Distorted

Dash narrates that you can escape anything except yourself—that disease and denial are prisons consuming from the inside, like a butterfly fluttering in a glass jar.

Dash narrates that you can escape anything except yourself—that disease and denial are prisons consuming from the inside, like a butterfly fluttering in a glass jar. He wakes to guards laughing over his unconscious body. They strip him, conduct a cavity search, and hand him a faded gray jumpsuit. No underwear, no explanation. As they drag him through endless dark corridors of crumbling concrete and black mold, the name of his new home reaches his ears: Alabaster Penitentiary. He has never heard of it. The ocean air tells him he crossed water to get here. The guards tell him nothing else.

A betrayed insider and a dead hostage end Dash's freedom forever

Dash is a twenty-five-year-old bank robber in Brooklyn who has been saving $342,000 and dreaming of retiring to Tulum, Mexico. Despite knowing the timeline is dangerously rushed, he accepts a tip from his contact Kent to hit Municipal Credit Union during an eighteen-hour window of unmarked bills. Inside, the heist collapses when his accomplice Mike turns out to be a police informant. Dash shoots Mike dead, seizes a young blonde hostage, and tries to flee through the side exit. Everything dissolves into red—screams, gunfire, blood he cannot account for. When he regains consciousness, he is blindfolded, drugged, crossing water in a vehicle. He wakes in chains at Alabaster Penitentiary, a secret prison on an island, where inmates are sent to be erased.

The Warden delivers a life sentence without trial or appeal

Manuel Blanco, the Warden—ghostly white hair, coal-dark eyes, a tailored three-piece suit in a rotting building—informs Dash he will never leave Alabaster. No lawyer, no phone call, no visitation. As the sentence sinks in, a massive tattooed guard steps forward with clippers and shaves Dash's platinum hair while he sits chained. The guard's fingers brush the base of Dash's skull, lingering at his nape in a touch that is oddly, disturbingly calming. Dash is placed in a cell with Luthor, a twenty-three-year-old hacker who has survived five years inside. Luthor gives him the basics: guards run everything, the Warden barely visits, and obtaining anything beyond bare survival—toothpaste, soap, edible food—requires going through the correctional officers.

Sexual favors are the only currency keeping inmates alive At dinner, Dash meets Ren—a charismatic, manipulative inmate who claims fifteen years inside—and Kang, a quiet Korean prisoner with a dragon tattoo. The food is repulsive: freezer-burned sandwiches with green fuzzy cheese. Ren explains that guards are inmates' sole link to the outside, and obtaining anything beyond starvation rations means trading sexual favors. Desperate for a…