The fire in her eyes did not seem interested in becoming words, which was probably for the best, since words often pretend to be clearer than they are.

She walked to the squat rack instead.

The rack frame was bolted into the concrete with the dull permanence of prison equipment.

The bar rested across the j-hooks at shoulder height.

Plates were stacked on the pegs in a pattern that suggested the facility had stocked the gym to satisfy the bare minimum and then considered that commitment enough.

She pulled two plates from the peg, loaded each side of the bar, and stepped back to look at the setup with the efficiency of who had long since stopped treating this as a decision.

She did not look at him.

"You’re going to hurt yourself," the inmate said, from where he leaned against with his arms crossed.

He said it like someone narrating a result he had already watched arrive, not unkindly, not especially invested, simply stating one more fact in a universe full of them.

"Flesh has its limits. Yours are different from mine."

Nyx got under the bar and lifted.

She finished the set cleanly.

The weight did not ask anything of her that counted as difficult.

She reracked it, stepped back, and looked at the plates as if the next increment were a question worth answering.

The inmate uncrossed his arms.

He went to the bar, unloaded what she had put on, and reloaded it with considerably more on each side.

He settled under it with unhurried concentration.

He ran through the set with the trained economy of a body built for exactly this kind of work, and stepped out.

He looked at her.

"Understand now?" he said.

Nyx added weight to the bar.

More than he had put back.

She lifted.

She did not find it difficult.

Silence followed.

The inmate stood with his arms at his sides and watched what was happening.

Then he reached the only explanation available to him.

"Your depth is shallow. You’re cutting at the bottom. That’s not a full rep, little girl."

Nyx stepped back from the bar and looked at him.

She picked up two more plates.

"I’m not saying you’re not strong."

He said, with the careful patience of someone trying to build language for a situation his worldview had failed to account for. "What I’m saying is that the movement you’re performing and the movement I’m performing are not the same. Leverage scales with height and limb length. It’s not a fair comparison."

He said that while moving back to the bar to add more plates, because apparently the argument required physical evidence before it would feel respectable.

Jinx had been standing two meters to Nyx’s left with the expression of someone watching a slow-motion accident from almost the right distance.

She said quietly, "She just did more than you."

The inmate paused with a plate in his hand.

"The workout is different," he said.

He set the plate in place.

"The workout," Jinx repeated.

"Yes."

Jinx looked at Nyx. Nyx loaded her side.

They both went.

He went first, with heavier weight and the authority that comes from years spent building exactly for this sort of load.

He finished and looked at her again with the patience of someone expecting the lesson to land eventually.

She went.

His eyes widened slightly.

"These facilities do not maintain accurate labeling standards."

He said after a moment, staring at the plates on her side with an expression that had drifted somewhere between certainty and the first uncomfortable suspicion that certainty had been doing too much work. "The weight stamped on these plates is not necessarily the weight in the plates. It’s a common issue with bootleg equipment."

Jinx turned and looked at the plates.

They were gray.

They were round.

They were exactly the size the numbers claimed.

"They look right to me," Jinx said.

"You’re not an equipment specialist," the inmate said.

He loaded four more plates.

More than he should have.

You could see the problem in the pause before he got under the bar, a beat longer than anyone comfortable with the weight needed to stand there.

He breathed.

He settled in.

He began the movement.

He made it to the bottom.

The bar did not come back up.

Which left him sitting at the bottom of the squat under the full weight, making the sort of sounds people make when their strength failed them in an hour of need.

Across the gym, an inmate on a bench lifted his head.

"Creed?" he said, in the tone you use for something that is mildly funny. "You good?"

Creed was not, at that moment, in a position to make a persuasive case either way.

Nyx was already walking away.

She moved toward the gym exit with her hands loose at her sides, at the easy pace of someone who had come, found what she needed to find, and was now proceeding to the next matter.

Behind her, Creed was struggling further and further, his veins snapping and muscles bulging up.

Jinx stood between the two situations for a visible moment.

Then she made her decision and followed.

"Do we just leave him like that?" Jinx said.

"Why not," Nyx said.

They walked out into the main yard.

Jinx looked back once.

"He doesn’t seem convinced," she said.

"He can continue from down there," Nyx said.

The perimeter patrol was on its loop.

The towers kept their posts.

She moved across the concrete toward the interior gate, because her sense of direction had been pointing northeast the whole time and free period was not a condition that lasted forever.

Proxy was at the gate.

He stood with his hands in his pockets and the expression he wore when he had come back from somewhere carrying more than he had left with, carrying that specific look of who had found something worth following and was already thinking several steps ahead.

She saw him across the remaining yard and kept walking, covering the distance in the way that happens when the destination is him.

She reached him.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

Both of them had things they had not had an hour ago, and neither of them needed to say that aloud for it to count.