You couldn't have stopped them. Hearing it didn't help. Mello had known it all along, even as he'd struggled to believe otherwise. The blame still rested on him. Without him, Matt would be at home, safely anonymous, keeping his head down, like he'd done for years. Mello still didn't know what exact criteria they used to select prisoners, but he was pretty damn sure a random hacker who'd once gone to a school for geniuses didn't fit them. More importantly, Matt would be alive if Mello had never called him, and though Mello had sworn he never would, if he remembered any of this when he got back, he had a sick, lingering feeling it wouldn't make a difference.

He noted S.T.'s run-down of his portable pharmacy with a nod. If Mello had known he'd be coming up here, and why, he might have swung by Matt's room to grab a pack of smokes for him. Might have. More likely, he still would've made a pointless dash.

"Do I look like I brought entertainment?" he snapped. He clicked the torch on, played it over each door. Nothing. Clicked it back off.

"Who's your roommate?" Someone with an intelligence background, assuming Mello hadn't already met him, would be very useful to know. If nothing else, it was a distraction from the silence that sat heavier in this hallway than anywhere else in the Institute, from the images he was trying to keep his mind from conjuring up of what that silence masked.