The cell was steeped in that particular darkness that only fell after the guards' last round, when even the torches in the main corridor finally died out, leaving behind an almost total gloom, pierced only by the thin grey light filtering under the metal door.
Atlas sat cross-legged on his bunk, his body still heavy from the sparring Hercles had forced on him that day, his gaze fixed not on himself, but on the grate separating him from the corridor.
Your Qualia grows in the direction of your raw will.
Hercles' words had been looping in his mind for hours. But that wasn't the only phrase keeping him from sleep. There was also Isaac's, spoken in that almost offhand tone, as one states the obvious: a canvas stretched just a little too tight, ready to tear the moment a will dense enough decides to press against it.
Atlas had never liked metaphors. He preferred things that could be measured. But a metaphor, he thought, was never anything more than a poorly worded hypothesis, waiting for a protocol to test it properly.
The lock on his cell had been rusting for years, probably long before his arrival in this world. A brown-red stain ate away at the metal around the bolt, denser in some places, almost nonexistent in others, following a logic only the corrosion itself seemed to understand. Burnface had grated this gate open dozens of times without ever seeming to notice just how much patience the metal had already lost.
Right. Time to test it.
He closed his eyes to see nothing else. He saw again the three shades of blue, and chose, almost by instinct, the one that drew him most, the azure he knew far too well.
Nothing took the shape of words. Not a single one, not even a thought. The sensation came naturally to him, as if his will were stretching on its own, spreading into the air around him. A will that never asked, because it had already decided the question didn't apply. He let it travel down his arm, to the tips of his fingers still resting on the rust, and held it there, motionless, his face just as empty, a faint azure glow seeping from his eyes.
The silence changed texture before anything became visible. The distant drip of a leak, somewhere in the depths of the block, cut off mid-beat, as if sliced clean. The muffled murmurs of two guards on watch at the far end of the hall vanished too, not gradually, but all at once, as though someone had shut an invisible door between Atlas and the rest of the world. Even his own breathing suddenly felt too loud in this new emptiness, almost obscene.
A tiny, sharp crackle started from the exact point where his fingers rested, and ran along the grate following a pattern that was anything but random. The rust didn't spread in shapeless patches the way it had for years. It followed the tension lines of the metal itself, the welds, the edges, the spots where the iron had always been most worn, the exact map of every weakness it should have exploited from the very first day. Brown-red filaments now ran from one bar to the next, branching like the veins of a dead leaf.
The more the rust devoured the metal, the faster it moved. The bars thinned before his eyes, eaten away from within, their cross-section shrinking second by second into something that looked less and less like iron, and more and more like packed ash.
His jaw tightened. No word came out this time, only a shorter breath, held back, the kind a man holds when he refuses to admit, even alone in the dark, that an experiment has slipped beyond control.
Atlas tried to halt the process, but the momentum refused to reverse. The corrosion kept up its mad rush, devouring the iron with an appetite of its own, utterly deaf to the will that had given it birth. In a matter of seconds, his own power had escaped him.
He slammed his bare palm against the grate, striking right where the rust still gnawed. The rotten metal had turned into a lace of jagged edges, as sharp as broken flint. The pain was immediate, searing. It cut clean through the vertigo of the Distortion, far more effectively than any rational thought could have. Blood welled up at once, black in the dim light, seeping into the grooves of oxide.
The corrosion froze on the spot.
The distant drip resumed its rhythm. The guards' voices picked back up mid-sentence, drowning out the silence, perfectly indifferent to what had just played out a few feet away.
Atlas pulled his hand back. Filaments of rust remained embedded in his torn flesh, mixed with blood already thickening. He stumbled backward, his legs giving out beneath him, and let himself slide down the nearest wall, unable to manage the three extra steps to his bunk.
The backlash hit him without warning.
Exhaustion struck first, crushing, but that wasn't the worst of it. Beneath it crept something quieter, an emptiness that didn't scream but settled into every corner of his mind, muffling his emotions until the bite of his hand reached him only through a thick layer of cotton.
He sat there in the dark, his back against the icy stone. His mangled hand rested on his thigh, the bloody palm turned upward. He stared at it for long minutes with clinical indifference, exactly as if examining a wound on a corpse that wasn't his own.
The darkness swallowed him before he'd even thought to care.
…
The pain caught up with him before he opened his eyes.
A dull, throbbing headache, lodged right at the center of his skull, like a drumbeat too slow to keep time with his heart. Atlas winced, raised a hand to his forehead, and only then noticed the other one.
His palm. No open wound anymore. No dried blood, no shards of metal embedded in the flesh. Just a paler line, barely visible, like the ghost of a cut that should have taken a week to fade.
Of course. Naturally that heals fast too, now.
There was something almost insulting in how easy it was, he thought. As if his own body had taken it upon itself to mother him without asking, erasing his mistakes before he'd even had time to fully regret them.
He stayed still a moment, staring at his own palm. The images of the night came back to him in a rush, no effort needed. The rust that had refused to stop. That brief but very real panic, faced with a power that had suddenly decided it no longer had a master.
And then his eyes fell on the bars of his cage.
The corrosion scar, clearly visible even in the now bright daylight gloom, spread across nearly a third of the door, irregular, almost alive in its pattern. Atlas stared at it for a long while, and felt, against all reason, a smile slip out.
He couldn't have said exactly where that smile came from. From confirmation, yes, that dry satisfaction he knew well, the one that comes from a hypothesis finally holding up. But there was something else underneath, something older, more embarrassing to admit. A boy who'd spent a lifetime being told he was unremarkable, neither brilliant nor a failure, simply average, had just bent metal through the sheer force of what he refused to accept. He never let that thought fully take shape. He just let it float there, somewhere beneath the surface, like something he'd be ashamed of if anyone else knew.
He stood up, still heavy with sleep, and approached the grate to examine it more closely. With his fingertips, he traced the edges of the corrosion, searching, without much hope, for some logic he could reproduce at will. Nothing revealed itself. No particular sensation, no echo of the night before. Just cold, eaten, inert metal.
The emptiness irritated him. He wanted to understand, truly understand, not just confirm that something inside him could do this. All his life he'd hated not knowing how things worked. And now he carried, under his own skin, a mechanism he didn't even possess the manual for.
He pushed, almost out of reflex, on the door. The grate swung open without resistance, without the usual creak, without him needing to put any force into it at all.
Atlas froze, his hand still resting on the metal.
It hadn't even been locked.
Something tightened beneath his ribs, and it wasn't worry. It was closer to excitement, that slightly dirty thrill of breaking a rule. This door shouldn't have been open. He knew it, and he wanted it anyway.
He glanced behind him, then slipped into the corridor, barefoot on the cold stone, his heart beating a little too fast for the caution he was still trying to impose on himself. No guard in sight. No torch, no footsteps. Nothing but silence.
The neighboring cells, one after another, revealed the same emptiness. Not just open. Empty, as if their occupants had left some time ago already, without urgency, without struggle.
An unease began to settle in, more persistent than his headache. You didn't empty an entire block in the middle of the night without a reason, and certainly not without noise. He'd slept deeply, too deeply, and that thought alone bothered him far more than anything else.
And there I was, sleeping like the dead, the whole time.
He went further, finding the same absence at every cell he passed, until he reached the heavy door leading to the stairs back up to the Arena's main hall. It too stood open, ajar on a light brighter than the grey, sparing one of his own corridor, as if the guards, in their haste, hadn't even bothered to shut it.
Atlas hesitated a moment on the last step before fully exposing himself. He weighed the risk of being caught outside his cell against the one that bothered him more — being the only one left in the dark about something everyone else clearly already knew.
Worst case, I'll just say it was already open. That should do it, I think. No one's going to check.
It wasn't even a lie. That small honesty put him a little more at ease.
He climbed the stairs, and the noise reached him before he even hit the landing. Voices. Many voices, mingled, restrained, the kind of collective murmur you only hear in crowds already dreading what they're about to see.
The hall at the top of the stairs was packed. Gladiators from every block, a mass of muscle and sweat, recognizable by their filthy tunics, stood clustered in one corner, some on tiptoe, others climbing onto the benches along the wall, all turned toward the same direction, toward a door Atlas didn't recognize, wider than the others, guarded by two men who themselves seemed unsure whether they were meant to stop anyone from coming closer.
Atlas wove through the bodies, ignoring the glances thrown his way, trying to understand what all these men were waiting for with such silent intensity.
Isaac.
The name surfaced before he'd even finished gathering the clues. The South. They're back. But that's far too soon, isn't it?
A murmur swept through the crowd like a wave, and every gaze turned toward the great door that had just opened.
Only three figures crossed the threshold. Three, where nearly ten had left, as far as Atlas understood.
Silence fell over the entire hall, total, almost painful.
The three men advanced with difficulty, leaning on one another more often than walking unaided, their tunics stiff with dried mud, with blood older than fresh. One of them limped on a leg that no longer seemed quite in its proper place. Another kept his eyes fixed on the ground, as if afraid to meet anyone's gaze in that crowd, even by accident.
Someone in the front row finally dared to ask the question everyone had been holding back since they'd entered.
"The others?"
None of the three answered. The nearest one opened his mouth, seemed to search for something to say, and closed it again without a single sound escaping.
"What happened out there?" another voice pressed, further back in the crowd.
Still nothing. Not a word, not a gesture to explain, only that same absence of an answer, repeated with every new question thrown at them, as though something, down in the South, had also taken from them their very ability to recount what they'd seen.
The three men kept moving through the crowd that parted to let them pass, none of them turning their head toward anyone, until they disappeared through a side door that two guards closed behind them with an eagerness just a touch too sharp.
The murmur picked back up, louder, more on edge, dozens of voices already trying to fill on their own the void the three survivors had refused to fill.
Atlas, for his part, stayed silent, staring at the closed door with a question that refused to let him go.
Seven men are gone, and the three who are left can't even talk about it. What does that to a man?
No sign of Isaac.