The walls at St. Bridge were thicker. The locks louder. Even the air felt heavier — like every breath came through steel.
Jayden had been in institutions before, but St. Bridge was different. It wasn't built to reform boys. It was built to contain men who used to be boys.
And somehow, at twenty-one, Jayden was still both.
---
The Routine
They called it rehabilitation, but everyone knew the truth. The schedule wasn't designed to heal; it was designed to erase time.
Wake. Count. Eat. Work. Count. Sleep. Repeat.
Jayden had learned to move through it like a ghost — silent, precise, eyes forward. He didn't fight anymore. Not because the fire was gone, but because he'd learned to hold it.
Control wasn't a lesson anymore. It was survival.
The staff liked him that way. "Carter's calm," they said. "Carter's reformed." They didn't see the sketches under his mattress, hundreds of them — faces, cages, flames.
They didn't know he'd memorized the cracks in the ceiling, tracing them into maps in his head, each one leading somewhere outside.
---
The Echo
It happened on a Tuesday. A counselor he didn't trust handed him a manila envelope. "Transfer record for review," she said. "Administrative mix-up. Probably nothing."
He opened it without thinking.
Inside was a thin packet of papers. One slipped loose, fluttering to the floor. When he bent to pick it up, the name printed across the top made his hands go numb.
Layla Carter – St. Briar Residential Youth Center
The words blurred. His pulse thundered in his ears.
Layla.
He read it again and again, afraid the ink would change. The last time he'd seen her, she was twelve and terrified, her arms wrapped around him as cops pulled them apart. He'd told her to be brave. He hadn't realized how long that promise would haunt him.
Now she was sixteen. Alive. Somewhere out there in another cage.
And somehow, she'd made enough noise in the system that her name crossed into his.
---
The Fire Returns
That night, Jayden couldn't sleep. The ceiling cracks he'd memorized a hundred times looked different now — not as cages, but as roads.
The fire inside him, the one he'd spent years mastering, came alive again. But it wasn't wild. It was focused. Purposeful.
For years he'd believed that survival was enough. But knowing Layla was out there, still burning her way through the same kind of hell, changed everything.
This wasn't about outlasting the system anymore. It was about finding a way to outlive it — for both of them.
---
Dre's Memory
Sometimes, in the quiet hours before lights out, Jayden still heard Dre's voice. It wasn't real — Dre was long gone, transferred or dead, he didn't know. But the words stayed.
"Control ain't the end of fire, Scrap. It's the start."
Jayden whispered into the dark, "Then it's time to start again."
He pressed his palm to the scar on his knuckles — a small, white reminder of every time he'd held back when he could've broken everything. And for the first time in years, he didn't just feel alone.
He felt connected.
---
The Sketch
When the guards passed, Jayden pulled out his sketchbook and flipped to a blank page. The pencil trembled, but he steadied it.
He drew two cages side by side — one labeled St. Bridge, the other St. Briar. Between them, he drew a bridge made of flame.
At each end, a figure stood — him on one side, her on the other. Both holding torches.
Underneath, he wrote: The fire found its echo.
---
The Shift
By morning, the staff noticed the change. Jayden walked differently. Quieter, but more awake. The counselor asked if something was wrong.
Jayden just smiled. "No. Something's finally right."
He didn't tell them about the name, the file, the bridge of flame now burning in his mind. He didn't need to.
Because for the first time since he was a boy, Jayden wasn't just surviving the system — he was planning his way through it.
And the fire wasn't just for him anymore.