While Elian listened to S's laughter —the same one from the call with Aidrien echoing through the fortress speakers— he kept walking down the corridors of the cells where boys and girls once didn't know if they would live or die. Those children were gone now: some had become part of the Legion —1305 (the eternal top 6), 1197 (former top 1), 1223 (former top 5), 1288 (former top 3), and 1301 (former top 1). They were faces Elian recognized. The other fifty were from before his arrival; he never asked about them. It wasn't as if the Legion members talked to him anyway.
"Hey… sometimes I miss them," Elian said aloud, speaking to his entities. "They weren't all that bad. Well, they were; they beat me up whenever they could, but they did it because they had no choice."
"Really?" the Demon mocked in his mind. "Hahahaha, how pathetic. You're more broken in the head than I am… and I share your skull. Ha."
"Shut up!" the Angel growled, furious. "I'm sick of sharing a body with you. I don't want to keep listening to you."
"Really? Look at me and see how little I care, you piece of trash," the Demon replied, taunting.
By now Elian could almost picture the scene without diving into his mind: his entities' fights had become routine.
"Seriously…" he muttered, listless. "I can't believe these fights matter less to me than the shit."
"SHUT UP!" the two of them yelled in unison inside his head. Elian flinched, covered his ears, and shook his head hard—putting on a show of authority he knew was fake: he did it to convince himself he still controlled something.
Since the Angel and Demon arrived, Elian had learned small things about them. The Demon was extremely sensitive to smells and textures: when S intentionally spilled a hot cup of coffee one time, the Demon threw a fit because the smell bothered him. The Angel, on the other hand, was intolerant of loud noises: once S woke them with a megaphone and the Angel writhed on the floor; Elian lost hearing for a few minutes. He'd also noticed the Angel seemed responsible for his rapid healing—after the coffee burn, it was the Angel who meditated and allowed Elian to recover—while the Demon had sharpened his instincts: made him lighter, keener, more "free."
For a week Elian had been thinking about escaping… without success.
"Let's run this again, guys," he said one night, in his mental plane.
"Don't drag me into your freedom delusions again," the Angel answered dryly.
"And watch you die?" the Demon laughed. "No thanks. If you die, we die too—don't we, tiny bag of rage?" He looked toward the Angel, who ignored him while embracing Elian.
"Yeah, yeah…" Elian replied, pushing the Demon away with a gesture. "I'll tell you what we know about fortress security. Guards change every six hours; cameras and some doors are unattended for about five minutes—" he'd always been bad at timing— "S can see us from anywhere: he also has Divine Vision, so escaping is hard; the ideal would be at night, if he sleeps. Though I doubt he sleeps. There are traps; I detected three on my first try."
"Don't remind me!" the Angel snorted. "Because of that escape attempt I healed you for nine hours straight. You don't know how much I hated those nine hours."
"I liked it," the Demon said, almost savoring it. "Those spikes, that corrosive fluid… that exquisite laser beam…"
"That wasn't a good first attempt," Elian admitted.
"THERE WILL BE NO OTHER," decreed the Angel.
"THERE WILL BE ANOTHER," replied the Demon.
They spoke at once. Elian sighed, tired of the same argument.
"All right, change of plan," he proposed. "Any ideas?"
Both entities leaned in, tempting him with the usual promises.
"If you let me use your body, I'll kill them all, even S," the Demon said, extending a hand. "I'll make them pay for everything."
"Let me," the Angel answered. "I will judge them. No one will be safe from God's judgment."
Elian looked at them, resigned.
"You never learn," he said, covering his eyes with his arm. "Fine: I'll try something else." He took the Demon's hand with his right and the Angel's with his left and pulled hard. Both slammed their heads together with a brutal clash.
"Aaah!" they complained at the same time.
"Always the same," Elian said. "Can you stop trying to take my body? I won't give it to either of you. You'd only cause more trouble."
The entities clicked their tongues: the Demon mockingly, the Angel in anger. A brief silence reigned in Elian's mind until, determined, he shouted:
"IT'S DECIDED. ON FEBRUARY 18, 291 D.G.C. I WILL TRY TO ESCAPE AGAIN."
His entities resumed their squabbling, but a smile formed on Elian's face. He was decided: he would flee at the slightest opportunity.
Meanwhile, at the Alhazen mansion.
Three days after the succession ceremony, Aidrien summoned Prince to his office. Father and son met again in short order.
"What do you want, father?" Prince asked, standing straight and serious.
"I have a task for you," Aidrien said. "It will be the first of many, to prove you want to be a true Alhazen."
Prince's eyes lit up. This was the moment he'd waited for his whole life: a chance to lead something within the Order of the Black Mantle, to prove his worth.
"As you wish, father," he replied, trying to contain his smile. "What must I do? A raid, a kidnapping, wipe out a rebel cell?"
"It's not that complex," Aidrien said, dousing any warrior fantasies. "S finished his project. He has a cargo of fifty-five soldiers—young people between ten and sixteen, though some were kept in hibernation capsules for decades—and also a new 'S': a Genesis under Alhazen control. The location is marked here." He snapped his fingers: the presidential hall sealed, lights dimmed, and the floor became a giant holographic map of Lirium. On the far right, near the country border, a red point labeled F. "S" shone. "You must go there. You have one week to assemble and bring me those soldiers and the new Genesis. By February 18, 291 D.G.C. If you succeed, I won't stand in your way when you claim the Order and the presidency."
He snapped again: the map vanished, lights returned, the curtains opened.
Prince swallowed. This wasn't the mission he'd imagined, but if it gave him the chance to inherit the Order and prove his worth… he would accept.
"I'll do it gladly, father. If you allow, I'll assemble twenty Order soldiers and we'll depart," he said, bowing.
"Permission granted. You may go."
Outside the office, Irene waited on Prince's orders. He whispered the plan to her.
"Vermeer, ready your combat team. It's time to prove my worth."
Irene snorted. If Prince succeeded, she'd be sidelined and return to leading the eleventh platoon—but she answered, resolved and grudgingly.
Thus, at both ends two young people prepared for the impossible: one to escape S's impregnable fortress; the other to assault it.
Prince chose nineteen trusted Order men, equipped them with the best arms and gear, and left. Irene accompanied him, brows knitted.
Elian, meanwhile, kept refining routes, hunting traps, and trying to outwit S's Divine Vision. Everything culminated on the appointed day: February 18, 291 D.G.C.
That morning Elian woke earlier than usual; Prince did not: he'd been moving toward the fortress for a day and a half with Irene and the nineteen soldiers, confident the mission would be clean. For Prince, it was his chance to prove S was wrong not to have trained him personally.
At 9:00 a.m. Elian started his operation. At 9:30 a.m. there was a guard change; he used it to ride the elevator up from Level -5. He'd left the control panel disabled in the morning, so the elevator stalled at Level 1. He sprinted to the outer wall: a hundred meters of dark brick, barely any handholds. He breathed, launched himself, and climbed, digging his fingers in until they bled and his nails broke; the Angel healed the damage, the Demon laughed inside. In two minutes he'd reached the top of a wall that would have taken anyone else hours.
But there, on the crest, was S, wearing that sadistic smile, waiting. Before Elian could react, S kicked him: he fell backward in a drop no untrained human would have survived. S followed, landing perfectly, leaving a shallow crater where his feet hit.
"Second attempt and you did like shit," S taunted. "Fun."
"Shit," Elian whimpered, aching, but his body began to recover thanks to the Angel. The Demon chuckled inwardly; the Angel scolded him for recklessness.
That night, around 11:00 p.m., when Prince was already at the fortress gates, he didn't opt for a quiet extraction. He ordered an attack: two rocket launchers struck the walls and guard posts. Prince didn't go quietly to fetch the soldiers: he wanted to demonstrate power. He forced the Vitryum gates and pushed inside; his men spread word: the young heir had come to destroy it all.
Alarms blared in the lowest levels.
"ALERT! IMMINENT ATTACK! SECURITY COMPROMISED. INITIATING RELEASE OF ENUMERATED INDIVIDUALS."
Elian, awakened by the alarm, saw that every cell door was open except his—his would open manually, since S had "granted" him freedom to wander, or so he claimed. He processed the information and the thought struck him: "I can run."
He opened his door, bolted for the elevator—repaired after his morning "prank"—and rode up. Every floor was a tableau of horror: -4 stained with blood and mutated corpses; -3 the Legion soldiers training with each other; -2 tables of sadistic games; -1 patrols that fired at the elevator without hitting it. When he reached Level 1, everything burned: main doors torn off, hallways smashed. Elian sprinted for the main exit.
Along the way he crossed paths with S. They were on opposite sides of a corridor; S smiled with that expression that meant, "run and suffer." Elian kept running. At the exit two guards—posted by Prince to watch the entrances—opened fire. Elian didn't stop: his Divine Vision didn't let him predict bullet trajectories, but it showed them in slow motion so he narrowly dodged each one; he observed the guards' Elyth channels and struck where the energy concentrated most, immobilizing them. He burst out of the fortress after more than a year of imprisonment.
He touched soil. He ran into the forest. The feeling that flooded him was both new and familiar: happiness. Freedom. Freedom won with pain, with other people's deaths, and with the weight of guilt. He stopped among the trees, looked up at the moon, and cried. He was no longer the nine-year-old Elian Graves: he was ten now—soon to be eleven. He knew how to fight; he knew, regrettably, what killing meant. He carried two entities inside him. And above all, he carried a bitter taste of freedom.