Theron had awakened the next morning, deeply relieved he was still alive, and in reasonably good shape, to his surprise.
"What is happening to my body?" Theron wondered. His heartbeat was steady now, yet strange aches bloomed in places he didn't know could hurt, and uncontrollable anxiety wouldn't let him rest.
Over the past two days, his senses had sharpened to an almost unbearable pitch. He felt he could hear through the thick walls of the medical wing—every conversation, every footstep, every breath held just beyond the metal. It was as if his ears had become antennae, tuned to frequencies most people lived their entire lives deaf to. The sensation was both terrifying and intoxicating.
At first he thought his skin would be irritated—he hadn't showered in almost a week—but then he caught himself, piecing it together.
The hyperawareness went deeper than hygiene. Something fundamental had shifted in the architecture of his senses.
"They have cleaning protocols," he muttered, though uncertainty colored the words. "I hope."
Although hyperresponsive to every sound, every noise seemed to sit in his skull like weight, as if his mind had frozen solid.
It was becoming harder to distinguish between external sounds and the ones his body generated—his own breath, the blood moving through his veins, the hum that had never quite left since Screening."The world's noise tastes different now," he murmured. "It's true what they say."
In prison you have endless hours. You come out a new person—mentally, physically. Reborn. Or destroyed.
The thought wasn't his own. It belonged to something he'd read once, or heard Kaelen say years ago. But it fit. It fit perfectly.
...
Theron spent hours locked in observation, jumping between thoughts, cataloging every detail the medical wing offered. Information was currency here.
In the docks, you learned survival by watching the tides. Here, you learned it by mapping rhythms.
Two guards rotated: twenty minutes standing watch, twenty minutes on break. The other pair mirrored the rhythm, a dance he'd memorised by hour three. The precision of it was almost mathematical. Steven and Joshua in the morning. Two different faces—Marcus and Elena—in the afternoon. Each with their own tells, their own small habits.
Steven had a habit of checking his wrist panel every five minutes, as if time moved differently for him than everyone else. Joshua stood perfectly still, the kind of stillness that came from military training or deep fear. Marcus hummed under his breath—something similar, what Theron recognised as a melody from before the Collapse, old and mournful. Elena picked at her fingernails, leaving small crescents of blood that she never bothered to clean.These tiny details were the only vocabulary the facility offered him.
If he trusted his hearing—and lately, he was inclined to—he was one level underground, maybe at ground level. No windows. No sounds below. Only the scrape and shuffle of feet above. The distant rumble of what might have been a generator, or vehicles, or both. The facility existed in layers, and he occupied the lowest accessible one.
The smell of disinfectants and cheap coffee reeked through the small window of the metal door, through which he was fed potato mush and water. Always at 7 AM, 1 PM, and 6 PM. The meals were exactly the same, as if they were created by a machine that had been programmed once and never adjusted. Theron found something almost comforting in the repetition. The world outside was chaos and uncertainty. This cage was honest in its monotony.
It was foolish—he knew it was foolish—but Theron clung to the thought: if escape came, only four guards stood between him and whatever lay beyond. He had mapped their positions, their breaks, their vulnerabilities. Steven was the weak link—too angry, too resentful of Joshua's authority. A man like that could be manipulated. A man like that had cracks.But the metal door between him and freedom was as thick as the walls. Thicker, maybe. He'd tested it during his first hours, pushing against it with his shoulder, running his fingers along the seam. It hadn't budged. More than that, he sensed—though he couldn't explain how—that it was reinforced with something that would resist force. Everything in this place was designed to contain, not to comfort.
A voice crackled over the speakers, mechanical and urgent.
"All higher-grade subjects to be sent to undergo cleansing. I repeat. All higher-grade subjects—"
The loop continued for two minutes, each repetition grinding deeper into the silence.
Theron's heart rate spiked. His hands went cold.
Higher-grade subjects. What did that mean?
In minutes, doors hissed open around him. He caught a glimpse of one inmate being moved—unconscious, sedated, restrained with a shock collar and a canvas shirt with arms that led nowhere. The man's limp body said everything. This wasn't medical observation. This was containment of something dangerous.
Theron was still in chains, yes, but lighter ones. Restraint on one wrist, a simple iron cuff. Not a collar. Not yet.
He thought of Kaelen's notebook, from which he had already memorised the opening line: If you are reading this, T, I'm glad. It means that he held his word.
Who was "he"? Lucas, obviously. But the deeper question remained: what had Kaelen asked Lucas to do? What trap or salvation had been set in motion when the notebook was placed in Theron's hands?
Powerful flares. Not him. He wasn't on the list of those "higher-graders".
Theron exhaled, and for the first time in days, something close to relief moved through him. But underneath it was something else—a strange, cold current of doubt. Part of him had wondered, in the dark hours, whether he wanted to be on that list. Whether flareless was a curse or a reprieve.
The facility had taught him something in just two days: power, real power, made you a target. The flareless were invisible. The flareless survived.
Or did they simply exist in a state of slow death, so gradual you never noticed yourself fading?
Nevertheless, for the first time ever, Theron though of himself as a lucky guy.
...
By day two, Theron had learned the rhythm. Every morning at 9 AM, a guard opened his door for the standard scan—the same procedure he'd memorised during his first ordeal. Three sensors on the temples, two on the wrists, one over the heart. A machine that hummed in a pitch just beyond human hearing, but not beyond Theron's anymore.
The guard's expression shifted between amusement and something darker—apprehension, maybe fear. He'd expected Theron not to survive this long. There was a question in his eyes: How is the flareless kid still breathing?
Theron had no answer to give him.
The second guard entered, and they began a low conversation, voices overlapping. They didn't bother to whisper. They didn't think he could hear. Or they didn't care.
Though they whispered, Theron's sharpened ears caught every word. His isolation had tuned him to the smallest sounds. Their voices came through monotone, almost mechanical:
"Director Voss brought this brat here for what, exactly?" Steven's voice had an edge like broken glass. "Why? He's flareless. The only interesting thing about him is that he survives—lives in the docks long enough, I suppose you learn how not to break. Haha."
There was something cruel in that laugh. Something that made Theron understand, in a way he hadn't before, what his entire existence had been: a lesson in how to endure humiliation without shattering. The docks had taught him that. His mother's absence. Kaelen's imprisonment. All of it had been training for this moment—sitting in a medical cell, listening to guards debate his worthlessness.
"You question orders?" Joshua's voice dropped to something colder. "I'll have you sent to cleansing with the others. Remember your place, Steven. Your resonance barely edges above his. You're not so different from the brat."
The threat landed perfectly. Theron watched—through the small window in the door—as Steven's entire body went rigid. The fear was palpable, animal. Joshua had found the exact pressure point.
Steven's mouth opened, then closed. The word cleansing had hollowed him out. He had no response.
"Close the door. I'm finished."
"Yes, sir." Steven's hand shook as he sealed the door.
Theron pressed himself against the wall, away from the window. His heart was hammering. Not from fear, though fear was there. But from understanding. He was watching a microcosm of the entire system. Every person was afraid of someone. Every person had a someone whose fear they could exploit. And at the top—Director Voss, presumably—there was someone who orchestrated it all, holding the threat of cleansing like a blade.
A hierarchy. Even here, even among the controllers, there was a chain. And Theron was learning how it broke.
What if he wasn't flareless anymore?
What if everything the system believed about him—powerless, worthless, expendable—was based on a lie?
The thought terrified him more than any cleansing facility ever could.
Outside his door, Marcus made his rounds, footsteps steady and rhythmic. The world turned. The system ground forward. And in the darkness of his cell, Theron Amina listened to the hum inside his own chest and wondered what song he was beginning to sing.