The protective camp run by Halcyon was nothing short of a masterpiece when it came to benevolent deception—at least, that's what anyone viewing it from the outside would think. Every building had been constructed with care, their walls painted in those soft, soothing colors that were supposed to make you feel safe, make you feel like everything was going to be okay. Modern architecture blended seamlessly with carefully maintained green spaces. The lawns were trimmed with obsessive precision, not a single blade of grass out of place, as if nature itself had been tamed and forced into submission for the sake of appearances.
Playground equipment dotted the grounds—swings that creaked gently in the breeze, a climbing frame that gleamed under the perpetually sunny sky, slides that curved invitingly downward. From above, from any official inspection, from any promotional material the foundation might produce, this place looked exactly like what it claimed to be: a haven. A sanctuary for children who had nowhere else to go. A place of hope and new beginnings.
To the children who actually lived within its carefully maintained boundaries, though? It often felt like something else entirely. A very pretty cage. A gilded prison where the bars were invisible but no less real.
Little Elijah existed within this place as something less than a presence—more like a shadow that moved through the spaces between other people's lives. The procedure they'd performed on him, that implant they'd forced into his skull, the memories they'd tried to strip away or bury or seal behind walls he couldn't breach—it had all left him with something that felt like a permanent fog in his mind. A persistent, low-grade confusion that never quite went away, no matter how hard he tried to think clearly. It was as if his own memories had become a book with pages glued together, and every time he tried to pry them apart to see what was written there, he only succeeded in tearing the paper, losing more of whatever truth might have been recorded.
He was quiet by nature now, though whether that quietness had always been part of him or was a consequence of what they'd done, even he couldn't say. He was observant in the way that prey animals are observant—always watching, always aware of where the threats might come from, always calculating the safest path through any given situation. And he was small for his age, his growth seemingly stunted by trauma or genetics or the inadequate nutrition of his early years, despite the foundation's supposedly balanced meal plans.
It was a combination that painted a target on his back in bright, unmissable colors.
The other children—a collection of orphans, "displaced" youths, kids whose parents had been deemed unfit or who had simply vanished into the cracks of a society that didn't care enough to keep track—had their own hierarchies, their own social structures, their own brand of cruelty. They weren't monsters, not really. Most of them had been victims themselves at one point or another. But hurt people hurt people, as the saying goes, and children were no exception to that rule. In fact, sometimes they were the worst about it, their cruelty having a casual, grinding quality that adults had usually learned to disguise better.
They circled him in the common room, where the too-bright lights buzzed overhead and the furniture was arranged in configurations that were supposed to encourage "healthy socialization." They found him in the dormitory hallways, where the sanitized smell of industrial cleaning products couldn't quite mask the underlying scent of too many bodies in too small a space. They cornered him on the edges of the playground, where the supervisors' sightlines didn't quite reach and the cameras had convenient blind spots.
A boy named Elvis had appointed himself the ringleader of Elijah's tormentors. He was older, bigger, with that particular brand of confidence that came from never having been seriously challenged. He'd coined the nickname they all used now, delivering it with a sneer that had become as familiar to Elijah as his own reflection.
"Look, it's dummy face ," Elvis would announce whenever Elijah entered a room, his voice carrying that particular tone of contempt that children somehow perfected before they even hit puberty. "Dummy face , dummy face … does anything come out, or do you just bounce back silence?"
The other kids would laugh. Not all of them, not always, but enough. Enough to reinforce the hierarchy. Enough to remind Elijah exactly where he stood in the social order of this pretty prison.
There was a girl named Lara, too, with sharp elbows and sharper words. She specialized in the "accidental" cruelties, the ones that could be dismissed as misunderstandings or clumsiness if any adult happened to notice. She'd bump into him at the lunch line with just enough force to send his tray clattering to the floor, food scattering across the too-clean tiles, other kids having to step around the mess while Elijah scrambled to clean it up before the supervisors noticed and added it to his growing list of infractions.
"Oops," she'd say, her voice dripping with false apology. "You're so light, Elijah. Like a little leaf. You should eat more, but then again, maybe you're just meant to be blown away."
The cruelties multiplied and varied. They tripped him during the mandatory group runs, their feet shooting out at just the right moment to send him sprawling onto the track, gravel embedding itself in his palms. They hid his assigned reader—the tablet device they were all given for educational purposes—forcing him to face the tutors empty-handed and suffer through their disappointed lectures about responsibility. They mocked his hesitant answers during the foundation's informal tutoring sessions, those supposedly supportive environments where children were encouraged to learn at their own pace. His pace, apparently, was too slow. Always too slow.
Their words became a constant soundtrack to his existence, a litany of casual cruelty that wore away at him like water on stone. Stupid. Slow. Weak. Ghost-boy. Worthless. Why are you even here? Nobody wants you. Nobody ever wanted you.
And Elijah took it. He absorbed it all, every word, every shove, every contemptuous look. The anger and humiliation pooled in his gut like something physical, a hot, leaden weight that grew heavier with each passing day. But he had no outlet for it, no acceptable form for its expression. The foundation had strict rules about violence, about aggression, about any behavior that disrupted the carefully maintained illusion of harmony. To fight back would be to give them an excuse to do worse things to him—more procedures, more adjustments, more of whatever they'd already done to his head.
So he just grew quieter. His shoulders curled inward, his posture becoming a physical manifestation of defeat. His gaze stayed perpetually fixed on the ground a few feet ahead of him, because meeting anyone's eyes only invited more attention, more opportunities for fresh humiliation.
The breaking point, when it came, was small. They always are, aren't they? The final straw is never the heaviest burden—it's just the one that happens to land at the exact moment when you have nothing left to hold it with.
It happened during one of the structured "team-building" exercises the foundation was so fond of. Some pointless game involving passing a ball through a series of hoops, the kind of activity that was supposed to teach cooperation and trust but mostly just reinforced existing social hierarchies. The supervisors watched from a distance, clipboards in hand, making notes about which children were "engaging positively" and which needed "additional behavioral support."
Elijah was nervous, his hands already sweating as the ball came toward him. He could feel Elvis watching, could sense the anticipation of his failure radiating from the other boy like heat. When the ball reached him, his fingers fumbled the catch. It bounced off his palm, rolled away across the grass, and the game dissolved into chaos.
Elvis didn't shout. Didn't make a big scene that would attract the supervisors' attention. He just walked over, placed both hands on Elijah's chest, and shoved. Not hard enough to be called assault, not violent enough to trigger intervention. Just enough force to send Elijah stumbling backward, his feet tangling, his body hitting the neatly manicured grass with a soft thud.
"Useless," Elvis muttered, the word not shouted but delivered with a cold, definitive finality that somehow made it worse than any scream could have been.
The other kids didn't laugh this time. They just looked at Elijah on the ground with a uniform, dismissive boredom, their expressions saying clearly that this was exactly what they'd expected, exactly what someone like him deserved. That casual indifference, that complete lack of surprise or concern—that was worse than any active mockery could have been.
Elijah didn't get up immediately. He waited, his cheek pressed against the grass that smelled of chemicals and artificial growth, until the group had moved on. Their attention shifted elsewhere with the short memory span of children, already forgetting him, already moving to the next activity. Only then did he push himself to his feet, his movements slow and careful, as if his body might break if he moved too quickly. He dusted off his standard-issue grey trousers—the ones that never quite fit right, too loose in some places and too tight in others—and walked away.
He didn't go to the dormitory, where his narrow bed and small locker waited in their assigned spaces. He walked instead to the farthest edge of the compound, to a forgotten strip of gravel behind the laundry building where the sunny facade of the foundation finally cracked and showed its true face. Here, the fence was visible—not hidden behind carefully planted shrubs or decorative screens, but standing stark and undisguised, a reminder of what this place really was.
Beyond the fence, rolling hills stretched out under a vast, indifferent sky. Empty land that went on forever, offering the illusion of freedom to anyone who didn't know about the monitoring systems and response protocols that would activate the moment any child tried to cross that boundary.
He found a lone curbstone, its concrete surface warmed by hours of sun exposure, and sat down heavily. The heat seeped through his trousers, almost uncomfortable, but he didn't move. He stared at the sky, at that endless expanse of blue that seemed to mock his small, contained misery.
The tears didn't come in sobs. He was too tired for that, too wrung out for anything dramatic. They were just a silent, hot overflow, tracking clean lines through the dust on his cheeks, leaving trails that he didn't bother to wipe away. His chest ached with a hollow, furious shame that had no outlet, no release.
He was small. He was defenseless. And the world inside the fence was just a softer version of the one outside—a place where strength, or at least the illusion of it, was the only currency that truly mattered. All the rest—the kind words, the therapeutic sessions, the promises of safety and support—were just window dressing on the same fundamental truth.
He sat there until the tears dried into tight, salty tracks on his skin, until his eyes felt gritty and raw. The leaden feeling in his gut hadn't dissipated; if anything, it had only solidified, growing colder and heavier, settling into something that felt almost permanent.
It was then, in that moment of absolute defeat, that he heard it.
A sound that didn't belong in the curated quiet of Halcyon. Not the sound of voices, not the distant shouts from the playground, not the mechanical hum of the facility's various systems. This was something else entirely—a series of sharp, percussive thwacks, rhythmic and hard, followed by a low grunt of effort that spoke of physical exertion. Then a faster series: thwack-thwack-CRACK.
It was the sound of impact. Of force meeting resistance. Of something or someone striking something else with controlled violence.
Elijah's curiosity—a reflex not yet completely beaten out of him despite everything—prickled to life. He stood slowly, wiping his face roughly with his sleeve, smearing the tear tracks into dirty streaks. The sound was coming from somewhere nearby, from the other side of the laundry building, from a section of the compound that was usually cordoned off by a discreet, vine-covered lattice screen. An area he'd been told, in the foundation's gentle but firm way, was off-limits to residents.
He moved quietly, his small sneakers making no sound on the gravel as he crept along the building's edge. His heart was beating faster now, though whether from fear or anticipation or simple curiosity, he couldn't say.
He found a gap in the lattice—a narrow triangle of view where the vines had failed to grow as thickly as elsewhere, leaving a space just large enough for a small boy to peer through. He pressed his face close to the opening, one eye aligned with the gap.
He looked through, and his breath caught in his throat.