Chapter 3

By day, I got cursed at as usual. Got hit as usual.

There is no such thing as a “peaceful” day in the mines. The only difference is who goes down—and how many.

If you push the cart a beat too slow, the whip lands on your back. If the man lifting stone slabs falters, the slab comes down, and the person beside him gets kicked too. The overseers like driving people to the limit, then watching to see whether you grit your teeth and hold—or collapse like rotten wood.

In my head I kept doing two things: tracking time, and tracking patterns.

That strange vehicle had appeared once last night, but I couldn’t treat “only once” as a pattern.

I needed to know when it came, when it left, how long the gap was in between, how long the door stayed open, when the patrol on top of the wall changed shifts. Without that, breaking in at night was gambling with my life.

So during the day, whenever my sightline could catch that wall at the top of the slope, I glanced up.

After noon I was assigned to move stone slabs by the ramp, closer to the lord’s estate.

When the night bell rang, the line was herded back to the shacks. During roll call the overseer looked at me, like he wanted to find even a trace of yesterday’s “defiance” on my face.

I kept my head down, slowed my breathing, didn’t even lift my eyes. He lost interest and waved me inside.

I drank thin porridge like always. Lay down like always. I even yawned on purpose a few times so the others in the room would think I was dead tired.

When the snoring rose all around me, I rolled over and sat up. I didn’t climb the slope right away. First I crouched on the outer edge of the shack quarter for a quarter of an hour.

I needed to confirm the night patrol route. When the footsteps faded, I moved through the shadows the same way I had last night.

When I reached the bushes, I lay flat and didn’t move.

I waited a long time.

Long enough to be sure of one thing: at least at this hour tonight, no vehicle would come, and no one would be active outside the wall.

I crawled out of the bushes and pressed close to the outer wall.

I found the raised buttons. I’d memorized the sequence until it was muscle memory, but I still pressed slowly, making sure each position and each pressure was identical.

A faint click sounded inside the wall.

The stone section slid inward, revealing a bright passageway. Light spilled out, stinging my eyes.

I didn’t rush in.

There was a low hum inside, like some machine turning constantly in the distance.

No footsteps. No voices. I held my thin blade in my hand.

Then I stepped into the passage. The door behind me closed automatically.

I walked forward. At the end of the passage was an iron door.

Dark, flat, with no keyhole.

When I’d watched the vehicle enter from behind the bushes, the light was too far away for me to see details. Now that I stood in front of it, I realized it was nothing like any door in the lord’s estate.

As I drew close, the door seemed to sense something and gave a short beep—clean, sharp, almost like a birdcall, but not.

The iron door slid sideways, revealing an even wider corridor.

A row of thin white lights ran along the ceiling, bright enough that the floor held no shadows.

For a split second I felt dizzy, because this light was too much like the harsh glare from the white room in my memory—only less piercing.

I held my breath and stepped in. The door behind me sealed soundlessly.

I moved down the corridor and soon saw a half-open door on the right.

Flickering light pulsed through the gap.

I stopped beside it and listened. There were voices inside—but not the mine’s crude curses, and not the soldiers’ accent either. The tone was something I’d never heard: fast, clipped, flat, with no rise or fall of emotion.

I didn’t shove the door open. I used my fingertips to pry the gap wider by a hair—just enough for a line of sight.

I saw a wall.

The entire wall was screens, arranged in a grid, like someone had hung dozens of moving paintings.

Each screen showed a different corner of the camp: the quarry, the shacks, the ramp, the whipping post, the fork near the lord’s outer wall…

On the screens, there was me.

Not in one. In several at once.

In each one, I was being beaten, dragged, hoisted up, splashed awake.

I saw myself with a hood pulled over my head, feet stepping on that hard ground, half pushed and half dragged forward.

The image cut to the white room. A harsh light poured down. I was pinned into a restraint chair, wrists locked, chest strapped tight.

But one screen showed something even more important.

In that footage, I had resisted before—harder than yesterday.

I’d snatched a club, smashed someone, charged the fence, ran up the ramp, almost out of the camp. The men chasing me couldn’t keep up; the distance widened.

Then, at the edge of the frame, a hand appeared holding a small remote. A thumb pressed a button.

On the screen, my body stiffened as if something had slammed into my bones. I seized, knees crashing to the ground. My fingers clawed at the hard surface but couldn’t push me up. White foam spilled from my mouth.

A few breaths later, several men rushed in and dragged me away.

I stared at the remote, and my mind narrowed to a single conclusion:

There is something inside me.

Not a curse. Not poison. A mechanism buried under the skin. It can drop me at the critical moment, steal my consciousness, and send me back to the mine to keep being a labor slave.

I pulled my eyes off the screens and looked to the other side of the room.

There stood a row of transparent pods. Inside them lay people. Every one of them looked exactly like me—but they wore no clothes, bare-chested, their chests rising faintly. They looked asleep, but that sleep felt more like someone had switched them off.

I didn’t understand who they were, or what they had to do with me. It was beyond anything my mind could contain.

There was only one staff member in the room, seated at a console with his back to the door.

Beside him sat a small tray: a few syringes, several restraint straps—and a remote controller I recognized from the screens.

I slowed my steps and walked in.

At that moment, he caught my reflection in the screen and snapped his head around.

Under the light, I saw he wasn’t a soldier, and he wasn’t a miner.

His face was pale, dark circles under his eyes. His clothes were clean, like new cloth.

When his gaze landed on me, his whole body locked for half a beat. He took a reflexive step back. His eyes swept from my face to my clothes, then to the mud on my feet—as if confirming I hadn’t climbed out of one of the pods.

I didn’t move. I stood where the light could reach me, letting him see exactly who I was.

His throat bobbed, like he wanted to shout for someone—or ask how I got in.

In the end, he did the one motion he knew best.

He grabbed the remote.

He aimed it at me. His thumb came down, almost without hesitation.

On the first press, the back of my neck went numb, like tiny needles exploding under the skin. My knees softened instantly, my stomach rolling with it.

I’d seen that sensation in the screens too many times. I knew what came next: convulsions, collapse, being dragged away.

I clenched my teeth and forced the surge down, heels nailed to the floor.

The staffer’s expression shifted from “problem solved” to “why are you still standing.”

He frowned and pressed the button a second time.

The second hit was harsher. The numbness poured from my neck straight into my skull. Even the ceiling lights wavered; for a moment, all I could hear was a thin, piercing whine.

But I still didn’t fall.

I drove my breathing deeper, forced my weight forward, the way I did when pushing the heaviest stone cart—layer by layer, pressing my strength down through my body.

The pain and numbness were real.

But they couldn’t make decisions for me.

The staffer froze.

He stared at the remote like he’d pressed the wrong button, then looked up at me again. For the first time, panic surfaced in his eyes. His finger even paused on the button, as if he wasn’t sure whether to press it a third time.

I walked toward him.