castle, and the resulting structure had been celebrated as a symbol of firm control and a threat to those who dared to break the law.Īnd so it remained, Gemma supposed, the symbol and the threat. The prison was hundreds of years old, built long before Meeus had been colonized by humans, and good ol’ Earth started its inexorable decline into the cesspit of the Universe.īack then, no taxpayer money had been spared on the prison’s construction.

It loomed ahead barely silhouetted against the dark sky, a hulking five-story quadrangle with no windows facing the street. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.ĭawn had not yet broken when Gemma came within sight of the prison.

Names, characters, and events are the products of the author's imagination.

Homebound by lydia hope