Tasìa crept into her cell cautiously as not to disturb anything in it until she figured out what was out of place. She gave her chair a quick glance. There was nothing amidst about it, so she climbed on it and stood up in it.

Now she could see over the full dorm to catch sight of whomever may be showing her some interest. Béyatta 'Kae-Kae' Castro's long neck was stretched back, as she peeked in Tasìa's direction. She stood, busy with her hands, as she leaned over her own locker top.

Catching sight of Tasìa watching her, she gave a slight smile and then turned back to her own business.

It was bad news for Tasìa. Castro was Ria's enforcer. Anything that required an actual skill set to accomplish and whatever dirty work the mafiosa wanted done, Castro was the one who executed Ria's plans.

Tasìa folded back down into her seat, peering straight-ahead.

What got my attention?

She could run through her intuitional nudge like a diagnostic. A practice she learned from an elder as a child that originated from her parent's religion before Tasìa rebelled against them in her early teens when she joined the Old Church.

She started with the ceiling six feet above the walls of her cell. The tiles could be lifted but it appeared none had been shifted out of place. The pattern of rust-colored mold accumulated from years of leaking pipes set above the tiles remained the same.

Her eyes next scanned the wooden ledge divider that sat atop the cement wall between her cell and the one directly in front of her own. Whenever her neighbor dusted it, Tasìa would briefly get the same alarm coursing beneath her skin before she figured out the source of her angst. This was not one of those times.

She scanned the locker top. Her Bible had not been moved. It was the only item she kept on the top. The double doors of the locker appeared untouched as well. Her eyes slowly drifted down.

There.

There was a thin brown smear, the length and width of six ants lined up. It spread along the length of the locker handle where it met the door butted up adjacent to the keypad.

Someone had tapped out Tasìa's combination, and grabbed the handle to push it up to release the lock right after she did so. The culprit must have had something smeared on her thumb at the time.

Amateurs. Amateurs. Amateurs.

Tasìa tisked to herself.

Less than a minute back and Tasìa had already unrivaled the plot set against her.

She carefully scraped off the evidence with her thumb nail. Tasìa put it up to her nose to smell it. Chocolate. The word came to her mind almost dreamily.

She recognized the consistency of the brand, and after tasting it, with its distinctive flavor of finely ground raisin and nut set in a swirly of nougat, she was dead certain of what kind of bar it was as well.

A Rico Turron Noog-Noog.

So cheap was the chocolate used in the manufacturing, it tended to be much stickier and softer than the chocolate bars shipped from the United States, but in spite of this, Noog-Noogs was every kid in the barrio's favorite candy bar.

So damn good.

Who could have possibly learned her combination? Unlike most of the other women, Tasìa was too careful to have ever tapped it out in front of anyone else.

She knew how easy it was to extract that bit of information because she possessed the combinations of fifty-three lockers in her own head. She acquired them merely by casually walking by other cells as she went to the snack room to refresh her coffee over the course of the six months of her incarceration.

Every motion between one digit on a keypad and another was as distinctive a gesture as any made in sign language. Obtaining a combination was no more difficult than memorizing a sequence of seven words.

She opened the door of her locker and she immediately noticed the line up of books on the topmost shelf had been shifted from facing leftward towards now facing rightward.

The culprit likely thought she was being a màs sutil daga - most subtle dagger - in the deftness of her actions, but the shift in the alignment of the books was an inexcusable differential of almost a centimeter. In the tight proximity of the locker, it was possible that even a civilian would have noticed the difference.

But why go through her books? A quick glance told her nothing had been stolen from the locker itself. They were aligned just as Tasìa had left them with none of the books pushed forward or backward as it would have occurred if one of them was taken out of place to examine.

So why bother moving them?

Then Tasìa understood what had happened. The culprit needed to bend her hand upward. Her hand bent towards the reinforced support plate holding up the locker top with her wrist pressed down. In that position, the culprit had pushed the books over.

Tasìa reached up to where she calculated the hand had been placed. On the underside of the metallic plate she found the two objects left there. A switchblade stiletto and a magnetic strip that fastened the blade into place.

Tasìa's skin flushed a deep red. It took only a few seconds for her to figure out what this meant as this was not the first time that someone had been deemed a troublemaker and had a weapon planted on them. Usually it was nothing more than a simple shank, and not a decent-looking blade like this one.

The lieutenant must have deemed Tasìa more trouble than she was worth after hearing about her wall climb. He likely gave Ria the blade to plant on Tasìa. He would have been the source of her combination as well.

Now with this blade put in place, he would have a seemingly random shakedown on her cell conducted at some point in the next few days.

After his duty officer found the blade while executing the shakedown, the lieutenant would slap her with a disciplinary shot - a non-judicial charge carried out by administrative procedure.

He would have her moved to the isolation cells on the medical floors where she would be someone else in authority's problem and not that of the lieutenant presiding over the dorm for the worker collective.

He likely hated paperwork every bit as much as Missi did. Not so much out of the laziness that was commonplace in correctional officers but for reasons that could negatively affect his career.

Even the slightest of chances her actions could have a detrimental effect on the advancement of his own career, the man likely considered intolerable.

She was nothing more than a liability to him.

The man, Lt. Hugo Brassi, was thoroughly a careerist and like many men of rank in the correctional system known to be ruthless in his ambition.

If she were to escape, or cause a significant disruption, Brassi would be skipped in the next round of promotions. It was the way of the system, an inviolable rule understood by everyone.

Tasìa pocketed the blade and the metallic strip. As she sat there thinking about how much of the world seemed to be tasked against her, Tasìa admonished herself for her own introspection.

It was no time to reflect on things, it was time for Tasìa to act.