been revealed, and people were still reacting out of fear.
Terri nodded and sighed. “Thanks. I’m just so worried about Amanda. And my mom. What if they’re arrested next?”
Shea had no easy reassurances for her. She knew as well as Terri did that her family was now in even more danger. BOW and the MPs would be watching every move they made for who knew how long.
As for Terri . . . women caught up in the mob mentality of the witch hunt were pretty much out of luck. Unless the RFW took up Terri’s case, she had no chance of getting out of this camp.
And unless Torin found her, Shea was in the same boat.
“Why are you here?” Terri finally asked, then stopped and winced. “I’m sorry—shouldn’t have said that. I mean, I know about your aunt and—”
“It’s okay,” Shea said, not wanting to get drawn into a conversation about it. Especially not here. In places like this the walls really did have ears. There was no telling how many people were listening in on conversations. They weren’t even safe outside. A parabolic microphone or two could cover most of the yard.
As if Terri had remembered the same thing, she lowered her voice. “Are you . . . like your aunt?”
A few days ago Shea would have said no. Now, she was living a new reality. Now, she was dealing with the knowledge that she’d killed a man and was, very possibly, in jail for the rest of her life—at least until her execution. But she looked into the other woman’s eyes and saw compassion. Amazing just how good it felt to be offered understanding. Slowly, Shea nodded.
Terri smiled. “A month ago, that might have terrified me,” she admitted quietly. “Now, though . . .” She looked around the yard again. At the dozens of women, in a range of ages anywhere from eighty to teens, and she sighed. “There are other things more scary. There’s being snatched from your home in the middle of the night and locked away without a chance of even speaking to your own child. There’s fearing that you’ll never get out.”
“We really shouldn’t be talking about this,” Shea whispered, glancing up at the closest guard tower. The man wasn’t looking in their direction, but that didn’t mean a thing.
“They’ve already locked me up,” Terri said firmly. “They’re not going to shut me up, too. You know, before this happened, I was like anyone else, reading about magic and the witches and how BOW and the MPs were doing their duty to protect the people . . .”
Shea took Terri’s elbow and started walking. She wasn’t sure why, but somehow she had the feeling that it would be more difficult for their jailers to overhear them if they kept moving in and out of crowds. And she tried to subtly warn her student’s mother that being outspoken in prison wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “Terri . . .”
She walked and shook her head before giving Shea a half smile. “I know. I know they listen. I know they watch.” Her gaze slid to the side, where two female guards stood together, watching over the prisoners. “But I’m still a citizen. I still have rights.”
“Not really,” Shea told her.
“There’s a sad statement.”
“You have to be careful,” Shea said. “No one here is concerned about your ‘rights.’ To them, we’re less than human. They’d like nothing better than a chance to take us all down. So if you want to see Amanda again—do what you can to stay unnoticed. Don’t stand out in this crowd, Terri. Blend in. Don’t make waves. You might drown in them.”
She huffed out a breath. “Seeing Amanda. What’re the chances of that, I wonder.”
“Probably not good,” Shea admitted, then added, “but you’ll make it worse for yourself in here by not being careful.”
“I know that, but underneath all of the fear, I am furious ,” she said softly and her voice toughened up as if to prove it. “I’ve met a few . . . interesting women here and the thing is, they’re no different from me. Not at the bottom of it, you know? I mean, we’re all just people. Some good, some bad.”
Oh, Shea wished she had met Terri under other circumstances. They could have been friends. Instead, they were prison mates with definite dates of expiration. “Yeah, the problem is, that doesn’t seem to matter.”
“All I’m trying to say is if people would just talk to witches, they wouldn’t