Chapter 4

NO MORE CHAINS

Alexander no longer bothered counting the days. Exhaustion had taken up permanent residence in his bones, and his routine, if it could be called that, had long since turned into something others might call madness. Still, it had kept him grounded. For a time.

He broke each day into three activities.

Sleep. Exercise. Meditate.

Each activity revolved around the slop delivery pipe. During his sleep, it was a repetitive disruption, never allowing him a proper night’s rest. During exercise, it gave him an excuse to stop. During his training, it was a welcome challenge in splitting his attention.

And he spent most of his time with his Technopathy. He’d worked hard, pushing himself to his limits, trying to meditate as a way to disguise what he was doing from the camera.

He wasn’t much better at meditation than he was at motivating himself to exercise, if he were being honest.

The first few days after the discovery of his superpower were full of excitement, if you ignored the moments of existential crisis at least. Each day brought advancement as he stretched his senses further, deeper into the rocky ceiling above, tracing the pulsing signals. Alexander imagined himself reaching a console or a comms device and summoning help.

But then his progress slowed to a crawl. It felt like he’d hit some sort of soft cap in his reach, with each hour of effort yielding less than the one before. It was disheartening, but he kept pushing. Not like he had many other options.

Days after that, Alexander had concluded that it would take his lifetime to make enough progress to reach anything of significance. So he took a break and tried something else. Something that made him question his sanity.

He tried talking to his implant.

And at first its responses had excited him. He allowed hope to convince him that there was more, that his suspicions were correct… but in the end, Alexander realized the implant wasn’t intelligent. Smart, certainly, and capable of inferring from his own speech and subvocalized commands how to better communicate with its host, even how to make recommendations based on his given intent, but there was nothing more than that.

Then, lying there under the weight of his own helplessness, he’d come up with an idea of how he might push his ability further. The suppression collar. Even while it had been active, Alexander could occasionally sense something beyond it. Muted and random noise, perhaps, but something.

That’s how Alexander found himself weeks later, seated in the middle of his cell, pushing the limits of his Technopathy against the collar at nine percent of its maximum suppression. He could feel the camera just out of reach. Breaking through each escalating level of suppression had been hard-fought, but each tiny victory sparked new hope that he might eventually find a way out.

His concentration broke when the vibrations started. Confused, he glared at the slop pipe.

It hasn’t been an hour yet, has it?

The vibrations in the pipe intensified. Something sprinkled into his hair. He looked up and caught an eyeful of dirt and dust for his effort.

“Shit!” He staggered upright, rubbing at his eyes with filthy hands.

The ground quaked beneath him.

He reached out for balance and found the damn pipe again. The entire cell shook, throwing him sideways. His shoulder slammed into the wall with a crunch.

He blacked out.

Alexander woke to pain.

He rolled over and gasped, drawing a reflexive breath as his ribs protested. Scanning the cell, he realized he had landed partway across the slab. Reaching back, he found sticky dampness. Bringing his hand back around, he saw blood.

Perfect. A concussion’s exactly what I need right now.

His eyes flicked around the cell, dazed. The slab beneath him. Hateful pipe. A cracked toilet stall. Everything was where it should be.

Even the door with the crack of light shining through.

His thoughts ground to a halt. Wait. Light?

Alexander froze, staring at the crack beneath the cell door. The frame had bent slightly, and the bottom right corner was ajar.

His mind kicked back into gear. He scrambled for the door, forcing his fingers into the gap, trying to push or pull; anything to get the door open, but it barely shifted.

Still, the cool air brushing across his face felt like a miracle. He drew in a deep breath, savoring the sharp, clean bite of it. It was the first he’d tasted in what felt like forever.

Then came the screaming.

Somewhere near, someone shrieked as though they were dying. Coming from the other direction, he heard the unmistakable sound of combat.

Alexander hesitated. A choice stretched out before him: the safety of his cell, or chasing the possibility of freedom where people were screaming for their lives and maybe even fighting to the death.

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Yep. Easy choice.

Alexander pressed his shoulder into the damaged door and pushed with all his weight. Muscles and bones ached in protest, pain radiating from damaged shoulders and crashing against his skull with each heaving breath.

The reinforced polymer groaned but refused to move.

Repositioning, he wedged a knee against the frame for leverage, and pushed again. Dark spots danced across his eyes, followed by a crack; something popped in his shoulder, pain blurring his vision.

He slumped forward, knees striking the ground, and pressed his face against the cold, unfeeling jailer that was the cell door. The taste of copper and dust filled his mouth.

“No,” he rasped, banging his head against the door once. “This might be my only chance.”

Alexander pushed himself to his feet. He studied the door and changed his approach. This time, he hooked his fingers into the gap, drew in a painful breath, and pulled.

Every muscle in his arms and back protested. He ignored the warning signs, signals screaming all the way to his brain. His hands, slick with sweat, slipped, skin tearing against the jagged edge of the door.

He ignored the pain, refusing to give up.

With a tortured shriek, the door shifted a fraction of an inch. It was enough.

Alexander shoved the tip of his foot into the gap and braced it against the frame, pulling with everything he had. The door held fast, and for a moment he imagined it would defeat him.

Then it relented all at once. He stumbled backwards as the door bent just enough for the locking mechanism to slip, then collapsed to his knees panting. His hands were slick with blood, droplets falling to the dusty floor.

Alexander didn’t even notice. All that mattered was the open doorway before him. Standing, he shuffled forward and quickly checked both directions. To his left, the hallway stretched out into darkness, flickering emergency lights ending abruptly partway down the slope. There were more cells, some with buckled and cracked doors. Others still sealed.

Something worried him more than the shadows that felt like it would swallow him, more than even the silence that had replaced the screaming and sounds of combat. There was a weight in the air, in his mind, something pressing down on his awareness the more he looked into the inky darkness.

With great effort, he tore his eyes away from it and checked the other direction, tracing the gentle incline.

That way, the hallway ended at the remains of a heavy bulkhead door. Whatever had caused it, the earthquake had mangled the frame so thoroughly that the tons of steel now hung loose, a single twisted hinge holding it together.

His breath caught. Beyond it, Alexander saw something he’d almost forgotten. Filtering through layers of dust and wreckage was a shaft of golden light.

Sunlight. There’s a way out!

The thought felt as unreal as everything else he’d endured since waking in this forsaken place. He risked another look into the darkness, considering the possibility that someone might still be alive down there. Perhaps trapped like he had been, or passed out from the quake. Part of him wanted to call out, to help if he could.

Another part of him disagreed. Save yourself first, idiot.

Alexander shook his head and reached for the collar, fingers brushing across the smooth surface. He’d kept it on for good reasons, but it no longer served any purpose.

“Deactivate the collar,” Alexander said, commanding. He’d learned over the past few weeks that his power flowed more naturally when he wielded it with proper intent. The implant had proven to be nothing more than a conduit for his own… authority, for lack of a better word. He had to mean the command, not just say or think it.

For that reason, he ignored the implant’s readout. He could already feel the power working its way through the device. There was a single beep, followed by a click, before the collar released its grip on his throat and clattered to the ground.

He didn’t look back.

Stumbling forward, his body and mind rebelled against the fatigue that had built up over weeks of captivity. This was not the time to lose his focus.

Crossing through the ruined bulkhead, Alexander felt cold air flow over him. The air in the hallway he’d just left, and his cell for that matter, had been oppressively still and warm, the kind of engineered discomfort meant to keep prisoners disoriented and compliant.

But here the air moved. It billowed up from deeper down the central shaft, carrying a chill with it that sent goosebumps running up his arms. His bare feet met the cold polymer of the fractured walkway, bolted to rough natural rock and spiraling up the central shaft. At least in places where it hadn’t been shattered or sheared away. There were short hallways branching off at intervals, like spokes in a wheel, though the emergency lighting appeared to only run along the walls of the main path.

From what he could see, the lowest levels of the prison seemed less affected by both the initial earthquake and the chaos that was clearly still going on above him. He could hear distant shouting and the rhythmic crack of weapons fire, but down here amid the pulsing red lights, there was mostly silence.

Alexander started jogging, weaving around collapsed railings and debris. As he went, his eyes scanned the wreckage, looking for a weapon or anything that might give him an edge. Though he found nothing of use, he couldn’t help but wonder if this incident was not actually a natural occurrence. He’d passed several cells with doors that had clearly been blown open from the inside.

It looked more like a coordinated breakout.

After completing one rotation, he risked a glance up the central shaft.

Higher up, movement flickered behind the rails. There were prisoners in classic orange prison jumpsuits jumping across gaps, black-armored guards in tight formations firing at anything that moved. Then a shape blurred overhead, trailing flame in their wake before vanishing from view.

A superhero.

There’s probably more than one too. This place is clearly built to hold people with powers.

Halfway around the second level, he saw the guard.

The man lay slumped against the wall, near an open cell. His armor was cracked and shattered up one side, helmet missing. One arm was bent at such an unnatural angle beneath him that Alexander winced just from seeing it.

For a moment, the man appeared dead. Alexander approached carefully, assessing. Then he saw the guard’s chest move and heard the shallow, ragged breaths. Unconscious.

Working quickly, he stripped a wrist tablet from the man’s forearm, sliding it over his own. He felt his implant’s query more than he read it, requesting authorization to connect to the new device. Alexander approved, then instructed it to scan for open comms channels.

Static-laced voices overlapped in a mess of tactical reports and shouted orders, though relayed through his implant rather than out loud. It was feeding the sounds to him through bone conduction, subtle vibrations along his skull, audible only to him.

Good. I’m going to need all the information I can get.

Alexander turned his attention to the guard’s boots next. They looked to be a size too large, but… beggars can’t be choosers. He worked them free, and pulled the first boot on, laces rubbing painfully against his wounded palm.

The guard’s hand lashed out, clamping around his wrist.

Alexander choked out a yelp, embarrassingly high-pitched, and quickly tried to rip his arm free.

The guard’s bloodshot eyes stared up at him.

“You—” the man began, voice gurgling.

Their eyes locked, both frozen in shock.