Cole held another sketch book, thick with leather binding. He handed it to Mal wordlessly.

"What's in this one?" asked Mal.

"Stuff – I think you might like to see. I drew them in the protection unit – one of my guards gave me the book."

Mal retreated to his bunk and opened the cover. The first drawing was from inside a small cell with bars across the top half of the door. A guard was standing outside, drawn softly, out of focus. In the foreground in crisp focus were the bars, and into the slot for a meal tray was the book, being extended by a hand with a wedding band on it.

The wall of the cell had writing on it, obviously put there by the guard before the image had been drawn. "Hang in there, kiddo. There's more to life than meets the eye. – Cpl. Hansen."

The rest of the pages were filled with drawings of the prison. Buildings, yards, cells. There were few people in this one, just shadowy outlines and the occasional guard; it was the work of a man alone. There were warm, soft lights coming from housing unit windows, an overhead view of the prison showing the network of fences and yards and gates as a wash of abstract art, a corridor lined with cells that somehow managed to look beautiful, rather than desolate and cold.

Mal sighed, turning the pages and examining the drawings more closely. He recognized many of the places; the hospital, the glossy administration building, the yards, one of the buildings where he’d been taken many times for the initial, pointless interrogations. Potted plants.

The ubiquitous potted plants, yet another misguided notion of a terminally misguided government that thought a body could change the nature of a thing with rules and window dressing. That border planets could be made to resemble the Core with tariffs and laws and smiling politicians whose manners concealed the fact that the only thing that mattered was the money and connections they could make by squeezing the life blood from them who had precious little of it in the first place.

Som