The thing about prison, Lev had decided by his third day, was that information moved faster here than anywhere else he had ever been.
Faster than college. Faster than the social circles back home where gossip travelled through carefully maintained channels and arrived slightly diluted. Here it moved raw and direct, person to person, in corridors and cafeteria lines and during the ten seconds two people stood next to each other waiting for a door to open.
All you had to do was be approachable.
Lev had always been approachable.
He had a face that invited conversation and a manner that made people feel like they had known him longer than they had and a specific talent for asking questions that felt like interest rather than interrogation. He had spent twenty-three years refining all of it and it worked everywhere.
It worked here too.
