You want to learn about the outside world, don't you?" His voice dropped, softer yet heavier. "You want to get stronger too, isn't it?"
The words hung between us, sharp as glass, slicing through the silence.
Yes – I wanted all that, but those weren't truly my desires. They were his. He had filled my head with them until the edges blurred; then he turned them inside out and told me they were mine.
He would come in and speak like a teacher, like a prophet, planting rules in my skull: To be strong you must do this. To be strong you must do that. To be strong you must sacrifice this. Over and over, until the seed he planted had grown into something too large for me to uproot alone.
He told me the only way back to my parents was to master the thing inside me, the demon that made my blood burn and my nights fold into nightmares.
"Control it," he said as if the word were simple, as if strength were only a muscle to be flexed. "Get stronger than any man, and then you will be allowed to belong." His voice wrapped around the promise like a bandage, binding hope and fear together so tight they were indistinguishable.
But since I came here, what had I done? What proof of growth could I show? The days blurred into the same sterile rooms, bright lights and the hiss of machines. Needles had become punctuation in my memories – a small, clinical prick, then a slow, searing trail down my veins.
Experiments, tests. Measurements taken and logged with detached efficiency. They called it progress; I called it another weight placed on my shoulders. Outside, men learned and trained; inside, we lay under glass and watched the world through impossible distances.
When I tried to look for change in myself, all I found were scars that didn't match any battle I had chosen. Strength, as he defined it, had been measured in numbers and broken down into charts: heart rate, cortisol spikes, reaction times. They recorded my failures with the same calm as a clerk tallying sums.
I had not walked into a field and faced an enemy; I had not raised my voice for someone else; I had only responded to the controlled chaos they created for me. If that was strength, it felt like a fraud, a pale imitation shaped by needles and orders, not by choices I had made.
So when Drewman asked if I wanted the world, if I wanted to grow, the question landed on me like an accusation and an offering at once. I did want it. I wanted to see streets that weren't fenced by barbed wire, to feel the air of a city that had not been rebuilt with grief. But I could not trust that wanting; it had been set in me by another's hand.
The thought of stepping into a life that might never be mine made my chest tight, and the demon inside me thrummed like a warning drum beneath my ribs.
Right now, as he sat in front of me, his eyes steady and unyielding, he spoke of yet another path to strength. Not through needles. Not through lessons. But through something he called becoming a man.
The words pressed against me like a weight, heavy enough to keep my chest locked tight. My lips parted slightly, as if on instinct, but no sound came. The silence stretched, his gaze never wavering, waiting. My throat felt dry, my tongue heavy, as though my own voice had been buried deep and forgotten.
At last, after what felt like minutes compressed into heartbeats, the words scraped their way up from inside me.
"Y-Yes…" The sound cracked, fragile, almost foreign to my own ears. My lips trembled as I forced the next syllables. "I… want."
The statement stumbled into the air, half-broken but alive.
For a second, Drewman's eyes flickered with something unreadable, then a sharp curve tugged at his mouth – amusement. It wasn't mocking, not fully, but it carried a strange satisfaction, as if he had just won a wager no one else knew about.
Apart from the screams they had wrenched from me during experiments, this was the first time he had heard my voice. My true voice.
Yes, I knew how to speak. I had always known. But every attempt felt like dragging chains over my tongue, each word heavier than the last.
And if I dared form anything longer than a fractured reply, the effort was doubled. I had to search, to dig through the fog in my head, piecing words together like fragments of glass.
Still… it was something. It was a nice beginning.
"So what you mean is that you want to become a man?" he asked, correcting my words with that small, clinical patience of his.
I nodded before I could overthink it, an eager, desperate nod. This could be my ticket out of the place, or at least a sliver of the world beyond these walls. Even if I had no clue what he meant by "becoming a man," the promise of leaving, of learning, pushed my chest forward like a tide.
"Then how about we test that resolve." His voice was quiet, almost conversational, but the sentence carried a weight I could feel in my teeth. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, moving with the effortless calm of someone who never hurried and yet always decided the pace of other people's lives.
The screen lit the dim room with a pale rectangle. On it was a lock – no decoration, only a grid of numbers arranged like a small, cold constellation. Drewman flipped it toward me as if the light itself might teach me something.
"I know your ears might not be that good at catching," he said, the remark clipped and almost casual, "but your eyes understand."
He pushed the phone closer until I could see the faint reflection of my face in the glass. The pattern of numbers waited there, sterile and exact. He muttered, "Enter the numbers that are on your school uniform, twice."
My heart stuttered. The uniform, the stitched code sewn above the pocket, yeah I remembered that.
I looked up at him, his face unreadable again; half-sentence, half-command. There was nothing in his expression to tell me whether this was a simple test or a step into something far worse. My fingers hovered over the glass, trembling slightly as the light warmed the shallow sweat at my brow.
When I touched the first digit, 3… the sound of the tap filled my ears; tiny, and decisive, and somehow it mattered. Then 1… each number I entered felt like a tiny oath. Twice, he wanted it twice.
I swallowed hard, repeating the sequence from the uniform, each press a little louder in the small room, each echo a drumbeat counting out the space between who I was and what he wanted me to become.
As I finished the second run, I couldn't tell which was louder: the phone clicking, my pulse, or the thought that maybe… just maybe, this was the beginning of something irreversible.
The lock dissolved with a faint click, and the screen bloomed open.
What it revealed was something no one would ever think to place in the hands of a five-year-old.
Drewman's gaze lingered on me for a moment, unreadable, before he muttered as he rose, "Don't turn off the screen until I come back." His footsteps retreated with their usual unhurried rhythm, leaving me alone with the device's pale glow.
I sat cross-legged on the floor, the phone warm in my palms, the light staining my face. Curiosity gripped me, and though part of me wanted to look away, my eyes refused. They clung to the images, greedy and unblinking.
The screen flicked with movement; shadows of bodies, a man and a woman pressed together in ways that made no sense to me. Kissing, yes, but then more strange gestures, touches, movements that grew stranger still, each frame shifting toward something rawer, something that demanded a leisure I didn't understand.
My brows knitted, my breath slowed. I couldn't make sense of it, not really. My young mind stretched to grasp meaning, but only fragments slipped through my fingers. And yet… Some pieces felt familiar. The brush of lips, the curve of hands, the closeness – things I had seen before in smaller, simpler ways.
I didn't understand it, but I couldn't deny what flared inside me. My eyes burned with curiosity, and beneath it, a stubborn determination. Was this what Drewman meant? Was this what it meant to be a man, this secret world of images and bodies?
I didn't know. But I kept staring, because not knowing made me want to find out.
But as I kept staring, certain that Drewman was only a few steps down the hallway, my eyelids shut on their own. My body sagged where I sat, yet my grip on the phone never loosened. And when my eyes closed completely, they dragged me into unconsciousness.
Behind me, mounted high in the corner of the room, was a camera. But from the angle with my back turned and my posture slumped no one watching would have noticed anything strange. To them, I looked like nothing more than a child nodding off with a screen in his hands.
Then, only a few minutes later, something burst from within me, a pressure so violent it couldn't be contained. The explosion ripped through the wall to my right, tearing it apart in a thunderous roar. Debris scattered like shrapnel, the force racing outward, blowing through several rooms in its path – even into the quarters of the other children.
The air shook with the violence of it, lights flickering, alarms wailing as dust and fragments rained down.
This was no accident. This was Vanik'shur's reaction, the demon's answer to what my body had been forced to endure.
And this has always been the problem. Emotions.
Whatever I felt; fear, anger, curiosity, even the faintest flicker of wonder, if those emotions collided with Vanik'shur's presence inside me, the result was never quiet. He always reacted destructively. Sometimes it was a whisper in my blood, other times a surge like tonight, breaking loose in violence I couldn't control.
But maybe… maybe this time it was for the best. Because what Drewman had left me with, was something no child should ever be forced to see.
But what if this was the very reason?
What if Drewman hadn't left me with that screen for any other reason… what if he had been certain, from the start, that it would force Vanik'shur to surface? That it would claw at the demon's attention the way no command or injection ever could?
If that was true, then he hadn't just been testing me, he had been testing us.