MORGANA — POV
My prince charming.
I wonder what he looks like.
I've caught fragments — glimpses that slip through the suppression like water through cracked stone, flashes that arrive without permission and leave before I can hold them still long enough to build a complete picture. But a face is the least interesting part of a person. What I wonder about is the weight of him. The way he carries whatever he's carrying. Whether the golden eyes I keep seeing in the temporal echoes is a color or a quality.
I think it's a quality.
I've been in this cell for three years.
Three years, one month, and — I've stopped counting days because days stopped meaning what they used to mean when your trait gets suppressed into a low hum you can feel but not use. What I have instead of days is patterns. Guard rotation. Light cycle. The specific frequency at which the suppression wards pulse — four-second intervals, Rex's engineers deciding that four seconds was the optimal disruption cycle for temporal trait expression, which is correct for approximately ninety percent of temporal trait users and incorrect for me in the specific way that matters most.
They built the cage around the power.
They forgot the person holding it.
The walls of my cell are covered in my writing.
Every inch. Scratched into concrete with fingernails during the first year — deep enough to be permanent, shallow enough that the guards initially thought it was grief-scratching, the kind of damage prisoners did to walls when their minds started going. They logged it as psychological deterioration. They wrote it in their reports. Rex read the reports and made a note: subject entering first-stage psychological unraveling, maintain current protocol.
Rex was wrong.
What I was writing was the future.
In the precise, mathematical sense of someone who has lived long enough — who has seen enough past and future timelines bleed through her power over years of using it without guardrails — to understand that the present is just where probability collapses into certainty. Given enough data points. Given the right mind to read them.
I have both.
The thing about my power, the thing Rex's engineers understand only partially, is that time manipulation isn't just about moving through time. It's about reading it. Existing inside it the way you exist inside weather — feeling the pressure changes, the humidity shifts, the specific quality of air that tells you a storm is coming before any instrument confirms it.
I have felt a specific storm coming for three years.
I wrote it on the walls in eight languages.
And I wonder — lying on the floor because the cot finally died six weeks ago and the cold concrete keeps the mind sharp — I wonder what he looks like.
His name is not what brings me to Tartarus.
Let me be honest about that.
My capture had nothing to do with carelessness or weakness or the kind of arrogance that gets powerful people caught. I was taken by the Nameless King himself.
Him. In person. With his own hands.
I'd been tracking the probability streams around the Kingpins for two months when he found me. Not because he'd predicted where I'd be — that's impossible with a temporal trait user, the future being the one thing you can actually obscure when you understand it well enough — but because he'd waited. He'd identified that I was tracking the timelines and he'd created a fixed point, a moment that would inevitably draw my attention, and he'd stood inside it and waited for me to arrive.
That's the kind of intelligence that belongs to something old.
The Nameless King. The one no one names. The shadow at the top of the pyramid that even the other fourteen kingpins speak about in lowered voices in rooms they've already checked for listening devices.
He'd looked at me across the ruins of what used to be a research building in the dead zone between Iron Fang and Veilstrand, and his expression of someone completing a step in a process they'd begun a long time ago and were patient enough to see through to the end.
"Morgana," he'd said. Just that. The name carrying the weight of someone who'd known it long before I'd started using it.
And then the suppression field had activated from seven directions simultaneously — seven, which required coordination that should have been impossible to maintain covertly at that range — and I'd understood that the building, the dead zone, the probability stream I'd been tracking, all of it had been architecture.
A box, built around me, that I'd walked into myself.
I hadn't struggled. What was the point. When something that powerful wants you contained, the struggle is just theater for your own dignity, and I had lived too long to waste energy on theater.
He'd handed me to Rex in a meeting I wasn't supposed to witness clearly — the suppression already deep by then, my vision of the exchange fragmentary, like watching through fogged glass. But I'd caught his words.
"Use this one carefully. Don't lose her. She's an anomaly."
Rex had taken me with the reverence of someone who'd been handed something they didn't fully understand but knew was valuable.
He built the cell around me over three weeks. Had the engineers run my trait profile twenty-seven times to make sure the suppression architecture was calibrated correctly. Carved the wards three inches deep into every surface — floor, ceiling, four walls. Ran the field at one hundred and forty percent of standard output. Added three redundant emitter systems in case the primary failed.
Then he put me in it.
And said, very calmly: "You'll help me, or you'll be recycled."
I had looked around the cell with its fresh concrete smell and its three inches of carved runes and its four-second suppression pulse, and I had thought: three years, give or take.
That's how long before the variable arrives.
I'd been correct to within six weeks.
The outfit Rex gave me when they processed my intake was standard Tartarus issue.
I've since made it mine.
The base is what they issued — a grey jumpsuit, the kind worn by every inmate in this building, institutional and deliberately anonymous, made from a synthetic fabric that breathes slightly worse than it should and fits slightly wrong across the shoulders, as if designed by someone who built it around a concept of prisoner rather than an actual human body.
But three years changes things.
The lower half of the left leg is torn off at the knee — I did that in year one, when the fabric fraying at the hem was driving me slowly insane, and I tore it clean rather than let it ragged. The exposed calf has writing on it now, in the same fine-line scratch as the walls — temporal notation running in a continuous spiral from ankle to knee, a calculation I started eight months ago and which will be complete approximately three days after I leave this cell.
I know this because I can feel the ending of it the same way you can feel the ending of a sentence mid-word.
The jumpsuit's upper half is open at the collar now — the neckline worked loose in year two, the synthetic fibers giving where I'd pulled, and I left it because the suppression field runs slightly hotter at throat-height and the exposed skin helps me feel it more precisely, which is information I use.
My hair is longer than it's ever been in my life.
I've kept my hair short for the entire span of my existence because short hair is practical and practicality matters when you live the way I live — or lived, before Rex. Dark brown. The kind of dark that catches light and makes it look almost black in shadow and almost auburn in direct illumination. Three years of no access to anything useful for cutting means it falls now past my shoulders, tangling if I let it, which I mostly do, because the tangling gives my hands something to do during the long stretches when the mind needs to run calculations and the body needs a task to keep it from the specific kind of restlessness that becomes madness in small spaces.
The temporal runes on my wrists — carved into my own skin in year two with a sharpened piece of the broken cot's frame — catch the light the same way the wall inscriptions do. The runes on my skin interact with the suppression field differently than the runes on the walls, because the suppression is calibrated against the walls, and I am not the walls.
Rex's engineers haven't noticed yet.
They will, eventually.
By then it won't matter.
I'm doing the calculations again — running the probability chains for what the temporal streams call the convergence point, the moment three floors above me where futures branch in ways that make the mathematics sing — when I hear the first one.
A voice.
Three floors up, maybe four, filtered through concrete and suppression architecture and the general ambient noise of a facility that never fully goes quiet.
A name.
It's the quality of the shouting that catches me first. Not just one voice — several, at once, like something has just been introduced into the ecosystem of the upper blocks and every organism in that ecosystem is registering it simultaneously. The specific quality of collective recognition, the sound of a name that means something passing through a population that knows what it means.
I press my palm flat against the cold floor.
Close my eyes.
Push my senses as far as the suppression wards allow — careful, slow, the practiced reach of three years of finding the exact edge of the field without touching it hard enough to trigger the cascade response.
The name arrives again.
And again.
Multiple voices now, carrying it in different registers — some sharp with fear, some rough with anger, some doing that thing voices do when they're saying something they can barely believe they're saying.
Kaiser.
I go very still.
Kaiser.
The temporal currents, which have been running their usual suppressed-but-present hum through my awareness like background music, change their note.
That's the only way I can describe it. The note changes. Like a chord resolving. Like a probability stream that's been building toward a conclusion for three years finally reaching the bar where it was always going to land.
Kaiser.
I've seen that name in my visions.
I don't write names in the calculations because names are too variable, too attached to specific futures that haven't locked yet, and writing them creates a kind of probability bias that contaminates clean forecasting. But I've felt it in the streams. A mass. A weight. A fixed point around which other probability lines keep curving, the way physics curves around mass, the way every river in a landscape eventually runs toward the sea.
The name of the anomaly.
And what a name for an anomaly.
Kaiser.
The old word. The one that crosses languages and centuries and always meant the same thing — the one who holds. The one who stands at the center. The emperor, the person in whom a massive collection of moving things finds its stillness.
A smile comes to my face before I've decided to let it.
I haven't genuinely smiled in three years.
I haven't felt that one since before Rex. Before the Nameless King's box. Before the grey jumpsuit and the three-inch ward-runes and the four-second suppression pulse.
It lands on my face now and it feels strange — like a muscle remembering motion it hasn't performed in years, slightly uncertain of the angles, recalibrating.
The upper blocks are loud.
Even three floors down, even through the concrete and the suppression architecture and the general acoustic muffling of Tartarus's deliberately deadened construction — designed to prevent sound from carrying, to maintain the specific isolation that's part of the psychological pressure Rex applies to his inmates — the noise is reaching me.
That means up there it's deafening.
Names. His name. Over and over, in different voices, in the specific way that fear and recognition and something like awe combine when a place encounters something it wasn't built to hold.
The trait-thief. The Ghost. Kaiser.
And then — through the hairline gap in the suppression that I've been maintaining for six weeks, the tiny inconsistency in the ward architecture that the field's four-second pulse opens and closes at the precise rhythms I've mapped to the millimeter — through that gap, something else arrives.
A name. A sound.
A signature.
The temporal equivalent of a scent — the specific probability profile that belongs to one person and no other person, as unique as fingerprints if you know how to read them. I have known how to read them for a very long time.
This one makes the mathematics sing.
It ain't like the calculated, controlled way they sing when I'm running forecasting models. The involuntary way. The way a tuning fork sings when the correct frequency passes near it.
The signature is open.
That's the word for it. Most people's probability signatures are convergent — their futures collapsing toward the most likely outcomes, the weight of habit and circumstance and personality pushing possibility toward predictability. The futures narrow as you approach them.
This one doesn't narrow.
It multiplies.
Every step he takes up there increases the number of available futures rather than reducing them. Like someone who genuinely in their actual bones — hasn't decided yet. Someone who's still choosing in the present tense, constantly, at every moment, which means they haven't let habit calcify around them into a predetermined shape.
That is extraordinarily rare.
I've met two people in my entire existence whose signature worked like that.
One of them was me.
Now there's a third person in this building whose futures are still genuinely, completely open.
And beside him — smaller, newer, burning with a mythic-tier signature that makes the suppression field hiccup because whatever Tara is, Rex's ward architecture was not built expecting it — a child.
A child with mythic-tier power.
What the hell is he thinking bringing a child in here.
The answer arrives with the question, which is the specific answer I should have expected: he's not thinking about it the way I'm thinking about it. Whatever that child is to him, it's not a tactical consideration. It's something that precedes tactics. Something decided at a level that tactics doesn't reach.
GODS.
He's going to be insufferably difficult to reason with and also exactly what I've been waiting for.
The noise from the upper blocks keeps coming.
I can feel it now as much as hear it — the vibration of dozens of voices hitting simultaneously, the specific acoustic pressure of a population reacting to a single presence all at once. The suppression wards in the walls are cycling faster than their standard four-second interval, the field architecture registering the collective emotional spike from the upper floors and compensating automatically.
Good system.
Not good enough.
Because underneath the noise — underneath the shouted name and the panic and the recognition and the specific quality of sound that comes from seeing something you were told existed but didn't fully believe in until it was standing in front of you — underneath all of that, through the hairline crack in my ward architecture, I catch something else.
A sound that isn't a sound.
The moment when it surfaced.
I felt it — the thing underneath Kaiser's surface. Whatever lives below the performance, below the management, below the deliberate architecture of projected ease. It surfaced for exactly as long as it needed to surface and then went back under, and I felt the suppression currents in the entire building respond to it the way they respond to sudden high-power trait expression — a spike in the field intensity, an automatic compensation, the building's nervous system registering that something had briefly occurred at a level it wasn't expecting.
Four words.
I didn't hear them clearly through three floors of concrete.
But I felt the weight of them. The temperature of them. The specific quality of certainty that belonged to something stated rather than threatened — a fact delivered because it had become a fact.
Whatever he said, he meant it in the way that people mean things when they've stopped performing and started reporting.
The smile on my face gets wider.
Down below my level — two tiers beneath me, four floors underground, in the part of Tartarus that the guards do rotations of in pairs with their expressions locked carefully neutral — something shifts.
I can feel the lower tiers through the suppression the way you can sometimes feel weather systems from underground. There, a low-grade awareness of mass in motion, of things that usually maintain their particular kind of stillness doing something different.
The lower floors are not quiet.
The apex-class murderers, the augmented warlords, the ones who are still recognizably people regardless of what they've done or become. They're reacting the same way the upper floors are reacting, just further muffled, further filtered, the name reaching them in fragments.
But below even that.
The ones that aren't people anymore.
The ones Rex keeps for reasons that are either scientific or strategic or both, the ones whose trait profiles went past the edge of what baseline human biology can sustain and kept going, the ones that the guards log as category undefined in their reports and call something else when they think no one's listening.
Even they're moving.
I can feel it — the specific temporal displacement that happens when things at the mythic-tier edge of power do anything at all. The way the probability currents around the deep cells shift when whatever lives in them registers that something new has entered the building. Just — aware of it. In the way that old, deep things are aware of changes in the environment they've existed in for long enough that any change registers as significant.
The entire building, from the top intake corridors to the deepest tier, is registering Kaiser's arrival.
Like a seismic event measured on instruments at every level.
Like a stone dropped into still water with the ripples reaching every shore simultaneously.
I press my palm flat against the floor again and close my eyes and let myself feel all of it — the upper-block panic, the lower-tier stirring, the mythic-tier child burning like a small star three floors above me, and at the center of all of it, the open probability signature of a man whose name is the old word for emperor and whose presence is doing something to the temporal architecture of Tartarus that Rex's systems are logging as an anomaly and Rex himself is almost certainly already recalibrating his models to account for.
Too late, I think at Rex, wherever he is in this building with his flat eyes and his careful plans and his absolute certainty that he has everything under control.
Way too late.
I let go of the floor.
Open my eyes to the grey cell, the humming wards, the three-inch runes carved into every surface, the walls covered in three years of mathematics that all of it — every equation, every probability chain, every temporal notation spiraling up my left calf — was pointing toward.
This.
Right now.
The anomaly in the building, three floors above me, walking the corridors of the place that's been my cage for three years while the entire population screams his name and the lower-tier creatures stir in their cells and the suppression fields run fractionally harder because something has entered this system that the system wasn't architected to hold.
I pick up a piece of broken concrete from the corner where the cot used to be — one of the legs, the one that finally snapped six weeks ago — and I go to the one bare patch of wall I've been saving.
Small. Deliberate. Left blank for exactly this.
I scratch two words into it with the broken edge.
In English, because some things deserve the language of the immediate present rather than any of the seventeen older ones I know.
My prince charming.
Then I look at the words for a long moment.
Above me, his name is still moving through the blocks like fire through dry wood. Kaiser, Kaiser, Kaiser. A name that the building is still learning how to hold, still calibrating around, still figuring out what it means that it's here.
I already know what it means.
Something earned — the word following the person like a logical conclusion, like mathematics resolving, like the only word that fit and therefore became the one used.
The emperor. The fixed point. The one around whom things curve.
He walks into this building in chains, and the entire population — human and otherwise, above and below, the people and the things that used to be people — every single one of them reacts. Because they felt it.
Because probability responds to him the way water responds to stone.
And he's here.
Finally.
After three years.
I press two fingers to the words on the wall.
"Alright," I say to the cell, to the hum, to the wards that are running slightly faster than usual and don't know why. My voice sounds strange in the quiet — rougher than I remember it being, the particular roughness of vocal cords that don't get much use when you're alone.
"Let's see what you're made of."
The suppression pulse cycles. Four seconds. The runes on the walls glow pale and steady.
Somewhere above me, his footsteps are probably already taking him somewhere Rex wants him to be.
He doesn't know yet, I think. That he came here for me specifically.
He will.
The smile is still on my face.
The real one.
KAISER — POV
The door didn't slam.
It hissed shut.
That sound was worse than a bang. A bang meant emotion. A hiss meant routine. It meant this hallway had swallowed men by the thousands and never once felt full.
Two guards dragged me by the arms like I was a sack of trash they didn't want touching their uniforms. The suppression cuffs around my wrists pulsed with a low hum that vibrated up my bones and into my teeth. It wasn't pain. Not yet.
It was pressure.
A reminder.
You're in our house. You don't get to be special here.
Rambo walked ahead, heavy boots steady. Seven feet of hardware and bad moods, bandoliers crossing his chest like trophies. His tac-visors flickered with red targeting lines that crawled over every wall, every door, every face that stared at us from behind reinforced glass.
He didn't look back much.
He didn't need to.
He knew where I was.
He knew I couldn't go anywhere.
I gave him a lazy grin anyway.
"Hey," I said, voice loud enough to bounce off the concrete. "You guys got a welcome packet? Like… 'Rules of Tartarus.' 'Where to scream.' 'How to schedule your daily humiliation.'"
One guard tightened his grip and tried to twist my arm into something that would make me limp. I let my shoulder roll with it, made it look effortless. Didn't give him the satisfaction of a flinch.
Rambo's voice rumbled without turning. "You talk a lot for someone in chains."
"I talk a lot because it annoys you," I said. "And because your prison is ugly. Somebody should tell Rex his interior designer hates him."
We passed the first row of cells.
Faces pressed close to reinforced glass and rune-etched concrete. Some watched like sharks. Some like ghosts. Some like they were already bored. Tartarus had a way of teaching people that hope was just another currency to get robbed of.
Then I heard it.
A voice, low and disbelieving, from somewhere behind the glass.
"…No way."
I turned my head as far as the guards would allow. A man in a corner cell had gone pale. His hands were shaking, not from withdrawal, but from memory.
"Holy shit," he breathed. "That's him."
Another cell stirred.
A woman with metal stitched into her cheekbones stepped forward, eyes narrowing. Hate sat in her gaze like a loaded gun.
"You've got to be kidding me," she spat. "They let Kaiser in here?"
A ripple ran down the corridor.
Names moved faster than blood.
Someone banged a fist against the glass. Someone else laughed—high, sharp, nervous.
A voice rose from deeper down, rough with anger.
"TRAIT-THIEF!"
The word echoed. A dozen heads turned. A few inmates surged forward like the glass wasn't there. Like rage could burn through reinforced steel if you fed it enough.
And then, from a cell on the left, a guy with burn scars crawling up his neck leaned in, smiling like he'd just found religion.
"Oh," he said, almost delighted. "This place is blowing up today."
The guards stiffened.
Rambo didn't break stride.
But his visor flickered a little brighter, scanning faster.
I smiled at the inmates like I was greeting fans outside an arena.
"Miss me?" I asked.
That set them off.
A few curses. A few threats. A few names I didn't want to hear spoken out loud, because those names belonged to places I'd burned down and people I'd left behind on purpose.
One inmate—old, eyes sunken—pressed his forehead to the glass and whispered like a prayer.
"Please don't look at me."
Another, younger, slammed his palm against the barrier hard enough to rattle the frame.
"You ruined my crew!" he shouted. "You took my brother's trait and left him empty!"
I tilted my head, pretending to think.
"Was he the one who tried to shoot me in the back?" I asked. "Or the one who begged?"
His face twisted. He screamed something and the guards moved on.
More faces. More reactions.
Fear. Rage. Hunger.
We keep walking.
The junction corridor opens — a wider passage where three wings meet, the suppression architecture layered heavier here, the rune patterns overlapping in designs that required multiple engineering minds working the same problem from different angles. The air tastes chemically wrong in the specific way that means a suppression field has been running at high intensity long enough to alter the ambient environment.
Rex built this place to last.
Tara is ahead of me.
Thirty feet. Two guards walking her toward the PROCESSING door. Her back to me. Shoulders straight, chin up, doing the thing — the posture, the physical vocabulary I taught her, carrying herself like the room was hers regardless of what the room thought about that.
She's doing it perfectly.
In this corridor it looks very small and that does something to my chest that has nothing to do with the plan.
The inmate at the junction corner sees her first.
And then the corridor got worse.
A prisoner in a cell near the processing hallway pressed his face to the reinforced glass. He was older. Stringy. Eyes too bright. The kind of smile that didn't belong on a human being.
He watched Tara like she was something that had been delivered for him.
His voice slid out through the slot in the door, quiet enough that the guards didn't react at first.
"Hey," he called. "Hey, little one."
Tara froze mid-step.
One guard barked, "Keep moving."
The prisoner ignored him.
"Processing first," he said, voice wet with anticipation. "Then you'll come down this way. They always bring the new ones past us. Always."
The other guard slammed his baton against the cell bars. "Shut your mouth."
The prisoner laughed like that was a joke.
"I'm gonna see you soon," he whispered to Tara. "And when I do… you'll learn what this place teaches. You'll learn what happens when nobody's coming to save you."
Tara's shoulders stiffened.
She didn't cry.
She didn't scream.
She just went still in the way only kids who've seen cages know how to go still.
My smile didn't fade.
It fell off.
I stared at the prisoner.
He kept smiling.
Kept talking.
And inside my own head, slow and quiet, I said the words like I was writing them into stone:
"I found my first kill"
Quiet. Level. Stated the way you'd state that it's raining.
The corridor dies.
Every sound. Every movement. The whole block going to that specific zero-temperature silence that only happens when every sound-making organism simultaneously decides that silence is the wiser choice.
Rambo turns around.
Seven feet of him, orienting toward me with the specific attention of a system that's received input it didn't account for. His visors sweep the sequence — my face, the cell, Tara's retreating back, the inmate now pressed against his far wall.
"What?" he says.
Genuine. One word. The question of a man who's done the arithmetic and needs one more piece.
I let the thing go back under.
Rebuilt the posture. Loose shoulders. The grin — slower than usual, more deliberate, with the quality of something being consciously restored rather than naturally present.
"Nothing."
Rambo looks at me for approximately one geological era.
Then his visors sweep the cell. One slow, visible, deliberate pass. The kind of look that says you've been catalogued, this file stays open. The inmate doesn't move from the wall.
Rambo turns back around.
We walk on.
Tara disappears through the PROCESSING door.
Beacon active. Clara's voice, strained through the suppression but present. She's okay. Stick to the plan.
I stick to the plan.
I don't like it.
I built it. I trust it. And I do not like watching the correct decision operate in real time and finding out that correctness doesn't make the feeling any quieter, just makes it sit with slightly better posture because at least it's justified.
Behind me, in the junction cell, the inmate hasn't moved from his wall.
Good.
Three floors below me, somewhere in the deep levels of this building that I've mapped from the intake walk and the suppression field pressure differentials and the way sound moves through layered concrete — three floors below — someone is waiting.
I can't feel her.
But the things I've read in her files, the temporal notation in her case records that Rex's engineers couldn't translate, the probability calculations scratched into cell walls in eight languages by a woman who's been alone in here for three years doing nothing but thinking —
She already knows I'm here.
The grin on my face is the real one for exactly two seconds before I put the performance back on.
Let's begin.
RAMBO — POV
I found my first kill.
Four words. A murmur. The vocal register of someone noting the weather.
Threats have heat in them — anger, desperation, the performance of dominance by someone trying to establish it. This had none of that. This was reported. Stated because it had become true and therefore deserved to be said.
I've been in this job for seven years.
I know what managed behavior looks like. I know what tools sound like when they're being deployed. The entire walk from intake had been a continuous sequence of deployed tools — the jokes timed for disruption, the posture performing ease, the specific quality of every word chosen for effect. All of it catalogued. All of it managed.
Those four words weren't managed.
They came from underneath the management.
And I watched the management come back online over the top of them — the posture reassembling, the grin returning at a slightly different angle, with a quality I've seen before on exactly two people in seven years of this work. The quality of deliberate restoration. Choosing, consciously, to put the performance back on after letting it surface.
Not out of control.
Deployed.
Used it. Served its purpose. Retrieved it.
The purpose was the inmate in the cell at the junction.
The inmate is now on his back wall and will remain there for the foreseeable future. The specific kind of fear that came off him in those two seconds isn't the kind that fades quickly. That's the kind that becomes an architectural feature of how someone moves through a space from now on.
Four words accomplished that.
The trigger was the girl.
That's the second data point. The first was the fractional expression drop in the intake corridor when she was separated from him — involuntary, masked in under a second, the reflex of someone who practices containment with skill. This was different. This was a choice to surface. To deploy. To let the thing underneath show itself to the corridor, to the inmate, to me.
Because the inmate looked at the girl in a way that triggered it.
I walk ahead and I turn the data point over carefully because this is the kind of information that — given to the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong framing — produces outcomes that aren't the ones I intend.
Rex will get it. When I understand it better.
What I understand now: the girl is the only variable in this facility that consistently bypasses Kaiser's surface management and reaches whatever's beneath it. And whatever's beneath it is significantly more dangerous than the surface.
He's twenty steps ahead of me and walking easy, and I note his breathing pattern, his step length, the way he holds his cuffed wrists — slightly loose, not pressing against the restraints, which means either he's accepted them or he's already determined they aren't the factor he needs to beat.
seven years.
Something in this building is going to change.
I'd like to understand how before it does.
THE LOWER TIERS
Four floors underground, in the part of Tartarus that guard rotation policy dictates is never conducted solo and never conducted without the emitter packs running at full load, the things in the cells do something they almost never do.
They move.
Just moving. The kind of movement that registers on the sensors as a departure from baseline behavior without mapping to any response category in the system.
The monitoring AI logs it as anomalous behavioral pattern, low threat classification, flag for review.
Nobody reviews it tonight.
The thing in cell 4-7 — Subject Zero, in the records; the void one, in the guards' private vocabulary — does something it has never done in four years of containment.
It goes still.
The cycling through configurations that the sensors log as its baseline. Complete stillness. The sensors register the change and flag it as anomalous behavioral departure, significant, recommend immediate review.
Nobody reviews that either.
In the stillness, if you were standing outside cell 4-7 with the monitoring equipment running, you'd register something the equipment wouldn't know how to classify.
Subject zero is listening.
Three floors above, the name is still moving through the blocks.
Kaiser.
Even here, four floors underground, in the cells where the things that used to be people are held by wards that were built by people who understood they were containing something beyond the standard parameters of what prisons were designed for — even here, the name arrives.
Faint. Filtered through concrete and steel and suppression architecture that runs at one hundred and sixty percent.
But present.
And in cell 3-5, two floors above the deepest tier, one floor below the human blocks, a woman with dark hair and a grey jumpsuit and temporal runes scratched into her own skin sits against a wall covered in mathematics and feels everything.
The upper floors' noise. The lower floors' stirring. The open probability signature of a man in chains three levels above her.
And she is smiling.
The real one.
Welcome to Hell.
END OF CHAPTER