The maintenance corridor was the facility's honest moment.
Everything else, the cell block, the yard, the canteen, had been finished to the level required for human habitation, which is another way of saying that it had been decorated into pretending.
The maintenance corridor had not been granted that courtesy.
The ceiling was lower, and the pipe runs traveled it openly, copper and iron bolted in bundles along the upper wall, boxes spaced at intervals, conduit wrapped in decades of institutional grey paint layered over the original color instead of replacing it, because even paint in a place like this learned the habits of compromise. The floor had the textured grip surface of somewhere that expected to be wet sometimes and had prepared accordingly.
Proxy walked into it with the awareness of a building that had stopped bothering to hide what it was.
The maintenance crew was five inmates and one guard.
