The Black Ridges compound was no place for children. It was a machine.
Metal walls. Concrete floors. Watchtowers that never slept. Generators growled through every brick. Smoke from burning tires stained the sky. Children moved in lines—silent, obedient, conditioned.
General Koroba walked through this world like its creator.
Taye Adeniyi walked through it like its prisoner.
From the moment Koroba pulled him from that ruined crate, Taye was stripped of softness. He learned to crawl on rough floors. To stand before he could speak. To keep his face blank no matter how harsh the drills became.
"Strength begins where comfort ends," Koroba said the day Taye finally walked straight. "You were not born for softness."
No toys. Only puzzles of twisted metal wires.
No stories. Only rules—short, sharp, unbreakable.
No tears. Koroba despised them.
And yet, beneath the silence, something flickered.
A quiet defiance.
A stubborn ember that refused to die.
Sometimes, in the silence after drills, Taye thought he heard a lullaby—soft, broken, carried by memory. He never knew if it was real or just the echo of something he had lost.
At night, when exhaustion pressed him into the thin mattress, Taye felt a rhythm inside his chest—like a second heartbeat. It was not his own. It was calling.
Koroba believed the world was a battlefield disguised as peace. To him, children were not born innocent—they were born unfinished. His discipline was the fire that forged them.
"There is fire in you," he told Taye one morning. "Not passion. Not anger. Something deeper. Something dangerous."
Taye never answered. But inside, the ember burned hotter.
Then the dreams began.
The serpent no longer stayed distant. Its twin heads turned toward him—one burning with fire, the other dripping with water. They hissed in unison, and Taye woke with sweat freezing on his skin.
He never told Koroba. Some instinct warned him not to. Koroba hated anything he could not control.
The night of his escape, chaos swallowed the compound.
Explosions ripped through the walls. Gunfire cracked like thunder. Smoke clawed at the sky. Children screamed, their voices drowned by the storm of violence.
Taye ran.
Through fire. Through fear. Through the metallic taste of blood in the air.
He ran until the compound disappeared behind rising smoke.
He ran until silence embraced him.
And beneath that silence, the second heartbeat throbbed stronger.
Pulling him.
Guiding him.
Toward the half he had never met.