Three Weeks Earlier
The boy counted from the beginning.
Not because anyone had told him to. Because in the first week, when the hours had no texture and the lights never changed and the walls were the same concrete as the floor as the ceiling, counting was the only way to mark that time was still moving. He had started with seconds, then abandoned seconds for breaths—less precise, but harder to lose track of, because his body remembered them even when his mind drifted.
He was on breath four thousand and eleven when he heard the new child arrive.
The door at the end of the corridor opened, then closed. Footsteps—light, quick, trying not to let anyone know how frightened they were. Jeremy had been that frightened once. He didn't remember when he'd stopped. Somewhere around the second week, the fear had metabolized into something quieter and more useful.
He listened.
The new child was put in the room three doors down—he could tell by the sound of the lock, different from the others, a sticky mechanism that caught before it released. Two-second pause. Then silence.
He waited.
After perhaps an hour, he heard her start to cry. Quietly, the way children cried when they had already learned that no one was going to come. The sound had a particular quality he recognized—not despair exactly, but the first moments of understanding that despair was now a possibility.
Jeremy pressed his palm against the concrete wall between them. He couldn't do anything about the crying from here. He couldn't do much about anything from here. But he was paying attention, and he had learned, from the bishop's own words, that being seen and remembered was sometimes enough to keep a person from disappearing entirely.
He kept counting.
Four thousand and twelve.
Four thousand and thirteen.
From the corridor, the low hum of the generators continued without comment, indifferent to everything.
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