Clary fidgeted in the bright orange jumpsuit, subconsciously tugging the itchy material away from her thin neck. She cracked her neck once, twice, and then stood from where she had been sitting on the solid but cracked concrete bench. She walked toward the bars that traversed one side of the cell and craned her head, trying to see something. Anything, really.

"Hello?" Her voice sounded hoarse from disuse, bitter from experience. She was answered with silence. She cleared her throat and tried again, running her hands down the lengths of the cool metal bars.

"Anyone there?" What she would have given for someone to talk to. She had been sitting in this barren cell for three days without a word. Even the person who delivered the lukewarm mush that they called meals had had nothing to say to her. She supposed that was how people treated you when you were a convicted felon.

She sighed and slumped back onto the bench, wincing at the return of pressure on her sore muscles. She had been in the same position for hours—her body was aching for some movement. Clary grabbed her sketchbook, the only thing that she had been allowed to bring with her, from the small shelf in the corner of the room and sat criss crossed on the ground. She knew that the position combined with her height and stature made her look like a little girl, but she was desperate for some variation.

She flipped open the book to the page that she had left off on, rolling her eyes at her own melodramatics. She had drawn handcuffs on her convicting judge.

Clary threw down her sketchbook in frustration, running her fingers through her hair. She shouldn't have even been there. She couldn't even think straight—the last two months had been a whirlwind of tears and confusion. She couldn't even remember what it had been like before.

She had been so sure that the whole investigation into her was a mistake. Why would she have killed her sweet old neighbor? The idea was so ridiculous to her that she hadn't even considered the idea that she could actually go to jail for it. But even Clary had to admit that, as the investigation drew on, it seemed more and more like she had done it. But she hadn't.

Clary threw her pencil now too.

"Hey. Fray. You're out of confinement." Clary forgot her musing at the sight of the guard and sprang to her feet, ready to burst out of the cell. She quickly gathered her sketchbook and pencil, wincing imperceptibly as the guard took them from her as soon as she'd picked them up.

She let out a sort of muted whimper at the loss, but all the guard did was grunt.

"Can't have these with the other inmates. Sorry kiddo." She was sure he was sorry. Just like she was sorry that time a rude driver had cut her off and then gotten pulled over. She could hear the sorrow in his voice.

He reached over to cuff her, but she drew back slightly. He rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Look kid. I can't take you to a new cell without cuffing you. It's the rules." He gently but firmly pulled her unwilling hands into the cuffs, locking them just a rung too tight. She glared at him, hating how cheerful and justified he looked. He thought that she was just another teenage murderer and that he had every right to be rude to her. He even whistled as they walked down the rows of empty cells.

She caught a glimpse of herself in one of the mirrors as they passed a bathroom, and almost gasped out loud before catching herself.

It looked like she had been run over. Her bright red hair was matted at the top, and her smeared makeup combined with the hair gave her a particular wounded red-headed raccoon look. Even her skin looked pale and ghastly (not that it wasn't usually pale) after spending the last two months alternating between home and the courthouse, and then later in the trial, jail and the courthouse.

"Welcome home," said the guard with a sinister grin, pushing Clary into a cell that she hadn't realized they'd arrived at. He adeptly maneuvered her hands out of handcuffs and clanged the door shut, depositing her into what may possibly have been hell.

There were two rows of beds, one on either side of the room, all but one containing a girl. They were all sleeping. Clary looked around in surprise—the room that she had been hadn't even had a window. She hadn't realized how late it was. She walked through the room in the dim lighting, hoping that she wouldn't trip on anyone. That's just what she needed, she thought laughingly. There was one empty cot near the edge of the room. She tried not to cringe at the thought of who had been there before her.

There was a pile of sheets on the bed, but they clearly weren't the ones that the prison had originally provided. It looked like the girls with the worst sheets had traded out her new ones for their old, hole-filled ones. She sighed and began to make the bed, trying to make as little noise as possible. She couldn't make out any physical distinctions in the dark, but she knew that probably any one of these girls could have taken her on. She wasn't even really a challenge.

She smoothed the distinctly rough sheet and tried not to think about the smell as she crawled into the cot. Despite the obvious disrepair of the entire system, it was a relief to have an actual bed of some sort. In the solitary cell, she'd had a blanket and a concrete slab. That had been about it.

Clary folded her arms up under her head to make up for her lack of a pillow, eyes narrowing as she assessed that the girl in the cot next to her had two pillows. For a half a second, Clary wished that she actually had killed someone. Maybe that was what it took to survive in a place like that.

She quickly shook her head and brushed the thought away. She just wanted answers, and not to die at the hands of oversized female teenage felons.

That was the last thought Clary had before she embraced the darkness of sleep that had evaded her for days and tried to forget reality.

Unfortunately, reality doesn't like to be forgotten.