Back at the base, Raphael drank another blood bag, washed up, and lay down on the bed.
He was tired in a way that went past the body. The moment his head touched the pillow, his consciousness simply switched off, no transition, no drifting, just gone.
He sank into deep water. Memory came in fragments, washing through him, filling the dark behind his eyes with things he hadn't thought about in years.
A room with no light source. None at all, the kind of dark that human eyes couldn't negotiate with, that offered nothing to work from.
Young Raphael stood in the center of it, eyes closed, a length of fishing line held between his hands.
His palms were striped with cuts and pressure marks, some from the line, some from other things. Some of the blood on them wasn't his.
The door behind him opened.
Two prisoners were shoved through, one with an axe, one with a knife. A guard stood in the doorway, voice flat and administrative.
"Kill him and you go free. The Federation will commute your sentences. This is your window, gentlemen."
The two men looked into the room. At the center of it, where the spill of light from the door barely reached, stood a figure in a prison uniform identical to their own.
Eight years old, maybe. About four-foot-eight. Soaked in blood.
The smell hit them both at the same time, thick and old, too much of it, the kind that meant the floor further back wasn't empty.
"A... kid?"
The one with the axe looked at the one with the knife. There was no pity in his face. Just a specific, uncomplicated relief.
The door swung shut behind them. They moved toward the approximate center of the room together, the axe man already half-laughing.
"I thought it was going to be some kind of animal in here. Or a seven-foot maniac, the way they were going on about it." He kept walking. "It's a child. One swing and I cut him in half."
The knife man's steps had slowed. The unease was building in him with the particular intensity of something his body understood before his mind did.
"Let's be careful. I don't know why they'd go to all this trouble for a kid, but look at the blood on him. That didn't come from himself."
Something closed around the axe man's throat.
Not a hand, something thinner, something that found the soft channels of his neck and pulled inward before he could register what it was.
"Ugh...hk—"
A small body landed on his back simultaneously, one hand sealing his mouth, the combined weight of the grip and the momentum wrenching his center of gravity backward. He went down hard.
The fishing line had buried itself into the meat of his throat. No matter how frantically his fingers searched for it, they kept sliding past.
But too thin, too even with the skin, the line invisible and the panic making his hands useless. He tried to hook it, scratch at it, find the edge of it. Couldn't.
The axe dropped. His legs kicked at the floor and kept kicking, the sound of it reaching the knife man in the dark, and the knife man made a sound that was mostly breath and started moving toward the door.
A few seconds later, the kicking stopped.
"...Ninety-eight."
The boy's voice was clear in the dark. Whatever had belonged to a child in it had been reduced to something very small, a trace element, almost theoretical. The flat note underneath it had taken up most of the space.
The knife man heard it and ran. He had no direction to run in, the dark gave him nothing, and he hit the wall twice, changed direction twice, and then the footsteps behind him started.
He pressed himself against a wall and hammered on it with both fists, his voice cracking with the effort.
"Let me out! Let me out! I give up — I'm done! please—!"
No answer.
The footsteps got closer. He spun around.
Nothing in front of him. Just black.
Then, from directly beside him, a voice that still had the slight unfinished quality of a boy who hadn't fully grown into it yet.
"Were you looking for me?"
Thud.
The axe went in above the nose and stopped at the bridge. The skull split to that line and no further.
Grey matter and blood ran down the face, and the knife man's lips moved once, something that didn't make it to language, before his body went rigid and fell.
Raphael watched the life leave. His hand trembled, slightly. His voice did not.
"Ninety-nine."
Click.
The lights came on all at once. After the dark, the brightness hit him like something physical, he squinted, pupils burning, and waited for the door.
A man in a military uniform walked in. Two armed guards flanked him.
He had the kind of presence that made people straighten their backs without being asked, a voice like something rolling down a stone floor.
"Raphael Alanster."
He looked at the boy in the center of the room.
"Insubordination. Unsanctioned killing of a fellow inmate. Refusal to accept the ruling, followed by the death of all ninety-seven death row inmates subsequently assigned to this room." A beat. "With a piece of discarded fishing line."
He let that land.
"Do you understand the charges against you?"
Raphael looked at him. His face was still a child's face, the features not yet fully settled into what they would become, but the expression on it had nothing of a child in it.
"What exactly am I guilty of?
My father taught me the knife and the axe from the time I could hold them. He taught me how to kill a man with most things. What he didn't teach me was the law. Or manners."
The Major's insignia caught the light briefly. He made a short sound.
"Fine. You are the child of the sinner Alanster, which makes you a sinner yourself by this Federation's reckoning. We'll transfer you to a different facility, a worse one.
The inmates there are murderers, descendants of witches and warlocks, and others like yourself. Children of sinners."
He clasped his hands behind his back.
"No kill limit. As long as you're capable of killing, keep killing.
One month from now, exactly two people must remain standing in that facility.
Remember what you are, and find a way to survive."
The edge of something that might have been grudging respect crossed his face, briefly.
"If you manage it, the Federation may see fit to offer you a pardon. Possibly a position as an operative."
He reached into his jacket, produced a glove, and dropped it on the floor between them.
Black. Leather. It lay there on the blood-soaked ground and looked up at him.
"...Hh."
Raphael drew a long breath and pulled himself out of it. The familiar ceiling of his room at the base came back into focus. He lay there for a moment, not moving.
Then he called up the system.
He'd had enough rest. His body felt functional again, the reserves rebuilt, the dissolution damage finished closing. There was work to do.
The hunting grounds. He needed to look at both of them.
[Second Hunting Ground • Witch: Unlocked.]
[Third Hunting Ground • Sinner: Unlocked.]
A pause. Then:
[Connecting to Third Hunting Ground...]