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Arkady was good at dealing with mindhealers. He could pass for sane. Some of those trapped inside the walls of Warden’s didn’t have that luxury: they couldn’t turn off the hairtrigger temper or the dead-eyed stare or the Dust addict’s twitch or the unnerving tendency to get much too close to other prisoners.

Arkady had none of these problems. And he was determined to make a good impression. Good impressions meant a lower probability of time spent in the white room, and maybe even a move out of Dangerous and into one of the less unfortunate blocks. Of course, in order to make that happen, he’d have to stop making inappropriate comments to the Warden...

Which was going to happen around the time when herdbeasts sprouted wings and started breathing fire. Okay, so he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Southern of getting to play nice with the petty thieves and the Dusters. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to play nice with the mindhealer. He’d heard she was pretty, and time spent in her office was time spent in not a cell. So when she called for him to come in, he stepped inside and offered her his best smile, the one that was friendly without being overly sharp.

“Evening, ma’am.” He leaned his bound hands on the back of the chair that was clearly for him, but didn’t take it yet. “Mind if I sit down?”

She was pretty. The rumors were true.

Down, Arkady. Do not flirt with the mindhealer.

Well, okay. Flirt with the mindhealer, but only a little bit. Keep it flattering, not creepy. There weren’t too many ladies in the Dangerous block, and likely they both knew it very well.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jessan.” He sat down in the chair offered to him – she wasn’t lying, it wasn’t comfortable, but at least it kept him from getting too relaxed. It wouldn’t look good to make himself completely comfortable in her office right away. He leaned back a bit, one leg crossed over the other, hands resting in his lap in such a way that the cuffs weren’t quite so unpleasantly obvious. “I don’t mind the lateness – I’m sure you’re busy with a whole weyr full of us to manage, and it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

A little, rueful smile accompanied the pleasant, friendly baritone. “They won’t let me practice my craft, but they let me go outside. It’s certainly an improvement from my previous accommodations.” What a nice euphemism for a hole in the ground with no windows and no company. Anything would be better than that.

Arkady chuckled out loud. “They gave him stonecarving tools? Really, now. With all due respect, Mindhealer, if someone had handed me tools, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.” Would it be laying it on too thick to add which would be a pity? Ah, shells, why not. Let’s take a risk. “Which would be a pity.”

She was studying him, and at the same time he studied her. He made no effort to hide the wher bite scars; there was certainly nothing he could do about them, shaved head and all, so might as well wear them with confidence, right? But this mindhealer... She was younger than he’d expected, and prettier. But there was something about her that made him suspect she wasn’t as out of her depth at Warden’s as she looked. “I play gitar. Understandable that they don’t trust me with something that has strings, but I wouldn’t mind picking up a new instrument.” Oh, the things he could do with a guitar string garotte.

“As for the Hold cell...” He waved a hand, somewhat dismissively, tone forcedly light and nonchalant. “The less said about it, the better. A bit on the cramped side. No view to speak of. Food could have been better. And I like the company here much more.”

There was a crack in the smiling mask – a c***k in the armor. A small but visible flinch passed through Arkady’s lean shoulders when she mentioned the white room, a flicker of something behind the friendly hazel eyes. “I’m familiar with the concept. Intimately familiar, you could say. I’mel and I had a nice friendly talk and I got a tour of the white room here at Warden’s.”

And if he ever got the opportunity, he was going to start taking pieces off the Secondary Warden for every candlemark he’d spent in there, screaming at the nothing to keep it at bay. Just for that, maybe he’d start with an eye.

“But I’m good at amusing myself, miss Jessan.” The smile was more subdued now, a little less manic. “There was a guard who came by once a day, back home. I talked.” The guard didn’t talk back, and sometimes Arkady didn’t stop talking when he left. But Jessan didn’t need to know that. “I composed in my head sometimes. Tried to keep count of days, which is not easy when you can’t see sunlight, let me tell you. Thought about ways to escape, mostly. Did you know that pewter spoons are too soft to be much good as a digging instrument? They bend too easy.”

…She understood. She understood much too well to just be some Healer Hall graduate sent here to play with the prisoners, and it took Arkady a little bit by surprise, even with his suspicions. He had never contemplated self-harm as anything but a means for an escape route – if he hurt himself they’d have to either take him to a healer or open the door to let a healer in. But then he’d realized that in all likelihood the Lord Holder would let him rot and die rather than risk a healer on him, and he’d decided against it. Suicide had been out of the question, even during the worst of the solitary confinement.

Arkady shrugged carelessly in response to her question. “Not particularly. I may be a prisoner, but I’m not an insane one – I understand that cooperation will get me things I want. I may tease the Secondary Warden a little, but a man needs a hobby, right?”

He reached up and brushed two fingers across the scar that coiled prominently over his cheekbone. “As for escape… You have a lot of whers here. Did you know that a wher can outrun a human easily, and they can track you by scent and body heat even at night? I didn't know that. Now I do."

If he’d known what fantasies sat behind Jessan’s smile, Arkady would have offered to make them come true for her. On anyone she wanted. Arkady wasn’t a picky man. He was pretty indiscriminate, in fact - especially when it came to murder.

But she probably already knew that. There was a note in his file about it.

“Oh, paperwork.” He made a face of mock horror. “No, I would never inflict anything so cruel on you. That’s just inhumane.” The sentence ended in a laugh, and he settled back a little more comfortably in the chair. This was nice. It was just talking, and Arkady had always been good at talking. It was his second best skill... well, possibly third best, depending on who you talked to.

“We can talk about whatever you’d like. Although, if we’re talking about why I’m here... You tell me?” Arkady shrugged expressively, his voice still friendly and good-natured as they moved onto more comfortable subjects than solitary confinement. “This is the first time anyone’s taken much of an interest in my mind. Well, beyond telling me how twisted it must be, which I find to be filthy slander."

“Oh, you have files on me. How exciting!” Arkady wanted to see them. It wasn’t even a matter of any urgency for him, more a sense of personal pride and curiosity: he wanted to see how many of his myriad escapades they’d actually linked to him. He’d done a lot of things while fleeing the Watch, some of them in rather remote places. Like a scavenger hunt! And it would be fun to see how well the Watch had done, how close they’d really been on his tail. “...But I’m betting I’m not allowed to read them. Oh well, they’d probably be wrong.”

Arkady was the kind of person who naturally grew more animated when telling a story. Part of the old Harper training kicking in, maybe. There were limits to how much he could gesture when he had a short length of chain binding his hands together, but those long fingers moved through the air, tracing abstract lines and curves. “Oh, but the running is the important part! I did all the exciting bits while I was running. I like to think I kept the Watch on their toes, at least for a little while. And there’s at least one greenrider out there who’s learned his lesson about accepting wine from strange handsome men.”

That one had been a glorious, crowning achievement. Leaving a Watchman naked in his bed and scarpering off with his uniform while he was still sleeping off the hangover. Arkady wished he’d kept some part of those black and blue leathers as a trophy... Pity, really. And he hadn’t even killed the man.

“As for the why... Well. You know the why for the running. For the event that started it...” He gave her a briefly thoughtful, searching look. “There’s two different ‘why’s, and I think we both know the one in my file is wrong. Do you want the one that makes sense, or the one that’s true?”