Cass & Mat: the Quiet Home
She wasn't permitted to be at liberty, but she was. Inside the Home, Cass liked to believe things slowed down. Time ran in ribbons, slow as molasses and it didn't matter that it rarely ran forwards but looped back on itself, twisted around like loops to get caught in. She had dreamed. They were the heavy, weighted dreams of banked impossibility compressed down to cardboard and dull, gray paste and she slept fitfully and with no restfulness until they let go.
She was drugged, the girl who stood on the interior of the doorframe as if she'd known Mat was coming. Oh, she did, but it wasn't a portent, it was the ordinary, dull way of knowing things that meant plans and diaries and things written down. She'd written it on the back of her hand, in biro that had washed and washed away and if Cass blinked, she could see it there now. She was drugged and she wore scrubs, the kind of pallid pea-green of the insipid and the sick and she was leaning into the wall, but she smiled at the direction of the blond, blond girl emerging from the white casket of a vehicle.
"You came." She'd thought she might. Cass wasn't certain.