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By the time Bagi arrives at Alcatraz, it is clearly far too late. She hears the alarms screaming long before her boat hits the island’s rocky shore. Cops swarm the place like ants. Two of them approach her as she steps out of the boat and docks it. Really, it’s a small miracle she gets noticed at all amidst the chaos.
“Hey,” one of them says, the bigger one with stubby horns. Some kind of bovine hybrid, maybe. “What are you doing here? All visits are canceled.”
“Clearly,” Bagi replies, to which the officer scowls. “I’ll go, then.”
He nods. “Good. Don’t stick around.”
Bagi feigns leaving, then gives an exaggerated hesitation. She's not about to try her luck getting past the highest security prison... well, ever. But she knows she can't let this trip be entirely in vain.
“Sorry for asking,” she says with a smile that suggests she’s not sorry at all. “But this is where Cellbit is being kept, correct?”
The second, shorter officer snorts. “Yeah, that freak and some other nuts. Least ‘til about an hour ago. So much for ‘impenetrable prison,’ huh?”
Officer Big scowls and elbows Officer Small, hard.
Bagi nods, partly to herself. “May I ask what he looks like? I’ll want to keep an eye out for such a dangerous criminal on my way home.”
Officer Big lets out a long-suffering groan. From his pocket he produces a sheet of paper.
“We’ve already started makin’ wanted posters. Take one and go.”
She does.
+++
Cellbit’s mugshot burns a hole in her pocket all the way through her voyage back to the mainland. She hates seeing it, yet it’s all she sees when she looks anywhere else.
She tries to block it out by digging up that old photo, the one of both of them that she keeps framed. Caught in the middle of running and laughing, playing some game, obviously. But the visage of her brother sporting a bloody grin and hollow eyes layers over his young, joyful face. Tears come unbidden to her eyes, but she blinks them away. She sets the picture on her lap, and the glass tilts in such a way that the light reflects her own face, exhausted, eye bags under her eye bags.
We both look awful, she thinks.
Bagi decides to sleep it off. She eats the provisions she’d packed for two, then lays down and lets the waves rock her into darkness.