Lights-out never came.
The light in the ceiling never went out. Caxton wasn’t allowed to have a watch in her cell, and there was no clock, either, but as she lay on her bunk listening to Stimson snoring below her, she eventually realized that midnight must have come and gone, and nothing had changed.
She stared at the light for a long time, waiting to feel sleepy. The light came from a single bulb set in a shatterproof fixture designed in such a way that Caxton could neither open it nor get any kind of grip on it. A single cockroach had found its way inside the fixture and died there. It had only five legs. One of them must have rotted away.
Next to the fixture was a small black rectangle that Caxton knew must hide a camera. The light was left on so that the camera could watch her while she slept. She stared at the rectangle for a long time, too, because it was difficult to know she was being watched and not try to watch back.
Then she rolled over and pressed her face into the scratchy pillow for a long time, trying to keep her eyes closed. They kept drifting open of their own accord.
She tried pulling the pillow over her head to block out the light. That just made it difficult to breathe. She tried giving up, next, and sat up so she could read one of her paperbacks by the unblinking light. She was too tired to focus on the words, though, and eventually she gave up on that, too.
Time passed. The night must have passed, somehow, though she couldn’t see anything but the walls of the cell and so she had no way of measuring how long she’d been awake until, out of nowhere, a buzzer sounded in the ceiling and Stimson stopped snoring with an abrupt wet sound and rolled out of her bunk.
“Wall up.” The sound came from the same place as the buzzer—a small speaker set into the ceiling, next to the light fixture and the camera’s black eye. Caxton jumped down from the top bunk and went to stand next to Stimson against the wall.
Together they waited for quite a while. Then the bean slot in the door slid back and a tray came through. Stimson stepped forward to grab it, then jumped back against the wall. A second tray came in and Caxton did the same thing. Then the bean slot slid back into place. It was designed so that the prisoners couldn’t open it from the inside.
Both trays were identical. They were wrapped in plastic. When Caxton pulled the plastic back on hers she found it contained three slices of toast, already slathered with butter, and two slices of melon that weren’t quite ripe. A shallow paper cup held apple juice. “No coffee?” Caxton said, a little upset.
“That’s my fault,” Stimson said, scraping at a moldy spot on one of her melon slices. “Sorry. I have a little teensy problem with, um, speed. I can’t have anything that’s an upper. Not even caffeine.”
“You’re a meth freak,” Caxton said, because she wasn’t feeling very charitable. “But I’m not.”
Stimson shrugged. Her mouth was full of toast. “I guess,” she said, showering crumbs everywhere, “they’re worried I might steal yours. So you don’t get none, either.” She washed down her mouthful with the juice. “Sorry.”
Caxton was hungry enough to eat everything on her tray quickly. That turned out to be a good thing—ten minutes after the trays had arrived, the order to wall up came again and the bean slot slid back so they could pass the trays out, whether they were finished or not.