The "cage" wasn't a metaphor.
Behind the main barracks, there was a structure that looked like a giant, rusted birdcage flipped upside down and hammered into the radioactive soil. The bars were made of recycled rebar, thick as a man's wrist, and humming with a low-frequency vibration that made your teeth feel like they were vibrating out of your gums.
Inside, the shadows moved. It wasn't just one Twitcher. It was a dozen of them—grey, spindly things with elongated limbs and skin that looked like wet parchment. They were hissing, a sound like steam escaping a broken pipe.
"Line up!" Iron Jaw roared.
The twenty survivors—now nineteen after Leo got turned into a red cloud—shuffled forward. They were clutching their "junk" weapons. Grog was holding his shoulder, blood leaking through his fingers where the Twitcher had taken a chunk of him. Ren stood at the front, her face still smeared with that black, oily sludge.
"This is the Birdcage," Iron Jaw said, pacing in front of the bars. "In the real world, these things are the bottom of the food chain. If you can't kill a Twitcher in a controlled environment, you're just a walking snack for the real monsters in the Dead Zone."
He pulled a small, brass key from his pocket and tossed it to Ren.
"You're the leader of Squad Alpha," he said. "Unlock the gate."
Ren looked at the key. It felt heavy. "I didn't ask to be a leader."
"The Academy doesn't ask, Ren. It takes," Iron Jaw grinned. "Unlock it. Or I let the Dogs back into the yard and we see who wins that round."
Ren stepped forward. Her boots crunched on the gravel. Every eye was on her. Blue Hair—whose name was actually Mei, though no one called her that yet—was shaking so hard her rebar spear was rattling against the ground.
Click.
The lock turned. The heavy iron door of the Birdcage swung open with a groan that sounded like a dying animal.
"Five at a time," Iron Jaw commanded. "Ren, Grog, Blue, Scar-face's buddy, and the kid with the glasses. Get in there."
They stepped into the shadows. The smell inside the cage was worse than the garbage truck. It smelled like an open grave in the middle of a chemical fire.
The Twitchers didn't attack at first. They huddled in the corners, their pale, milky eyes tracking the movement of the teens. They were waiting for a sign of weakness.
"They're... they're just people," the kid with the glasses whispered, his voice cracking. "Look at their clothes. That one's wearing a school uniform."
He was right. One of the Twitchers, a small female with her jaw hanging off, was wearing a tattered blazer from the Inner City. She had been someone's daughter once. Someone's sister.
"They aren't people anymore, Specs," Ren said, her voice a low growl. She gripped her cleaver. "They're hunger. That's all."
One of the Twitchers—the one in the school blazer—lunged.
It didn't run like a human. It moved on all fours, its spine snapping and popping with every movement. It cleared ten feet in a single heartbeat.
"Watch out!" Mei screamed.
The Twitcher slammed into Specs. He wasn't fast enough. The creature's long, blackened fingernails ripped through his shirt, carving deep furrows in his chest. Specs let out a high, thin wail as he was pinned to the dirt.
"Get it off him!" Grog yelled, swinging his sledgehammer.
But Grog was injured. His swing was slow. The Twitcher hopped over the hammer, its head swiveling 180 degrees to hiss at him.
Ren didn't wait. She didn't have a plan, just an instinct born from surviving the worst slums in the Northern Sector. She dived.
She tackled the Twitcher off Specs, the two of them rolling in the filth. The creature was surprisingly light—mostly bone and dry muscle—but it was incredibly strong. Its hands gripped Ren's throat, its breath smelling like rotting trash.
Choke.
Ren's vision started to go dark. She couldn't reach her cleaver; it was pinned under her hip.
"Mei! Now!" Ren gasped.
Mei stood there, frozen. Her hands were clamped around the rebar spear. She saw the Twitcher's teeth inches from Ren's face. She saw the black veins pulsing in its neck.
"Do it!" Grog roared, slamming his fist into another Twitcher that was trying to sneak up on him.
Mei screamed—a raw, terrifying sound—and lunged. She didn't aim. She just shoved the sharpened rebar forward with everything she had.
The metal rod went straight through the Twitcher's back and out its chest, pinning it to Ren like a grotesque kebab.
Black blood sprayed Ren's shirt. The creature jerked once, twice, and then went limp.
Ren shoved the corpse off her and scrambled to her feet, coughing. She looked at Mei. The girl with the blue hair was staring at her hands, which were covered in the black sludge. She looked like she was going to faint.
"Don't stop," Ren warned, grabbing her cleaver. "There are ten more."
From outside the cage, Iron Jaw watched with a bored expression. He reached into a small cooler at his feet and pulled out a handful of glass injectors. They were filled with a glowing, neon-green liquid that looked like liquid poison.
"Enough of the slow-motion dancing!" he yelled over the sound of the fighting. "You're fighting like humans. That's your first mistake."
He walked up to the bars and threw the injectors through the gaps. They landed in the dirt, glowing like radioactive emeralds.
"The 'Green-Line' injectors," Iron Jaw said. "The military calls it 'Combat Enhancement.' We call it 'The Devil's Spit.' One dose will give you the strength of five men and the speed of a bullet. It also rots your heart if you use it twice in a day."
Grog looked at the glowing tube near his foot. He was bleeding out from his shoulder. He was tired. He was weak.
"Don't do it, Grog," Ren shouted, parrying a claw with her cleaver. "We can handle them without that crap!"
"No we can't!" Grog yelled back. He looked at Specs, who was lying in the mud, clutching his shredded chest. He looked at the three Twitchers circling them.
Grog grabbed the injector. He didn't hesitate. He slammed the needle into his thigh and pressed the plunger.
The effect was instant.
Grog's eyes didn't just dilate; the pupils vanished, replaced by a solid, glowing green. The veins in his neck bulged until they looked like thick ropes. He let out a roar that didn't sound human. It sounded like an engine redlining.
He grabbed his sledgehammer—a tool that weighed fifty pounds—and swung it with one hand.
BOOM.
The head of the nearest Twitcher didn't just break; it exploded. Bone fragments flew across the cage like shrapnel. Grog didn't stop. He blurred across the dirt, a whirlwind of violence. He was tearing the Twitchers apart with his bare hands, ripping limbs from sockets, laughing with a manic, terrifying joy.
"Grog! Stop!" Ren yelled.
But Grog couldn't hear her. He was lost in the "Green-Line."
By the time the last Twitcher was a pile of twitching meat, Grog was standing in the center of the cage, shaking. The green glow was fading from his eyes, replaced by a deep, hollow grey. He collapsed to his knees, vomiting up a mixture of the protein block and dark bile.
Iron Jaw opened the gate.
"Trial over," he said, checking his watch. "Not bad. Two minutes and forty seconds. A new record for trash."
He walked over to Grog and kicked him lightly in the side. Grog didn't move. He was unconscious, his heart rate so fast you could see his chest vibrating.
"He'll live," Iron Jaw said, "but he'll wish he didn't when the crash hits. That's the problem with shortcuts. They always take a piece of you."
He looked at the remaining students outside the cage. They were all staring at the injectors still lying in the dirt. Some looked horrified. Others... others looked hungry. They saw the power Grog had. They didn't care about the cost.
"Pick up your 'classmates'," Iron Jaw said, pointing to Specs and Grog. "The barracks are open. Get some sleep. Tomorrow, we start the real work."
As Ren helped Mei carry the unconscious Specs out of the cage, she looked back at the Birdcage. The "Sweepers" were already coming—drones with flamethrowers to sanitize the area.
She looked at the injector still clutched in Grog's limp hand.
The Academy wasn't teaching them how to be soldiers. It was teaching them how to be weapons. And weapons don't have friends. They only have targets.
"Ren," Mei whispered as they walked toward the dark barracks. "What happens when they run out of Twitchers?"
Ren didn't answer. She knew the answer.
When they ran out of monsters to fight, The Academy would just make them fight each other.
The barracks wasn't much better than the garbage truck. It was a long, low-slung building made of corrugated metal that moaned every time the wind kicked up. Inside, the air was freezing and thick with the smell of wet dog and ozone.
There were no individual rooms. Just rows of metal bunks with thin, stained mattresses. A single flickering light strip hummed overhead, casting long, twitchy shadows against the walls.
They dumped Grog onto a bottom bunk. The big guy was shivering so hard the metal frame rattled against the floor. His skin had gone from that manic, glowing red to a sickly, translucent blue.
"He's freezing," Mei said, her voice trembling as she wiped a smudge of black blood off her cheek. "We need a blanket or something."
"There are no blankets, Blue," Ren said. She was sitting on the edge of the opposite bunk, meticulously cleaning the black sludge off her meat cleaver with a scrap of fabric she'd torn from a dead kid's shirt. "In this place, if you want to stay warm, you sleep close or you shiver. That's it."
Suddenly, Grog let out a choked gasp. He rolled over and began to retch, clutching his stomach. The "Green-Line" was leaving his system, and it was taking his dignity with it.
"Don't touch the vomit," Ren warned as Mei moved to help him. "That stuff is toxic. If it gets in an open cut, you'll be the next one in the Birdcage."
Mei recoiled, her face pale. She looked around the room at the other fourteen survivors. They were all huddled in small groups, eyes wide and darting. The "trust" they had shared for those few minutes in the cage was already evaporating.
CLACK. CLACK. CLACK.
The sound of heavy boots on the metal floor made everyone jump. Iron Jaw walked in, holding a digital tablet that flickered with a harsh blue light. Behind him, two guards stood with their rifles leveled at the bunks.
"Listen up, meat," Iron Jaw said. "The first trial is recorded. Your performance—speed, aggression, and survival instinct—has been calculated by the Central Core. Look at the wall."
A projector hummed to life, beaming a list onto the rusted metal wall of the barracks.
> SQUAD ALPHA RANKINGS:
> * Ren – Grade: A (Executioner)
> * Grog – Grade: B- (Berserker / Dependent)
> * Mei – Grade: C+ (Support / Hesitant)
> ...
> * Specs – Grade: D- (Fodder)
>
"The rankings determine your rations," Iron Jaw explained, his metal jaw clicking. "Rank 1 through 5 gets a double protein block and a clean liter of water. Rank 6 through 15 gets the standard sludge. The bottom four..." He paused, a cruel glint in his eyes. "The bottom four get to eat what's left in the bucket."
He looked at Specs, who was still clutching his bandaged chest. "And if you're too injured to work tomorrow, you're downgraded to 'Medical Waste.' We don't fix broken tools here. We recycle them."
After the guards left, the room was silent. The "Double Rations" sat on a small table near the door. Five clean bottles of water. Five solid, grey bricks.
Ren stood up. She felt every eye in the room on her back. She walked to the table, picked up two bottles of water and two protein blocks, and walked back to her bunk.
She didn't eat. She tossed one bottle and one block onto Grog's chest.
"Eat," she commanded.
"Why?" Grog wheezed, his eyes bloodshot. "I... I'm a 'Dependent' now. That's what he said. I'm a loser."
"You're a shield," Ren said, her voice flat. "And shields are only useful if they aren't cracked. Eat the food. Tomorrow, the trials won't be in a cage. They'll be out there."
She pointed a thumb toward the window, where the dark silhouettes of the scrap mountains loomed under the sickly moon.
"Wait," a boy from the middle of the room stood up. He was a wiry kid with a facial tattoo that looked like a barcode. "You're Rank 1. You don't get to decide who eats. That extra food belongs to the top five. Grog is Rank 2, fine. But what about the rest of us?"
He stepped toward the table, his hand reaching for the remaining rations.
Ren didn't say a word. She just leaned over and picked up her rusted cleaver. She didn't point it at him; she just started scraping a piece of dried bone off the edge.
The sound—skreeee, skreeee—filled the quiet room.
The boy froze. He looked at Ren's eyes. They weren't the eyes of a teenager. They were the eyes of something that had already died and come back wrong.
He pulled his hand back and retreated to his bunk.
As the flickering light strip finally died, plunging the barracks into total darkness, the real sounds of The Academy began.
It wasn't the wind. It was the sound of something moving under the floorboards. A wet, sliding sound.
"Did you hear that?" Mei whispered from the bunk above Ren.
"Yeah," Ren replied, her hand gripping the handle of the cleaver under her thin pillow.
"Ren... why are we really here? This isn't a school. It's a slaughterhouse."
Ren looked up into the darkness. She remembered the day the Enforcers dragged her out of the hole she called a home. They hadn't told her she was going to school. They told her she was being "reclaimed."
"We're here because the world is full," Ren said quietly. "And when a cup is too full, you have to pour some out. We're the part that's being poured."
Outside, a Dog let out a long, mournful howl. Inside, nineteen kids lay in the dark, wondering which one of them would be the first to break when the sun came up.