Prison labor, Ren had learned, did not care about his hobbies.
Some days meant the workshop and Takeshi’s silent, tolerant company.
Other days meant a bucket of gray water and a corridor that needed scrubbing, or a kitchen where an older prisoner explained, entirely unprompted, exactly how much salt was too much salt, or — as today — a broken storage crate and a guard who clearly considered the matter closed.
“Fix it.”
Ren looked at the nails.
Looked at the hammer.
Looked at the crate, which had given up on structural integrity some time before he’d arrived.
“Really?”
“Fix it.”
He fixed it.
Badly.
It held together in the specific, unconvincing way that things held together when someone had technically followed instructions without being emotionally invested in the outcome.
The guard inspected it with the air of a man who had seen much worse.
“Good enough.”
“Those,” Ren said, “are the nicest words anyone’s said to me all week.”
The guard didn’t dignify that with a response, which Ren had come to recognize as a form of respect around here.
As the man turned to leave, Ren’s eyes caught on the ring of keys at his belt — an ordinary detail, except that it wasn’t the first time he’d seen it.
Different guard, two days ago.
Same ring.
Same small, distinctive key near the front, worn shinier than the others from handling.
He filed it away.
He didn’t know why it mattered yet.
He’d learned, by now, that the useless information usually announced itself as useless right up until the moment it wasn’t.
The workshop, when he finally got back to it, had its own collection of locks — a row of tool chests, a supply cabinet, the door to the room where Takeshi kept the good metal.
Ren had been ignoring them for weeks in favor of his ongoing, deeply humbling war with wood and leather straps.
He was not ignoring them today.
“Don’t,” Takeshi said, without looking up.
Ren turned around.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You were thinking about doing something.”
“How did you know?”
“Your face.”
“What’s wrong with my face?”
“You’re looking at that lock like it insulted your mother.”
Ren looked back at the cabinet lock, reassessing.
“…It might have.”
Takeshi made a small, dry sound — not quite a laugh, something adjacent to one, the same sound he’d made over the back scratcher — and set down what he was working on. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“Come here.”
Ren came here.
Takeshi pushed a small disassembled mechanism across the bench — pins, a housing, a spring, a scattering of parts that added up to considerably more than Ren would have guessed a single lock contained.
“Take it apart.”
“It’s already apart.”
“Then put it back together.”
Ren picked up a pin, turned it over.
“Why?”
“Because you keep looking at that cabinet like it owes you money, and I’d rather you understand it than pick it.”
“That’s not an accusation I can really argue with.”
“So I’ve noticed.” Takeshi went back to his own work.
“You’re strange.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Locks, it turned out, were not magic, and were not — despite what six-year-old Ren would have assumed before any of this — really about the key at all.
A lock was a system built to prevent movement.
A key was simply the one shape that produced the correct sequence of movement anyway.
Different designs solved that problem differently, and none of them, Takeshi was clear about this, needed to be unbeatable.
“So every lock has a weakness,” Ren said, turning a pin over in his fingers.
“No.”
He frowned.
“Then what’s the point of all this?”
“A good lock doesn’t need to be impossible to defeat.” Takeshi tapped the housing.
“It only needs to be difficult enough.”
Ren sat with that longer than he expected to.
It had the particular texture of an idea that was going to keep being true in places that had nothing to do with locks — prisons, arguments, people.
No perfect defense.
No perfect weapon.
No perfect anything.
Just layers, and how much trouble you were willing to go through.
He didn’t say any of that out loud.
He suspected Takeshi already knew, and would only find it insufferable if Ren said it first.
“Put it back together,” Takeshi said again, and went back to pretending not to watch.
Ren tried.
Failed.
Tried a different order.
Failed differently, which he supposed was technically progress, in the same spiritual category as his second prosthetic attempt balancing worse than his first.
By the fourth failure he set the pieces down with more force than was strictly necessary.
“I hate this.”
“Why is everyone in this prison obsessed with me suffering?”
“Because you’re learning.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.” A beat.
“It was meant to be accurate.”
Ren picked the pieces back up.
It took him the better part of two visits, spread across chores and one disastrous laundry shift he’d rather not think about, but the fifth attempt clicked — literally, a small definite sound as the last pin seated — and the lock closed clean in his hand.
He looked up.
Takeshi was, unmistakably, watching this time.
“There,” Ren said, with the specific smugness of someone who had earned the right to a small amount of it.
Takeshi took the lock, turned it over once, and set it back down without comment, which from Takeshi, Ren was fairly sure, constituted a standing ovation.
“Keep it,” Takeshi said.
“Practice on your own time.”
“You’re giving me a lock.”
“I’m giving you a broken lock nobody wants back.”
“Sentimental.”
“Don’t make me take it back.”
Ren pocketed it before Takeshi could reconsider, and found, walking back across the yard that evening, that his mind had already wandered to the guard’s key ring — the same small, shinier-than-the-rest key, filed away next to everything else he didn’t yet have a use for.
He wasn’t thinking about escape.
Not seriously, not yet — he was one arm short and several years of ignorance away from anything that reckless.
But he was starting to understand that a system was just a lock wearing a bigger costume, and that difficult wasn’t the same thing as impossible.
He tucked that thought away too, next to the key, next to the itch he no longer had, and went to find out what was for dinner.
Jiro caught him at the forms again that evening, the same corner of the yard, the same stick standing in for a sword.
Ren expected nothing, the way he’d expected nothing every other time.
“Your foot’s wrong.”
Ren froze mid-motion.
“You’re watching.”
“You’re loud.”
“I’m being quiet.”
“You’re loud for someone being quiet.” Jiro didn’t elaborate further, and didn’t offer to fix it himself, either — just walked on, leaving Ren standing there rearranging his stance around one sentence like it was a whole lesson, which, from Jiro, it apparently was.
The falling had mostly stopped being a problem by now — he could take a bad step, a shove, an uneven patch of yard, and land it without his whole balance unraveling the way it used to.
Jogging the perimeter during work breaks didn’t wind him the way it had those first weeks either, though sprinting still pulled his stride lopsided if he wasn’t paying attention to it, which meant he was paying attention to it constantly.
None of that felt like progress in the moment.
It only ever showed up backward, the way most things in here did — a fall that didn’t hurt as much as the last one, a lap that didn’t leave him bent over gasping — and he’d learned to take backward progress over no progress at all.
He was still nowhere near finished with Hanako’s shelf, either.
He’d made it through maybe two dozen entries, most of them half-remembered and recited wrong more often than right, muttered under his breath during whatever chore currently had his hand occupied.