Kirill and Maksim didn't even want to understand why they were so comfortable lying in bed and sleeping until they were fully rested.
But Vlad was the most nervous of all.
He wasn't himself. He kept walking around the room in circles, speaking either aloud or quietly to himself.
— If I sleep a little more, it will be disrespectful to the counselors. On the other hand, if I sleep well, I'll be more useful.
Vlad stopped and, like a professor at a university preparing to lecture students about the Trojan Horse, raised one finger.
— Decided. I'll sleep. Then I'll be more useful.
He lay down as if someone had injected something into his arm and immediately fell asleep.
Mildred entered the room.
When she saw Vlad sleeping, she placed a glass of juice beside him and quietly whispered into his ear:
— Drink the juice at 10:21.
Then she left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.
At that time, Alex and Denis went outside for a walk around the camp.
No one understood how these two boys, who had been fighting on the bus, were now walking together as friends.
They talked about different things: their hobbies, their parents, what they wanted to become in the future, and even their plans for escaping the camp.
At one point, they saw the tree where Vlad and Elizabeth had once written something.
They looked at each other, smiled slightly, and ran toward the counselors.
— Do you have something sharp? — Alex asked.
The counselor looked surprised.
— Why do you need something sharp?
Alex shrugged.
— We want to do something.
The counselors stepped aside and talked among themselves.
When they returned, they handed the boys a knife. It wasn't very sharp, but it wasn't completely dull either.
Alex and Denis ran back to the tree.
Alex carefully carved the letter D, while Denis carved the letter A, placing both letters inside a heart.
They stepped back to look at their work.
— Not bad, — Denis said.
— Definitely better than what Vlad wrote, — Alex joked.
They laughed and sat beneath the tree.
After some time, Denis rested his head against the tree trunk and closed his eyes.
— We should probably continue working on the escape plan later.
Alex nodded.
— Definitely. I still need to finish drawing the map.
Time passed unnoticed, and eventually they decided to go to the cafeteria to finally eat.
Meanwhile, Kirill and Maksim were still sleeping, just like Vlad.
They were huge sleepyheads, always falling asleep during lessons except chemistry and biology, because they actually enjoyed those subjects.
Eventually, they decided to get up, quickly got dressed, and went to the cafeteria.
But Vlad was still asleep.
The boys started getting nervous.
Elizabeth was even more worried. She couldn't sit still and kept pacing back and forth.
Sasha jokingly said:
— Did you fall in love with Vlad or something?
Elizabeth immediately crossed her arms over her chest and waved her hand dismissively.
— Get lost. None of your business.
Sasha laughed.
A few minutes later, Vlad finally arrived.
Elizabeth immediately looked relieved.
— Where have you been?! — she asked.
— Sleeping.
— For that long?
Vlad shrugged.
— Apparently, I needed it.
Elizabeth shook her head but smiled.
She quickly returned to her seat and began eating.
Then she turned toward Vlad and used sign language to say:
— Let's go meet the children from "Beautiful Violets." And then we'll go to the library.
Vlad understood sign language perfectly.
He didn't answer.
He simply nodded and smiled.
Elizabeth became so happy that she looked as if someone had just told her that she had received every book in the world for free.
The other children decided to go with Elizabeth and Vlad to meet the children from "Beautiful Violets."
Soon, practically everyone from "The Awakening Rose" was following them.
The children from "Beautiful Violets" were older, around sixteen or seventeen years old.
By the end of the camp session, some of them would become counselors themselves.
Rio was the first to start the conversation.
— Hi! What are your names? Can you tell us more about the camp?
A girl about sixteen years old looked at them.
She had pale skin and an almost porcelain-like appearance.
She smiled.
— Hello. My name is Eli. I'm sixteen. If you want to know more about the camp, it's better to ask the counselors. We might be mistaken.
Her voice sounded strangely slow and heavy, similar to the counselors' voices, although not quite as strong.
A boy who looked almost identical to her continued:
— Like Eli said, it's best to ask the counselors. We might accidentally tell you something wrong. And you want accurate information, right?
The children nodded.
They decided to find the counselors.
Elizabeth and Vlad, however, went to the library, just as Elizabeth had suggested earlier.
They chose several books that were surprisingly serious even for them.
They sat down and began reading in silence.
They both enjoyed it.
After finishing their books, they returned to the same tree.
When they saw the inscription D + A inside the heart, they quietly chuckled.
— Alex is going to be furious when he sees this, — Vlad joked.
Elizabeth laughed.
They sat beneath the tree and continued talking.
Vlad was braiding Elizabeth's hair when Yulia, one of the counselors, suddenly called them.
— Come on, you two. Let's go to the assembly hall. We have to perform something there, okay?
Vlad and Elizabeth nodded.
Yulia walked ahead.
Vlad's legs had gone numb from sitting for so long, so he groaned quietly and followed Elizabeth toward the assembly hall.
The hall was already full of children.
Alex and Denis were sitting together, discussing their escape plan in whispers.
In the assembly hall, the counselors announced that the children were going to perform Romeo and Juliet.
Everyone sat down and watched.
Vlad and Elizabeth, however, were rather bored.
They already knew the story by heart.
When the performance ended, the children began leaving the hall.
Vlad and Elizabeth returned to the library with Vlad's notebook.
Vlad opened it and began writing.
At the top of the page, he wrote:
"The Performance of the Two-Faced."
They called it the "Performance of the Two-Faced," but inside the enormous hall there were no spectators — only the same faceless puppets whose will had been erased down to its very foundation.
Every morning here began with a monotonous, low hum.
It continuously vibrated at a frequency of 430 Hertz — an oily, viscous sound that seeped through the skull and flooded the mind with sticky fog.
The puppet masters called this hypnotic whisper "Direction."
The soundwave paralyzed the neocortex, forcibly shifting the brain's electrical activity to the theta level — a state of deep, irreversible waking sleep.
Logic, memory, and one's own sense of self dissolved within that sound.
All that remained was pure, absolute hypnosis controlling every breath.
For over thirty years of the Performance, no one had ever seen those sitting in the theater boxes above the stage.
Only fragments of their orders drifted through rusty loudspeakers, which the sleeping mind perceived as its own thoughts.
The Conveyor Belt for Burning Away the Mind
No one was born an actor in this theater.
Every person was brought here through a merciless conveyor belt of mental violence consisting of three stages.
Everything began in completely black, soundproof rooms — conditions of total sensory deprivation.
The prisoner was stripped of all external stimuli: no light, not a single rustle, no tactile sensations.
In such emptiness, the human brain lost its connection to reality.
It was then that three layers of sound were played through hidden headphones: low-frequency infrasound inducing causeless terror, binaural beats, and the monotonous ticking of a whispering metronome that gradually replaced the rhythm of the person's own heartbeat.
When the brain sank into a pliable trance, the "Breaking of Anchors" began.
It was the methodical destruction of the past.
Special linguistic codes were broadcast through loudspeakers, layered over personal memories.
If a person tried to remember their name, a voice in the darkness gently whispered:
— That name belongs to a dead man. Your name is silence.
If the face of a loved one appeared in memory, the hypnotic command instantly linked that image with unbearable fear.
The brain, trying to protect itself, began blocking those memories.
After weeks of continuous suggestion, the personality became almost an empty sheet.
At the final stage came the fixation of the "Mental Lock."
The emptied prisoner was led before a mirror.
At that moment, their mind resembled liquid cement — ready to take any shape imposed upon it.
For the first time, the puppet master placed a heavy mask into the prisoner's numb hands and pronounced the key audio trigger: a short metallic click from the loudspeaker.
At that very instant, a command was permanently implanted into the mind:
"The mask is your face."
The Anatomy of Masks and Trance Triggers
The post-hypnotic command became stronger than ordinary reflexes.
The hypnosis penetrated so deeply that the actors' heartbeat and breathing synchronized with the frequency of the hum in the hall.
Their movements became mechanical.
Their hands obeyed commands without hesitation.
Beneath the masks, their faces had become pale and almost expressionless from years spent away from sunlight.
Their lips barely moved.
The mask itself was made from plaster, compressed ash, and chemical hardeners.
It controlled emotions through trance triggers.
White Side — Ecstasy.
A matte-white half with empty eye slits and a frozen, unnaturally wide smile.
When the actor placed this side against their face, the mental program produced an overwhelming illusion of happiness.
Black Side — Repentance.
A charred, rough surface repeating the contours of a face distorted by pain.
When this side was turned outward, the mental program activated fear.
There was no physical wound.
The mind itself created the sensation.
The Synchronization Ritual
Every four hours came the moment of "Synchronization."
Two figures frozen upon the stage moved toward each other at the center of the circle.
They no longer remembered who they had been before entering the theater.
Their movements were measured down to the millimeter.
At the signal from the loudspeaker, they raised the masks to their faces.
The moment the masks touched their skin, another wave of suggestion flooded their minds.
The remnants of free will disappeared.
One turned the black side outward.
The other turned the white side outward.
The Performance continued.
An Abyss Without Escape
Sometimes, deep within the exhausted psyche, a "Necrosis of Will" occurred — an extremely rare malfunction when the overstrained brain briefly cast off the chains of suggestion.
In one such moment, an actor looked into the empty eyeholes of another mask.
For a fraction of a second, awareness returned.
He understood that his entire life, his thoughts, and his movements had become someone else's commands.
He tried to release the mask.
He tried to scream.
He tried to wake the others.
But the hypnosis was absolute.
The mental commands returned immediately.
The soundwave from the speakers grew louder.
One final command echoed through the enormous hall:
"Forget."
And the consciousness obediently complied.
The darkness of suggestion merged with the darkness outside.
In that enormous room without windows or doors, salvation did not exist.
The most terrible jailer was no longer a person.
It was their own sleeping mind.
The Performance continued.
And the hypnotic sleep deepened endlessly.
Vlad stopped writing.
He stared at the final page for several seconds.
Elizabeth looked over his shoulder.
— That's creepy.
Vlad smiled faintly.
— That's the point.
He closed the notebook.
Outside, the rain continued to fall.
And somewhere beyond the fog, someone was watching the camp.