It was the time of the lunar eclipse in the solitary confinement wing, the cusp of a perpetual dim, gunmetal light. It was the time between shifts from blinding beams to deep-space darkness and back again. Such things were on some sort of timer, but Horus was not able to recognize the pattern. He sat in the gray stillness, the nerve endings needling his backside like pins in a cushion. His eyes twitched in the gloom, trying to catch some stray ray of light that might stimulate his corneas. The cement on which he sat sloped toward the center of the floor, where it met a small corrugated drain, which held Horus and the meager contents of the cell like a sink. He couldn’t always see the drain clearly, but he knew always that it was there, the threads of copper and green around the drain drawing his eyes as he wondered when he would liquefy and run down its open mouth. Horus could still remember the pull of gravity when he first arrived at Black Plains, how the elevator scaled down each sublevel, the click and scrape of metal that grew muted as it neared the lowest level.
