The Blue Robe Man's hand rested on Lisare's shoulder. Light. Patient. The way a man touches something he already owns.
The sound came first—a low groan of pressure from somewhere deep in the facility. Then the crack.
The white room door opened.
Lisare looked up.
Poya came through the doorway.
She would not have recognized him. She knew that in the part of her mind that catalogued horrors, the part that still worked even when the rest of her wanted to shut down entirely. The creature walking toward her wore Poya's face—and that was nearly the worst of it. Nearly.
His leg was wrong. The upper bone had broken through the skin of his thigh and jutted outward at an angle that made her stomach try to rise. Blood still wept from the wounds carved deep into what remained of his calf, dark and slow. His toenails had been pressed inward—pushed down into the flesh until the skin folded up around them to hold them in place like pale petals around a nail.
His arm was worse.
The fingers of his right hand hung by the tendons alone, bones exposed to the air where the skin had been peeled away. Fifty-six holes dotted his hand from wrist to knuckle, each punched through by something narrow, the white fat beneath showing clearly against blood-dark skin.
His stomach had been opened. His intestines dragged along the floor behind each step, thick ropes of gray-pink coiled in his wake. Through the cavity of his chest, she could see his heart still beating. His lungs, what remained of them, had been bisected and withdrawn. They rattled with each breath like crumpled paper.
His head.
One eye hung from the socket by a thin thread of nerve. Both ears had been removed—not torn, removed—and his nose had been broken upward, pointing toward the ceiling like a crooked finger. The hair above his crown was ash. A section of his skull had been opened, the flap of scalp laid back over the hole but not sealed. It was visible. It moved when he moved.
His left hand was gone entirely.
He shuffled forward, and the sound of his intestines sliding across the floor was something Lisare would carry for the rest of her life.
"P—Poya—" The word broke apart in her mouth. "What hap—"
He heard her voice.
He turned his head—slowly, because of what was hanging from it—and found her in the room. Something passed across his remaining eye. Not relief. Not forgiveness. Recognition. And then revulsion.
He fell. His broken legs gave out beneath him, and he caught himself on his knees and one arm, refusing to look at her.
"Don't." His voice was a ruin. Barely air. "Don't talk to me. Monster."
He started crawling away.
The hand on her shoulder tightened. Not painfully. Just enough to remind her it was there.
"You have nothing." The Blue Robe Man's voice was soft. Contemplative. The tone of a man who had already won and found the victory unremarkable. "You are nothing. You lost your best friend—" his fingers gave a small, almost gentle squeeze, "—because of your own recklessness, E1."
He leaned down, bringing his mouth near her ear.
"Act reckless again," he said, "and every person you call a friend in this facility will receive the same consideration we extended to E178."
Lisare looked at the floor.
The emptiness came quickly. It always did now, flooding in to replace what was too large to hold. Her body stilled. Her shoulders dropped—not in defeat exactly, but in something older than defeat. Something closer to extinction.
"Good." He straightened.
The smile on his face had the quality of something that lived in dark water. "E1. Go to your room. S139 will observe you." He turned, already dismissing her. "You at mercy. Everyone at mercy." He walked away saying it quietly, to no one in particular, as though the thought genuinely pleased him.
Lisare stood in the corridor alone. Then she walked to the white room.
She didn't know why. Perhaps some part of her needed to see it. To understand the weight of what she had caused.
The white room was not white anymore.
Blood covered every surface from floor to ceiling. Bodies hung from hooks embedded in the walls and the ceiling above—some still intact, most not—and the things that had come loose from them were scattered across the floor in arrangements that had no name in any language she knew. White robes lay crumpled beneath the worst of it, stained through. The smell was copper and rot and something chemical she couldn't identify.
Movement near the far wall.
A figure was crawling. Slow. One arm dragging. He raised his head when she stepped inside, and his eyes—still human, still desperate—found her.
"Please." His voice was a thread. "End me. E178 is not human. I want to die. I want to leave this plain of life."
Lisare looked at him. He looked back at her.
She raised her arm and drove it through his skull. Quick. Clean. One motion.
"I—" She opened her mouth. The word didn't come. She closed her mouth and walked out, blood spots freckling her forearms and the hem of her clothes.
Her room was dark.
"Don't push yourself to the edge, E1." The voice came from the far corner, calm and unhurried. "I'm here simply to observe your actions. To make sure you don't make the same mistake twice."
A woman stepped into the narrow light. Short gray hair, the tips slightly upswept. Two red earrings caught the light. A golden necklace with a small diamond sat at her throat—a marriage pendant, by the look of it. Her robes were red, and a small name badge sat level on her chest.
S139 / Bury
"I'm S139," she said, and smiled. "But please, call me Bury Grein."
Lisare looked at her. "Lisare." A beat. "You can call me E1. Just your average pegaluve."
She smiled when she said it. The smile didn't reach her eyes, and she made no effort to bring it any further.
Bury walked forward and wrapped her arms around her.
Lisare didn't move. She stood with her arms at her sides, staring over Bury's shoulder at the wall and the bed beyond it, her face as blank as stone. But her eyes—slowly, without her permission—began to fill.
"I am here to help you get free," Bury said quietly. "All of you."
A tear fell. Then another.
"My parents would be killed." Lisare's voice was even. Factual. "If I left. They would be killed." She paused. "I wouldn't be able to mourn them, either way. I don't know that I have that in me anymore."
Bury's arms tightened around her.
"Don't worry about them," she said. "I will make sure everyone is kept safe. But I'll need your help to do it."
Lisare looked up at the ceiling past Bury's shoulder. After a long moment she nodded, then gently disengaged and moved to the bed. She lay down on top of the blankets, fully clothed, and stared upward.
Thinking I could be of any use, she thought. I am nothing but a chain around their necks.
Bury lingered at the door, watching her. Then she stepped out, and the door closed, and the room went dark.
Two hours passed.
Lisare lay in the dark without sleeping, watching the shadows above her shift as her eyes adjusted. Her breathing was steady. Measured. The silence in the facility at this hour was the kind that pressed in from all sides.
She got up.
She crossed to the titanium entrance—the massive slab that sealed her room from the corridor—and stood before it. Her hands hung at her sides. The purple was starting at the edges of her hair, bleeding upward from the roots. Her wings stirred behind her, darkening.
She hit it once.
Soft. Tentative. Testing something.
"Why."
She hit it again.
"Why."
Her knuckles split. She didn't stop. Her wings flared fully behind her, the feathers shifting deep violet as her voice climbed from a whisper to something ragged and raw.
"Why!"
The kids in adjacent rooms began to shout. Fists on walls. Insults hurled through the steel.
"Useless bitch, stop yelling—"
"E1, can you just die?"
The words registered. She heard every syllable. And her hands closed into fists and she hit the door harder, blood tracking across the titanium in streaks, the metal beginning to creak—not deforming, but beginning to understand what was asking it to.
She drew back and put everything she had left into a single strike.
The entrance crumbled.
Not dented. Not bent. Crumbled—chunks of the reinforced slab falling away from the point of impact, the rest folding inward and then outward as the structural integrity simply failed. The sound of it rang down the corridor like a bell struck too hard to make music.
She stood in the wreckage, breathing hard, her right hand broken in several places. She looked at it once. Then she walked back to her bed, lay down, and closed her eyes.
Sleep came faster than it had any right to.
The scientists arrived at a sprint and nearly fell over each other stopping at the doorway.
The Blue Robe Man appeared behind them at a leisurely pace. He surveyed the room. He looked at the girl asleep in the bed.
"Leave," he said pleasantly. "Two of you remain outside to ensure she stays within." He turned and walked away without another word.
In the corridor beside the facility, an iron staff was embedded in the earth outside her room's exterior wall. In the dark, it had been glowing—red, the light pulsing from the base of it up through the shaft—and the ground at its feet had been fracturing in thin, radiating lines. As Lisare's breathing evened out and deepened, the glow faded. The cracks stopped. The staff went quiet, as though something had been silenced.
Morning came.
The entrances opened in sequence, and the experiments filed out into the garden. Some still looked like people—children with wrong proportions, wrong coloring, wrong ways of moving. Others had stopped resembling people in specific ways: one walked on legs twice the usual length, its neck drawn out above them like a reed. Another had grown an additional mouth across the lower half of its face, toothless and working. A third had five legs and three arms, the extra arm emerging from the center of its chest.
Lisare was still asleep.
The guards outside her doorway stood at quiet attention while a small maintenance worker in red crouched over the rubble of the entrance, turning pieces over in his hands with increasing bewilderment. His yellow tie kept getting in the way.
"No normal creature could do this." He tapped one of the fallen slabs with the head of his hammer-pick. The metal rang dully. "Not even the orders could breach this grade of enchantment. So how—"
He had no answer. He went back to tapping.
Bury came in adjusting her glasses, a folder of documents tucked under one arm.
"Lisare." She approached the bed without hesitation. "Wake up, dear. We need to talk."
Lisare stirred slowly. Her eyes opened to the ceiling, then tracked to Bury. The recognition was immediate but unhurried. "S139. What are you doing here?"
Bury smiled and gestured toward the door. Lisare sat up, already dressed—she always slept in her clothes—and followed her out.
In the garden, the experiments had gathered in a loose ring around an elevated stone platform at the center of the grounds. Two figures were fighting on top of it. The other kids circled, watching.
"Like always," Lisare said. "E47 and E34 are climbing the ranks." She looked from the fighting stone to Bury.
Bury stopped walking and turned to face her, then reached up and patted her head once. Lisare squinted—one eye closing—and a small, involuntary smile crossed her face before she could suppress it.
Bury produced a badge from her documents. Golden. Different from the numbered tags the other experiments wore.
"You're no longer E1," she said. "You've been promoted. SE4."
Lisare took the badge and turned it over in her hands, frowning. "SE4. Special Experiment. Where are the other three?"
Bury reached toward her head again. Lisare caught her wrist.
Bury smiled anyway. "SE2 and SE3 were sold. SE1 escaped—a long time ago now. You broke a reinforced titanium entrance with bare strength, Lisare. That requires a different category of observation." She paused, watching E34 drive a knee into E47's side. "It also means you've proven something."
Lisare looked at the badge again. "And my friends?"
Bury looked at her.
"Not that I have any," Lisare added, the words flat and without inflection.
"Your friends," Bury said gently, "will still be here. Surviving, as they always have."
Poya came through the facility doors fully healed.
He walked without favoring anything. His face was closed, expression contained, like a man who had decided something in the dark and was carrying it forward now without reconsidering. The other kids noticed him immediately.
"Oh, look—Poya's come back out." Laughter, scattered. "What's the plan? Beat us all through willpower?"
He walked through them. Shoved two out of his path without breaking stride. Stepped up onto the elevated fighting stone, and stood there, and waited.
"Which one of you," he said, "wants to try."
The laughter faded to murmuring.
"I will."
Poya turned.
Lisare stood at the edge of the crowd, meeting his gaze without flinching. Something flickered behind his eyes. He clicked his tongue.
"Another time," he said, and moved to step down.
The crowd didn't move. Hands caught him at the shoulders. Lisare stepped up onto the stone.
"Poya." She stopped a few paces from him. Her voice was quiet enough that only he could hear it clearly. "We used to be friends. I still see you as one."
He looked at her for a long moment. His jaw tightened.
"You think I would stay friends," he said, loud enough now for everyone, "with something like you? A monster?"
The word hit the air and stayed there.
Lisare took a step forward and shifted her weight into a stance. "I'm not here for forgiveness. I'm here for a way out."
"And I'm not here to be your punching bag." He took a step to meet her.
They walked to the center of the stone together.
Poya's teeth were grinding. He held her gaze, then looked briefly toward the open sky above the facility walls—a flash of blue between clouds—before bringing his eyes back down.
"We're going to die here anyway," he said. "Why bother."
"By doing what they want is the easy way out," she said quietly. "Be stubborn about it. You won't survive a week without me."
Something moved in his face. Fast. She almost read it before it was gone.
He swung.
She closed her eyes and took the hit.
The force knocked her off her feet. The crowd went silent. She hit the stone and lay there, and Poya came down on top of her and started hitting in earnest—fist after fist, the impact of each blow driving the sound out of her—and she did not raise her hands to stop any of it.
"Without you!" His voice broke open. "You think I'm just garbage—entertainment—something to be used? I trusted you for months! I trusted you to no end, and you—" Another blow. His voice was fracturing into something rawer. "I'm glad you're leaving. I'm glad—"
She heard him. Every word. But her eyes were closed, and somewhere behind them she was watching the shape of a cloud move across a bright afternoon sky.
.......................................................................................................
Ten years.
The stone was cracked through in three places, old damage from old fights. Bodies lay at the edges of the garden—scientists in their whites, a few experiments—spread in positions that suggested they had not seen the end coming. The facility was quiet in the wrong way. Not peaceful. Empty.
Poya was older in all the visible ways. A short beard, neatly kept. A blind eye, pale and still. Scars layering older scars on every surface of skin. His hair was longer now, deliberately styled—the small vanities a person holds onto. His body had been shaped by years of survival into something formidable.
He was sitting on top of Lisare, breathing hard, his fist still raised.
She lay beneath him, beaten across the face and chest. Her hair was disheveled from being dragged across the broken stone, and the SE tattooed into her forehead was half-obscured by a smear of blood. Her clothes were destroyed. She had not defended herself.
Poya stared down at her.
"Why aren't you defending." Not a question. Barely a voice. "The training. The pain. The betrayal and the hate. Every single thing I've gone through because of you—" His raised fist trembled. "And you still see me as trash. You still won't give me the dignity of a real fight."
He stood. He stepped off her and walked away across the ruined garden without looking back.
"The sky is blue today."
He stopped walking.
"Just like the day you hit me. The first time." Lisare was still lying where he'd left her, face turned up toward the afternoon, eyes bright with something that hadn't fully spilled over yet. "I never forget, do I. I can't." A sound came out of her—almost a laugh, but quieter and much sadder. "I'm just a chain that holds nothing. The chain that once held you, broken now, letting you fall into whatever comes next."
She sat up. Then stood. Then turned to face him.
The tears came then. Not the controlled kind.
"I'm going to miss you, Poya." Her voice didn't shake. The tears were entirely separate from her voice, as if they had agreed not to interfere with each other. "I don't know what to call this feeling. Hate or love. Both of them have the same texture from the inside. All I know is I want to keep you alive and close, and I don't know if that makes me cruel or honest."
Poya spat on the ground. He started walking toward her.
She raised her hand. Her fingers spread—then slowly, deliberately, curled inward until she was holding something invisible. The gesture of something reaching toward a person who was not quite there.
"That feeling," he said, still walking, "is broken love. You've broken mine more times than I can count."
He reached her distance. He broke into a run. His fist went up.
Then he stopped.
Poya looked down.
The hole in his side was neat. It went through where the ribs were thinnest, at the angle where the heart sat closest to the surface. Blood was coming fast. He pressed a hand against it—more from reflex than intention—and raised his eyes to her.
His expression was calm. The surprise in it was the mild kind. The kind a man feels when a thing he suspected turns out to be true.
"Guess..." He exhaled slowly. "Guess you really are the chained one. Lisare."
He fell forward, flat, and the stone beneath him did not move.
She didn't move to catch him. She watched him go down and stood over him for a long moment before crouching slowly to his level. She reached out and pressed his eyelid closed with two fingers—first one, then the other. Her other hand curled around the staff, slick with his blood, the metal warm from where it had been held.
"Dop—"
The word stopped in her throat.
Her eyes went wide. Her free hand flew to her neck, pressed against the skin there as though she could feel something wrong from the outside. The staff dropped from her fingers and rang against the stone.
"Dop longet!!"