I: A Fledgling Among Snakes

L033 woke up how he usually did—to the ungodly wail of a screeching alarm. He yawned, pushing the ratty sheet off him, and rolled onto his side, hoping to catch a few more winks of sleep before the morning guard came in and dragged them all to the far side of the room for attendance. He had once overheard one of the other children, a girl of about seven years, who had been brought in only recently, laugh at how they called it "attendance."

"It's just like at school," she had said.

L033 did not know what school was. When he asked her about it, she just stared at him for a second, then burst into tears.

She was a strange girl. She, unlike most of the children there, remembered her human name. The other kids would sit around her and ask her to repeat it, and repeat the names of her family and friends. She would, so often and so consistently that L033 did not know which one of the hundreds of names was hers. But every name had a ring to it that all the children found attractive, perhaps because the whole idea of a name held a sentiment they had been denied at the ranch—identity.

Some of the children had been born in the ranch and never had names of their own, so they sat in idle fascination at her recitations of formal names, nicknames, first and last names, pet names, place names.

L033 never had a name. Not that he remembered, anyway. According to some of the older kids, he had been brought in when he was a toddler, so he knew that he hadn't been born in the facility. That's all he knew about himself, and about the outside world. He knew it existed, and that he had once been out there. He supposed that he had once had a name out there, but in here it was different.

The girl with the lists of names had been captured with a few other children just a few months ago. Most of them had been weeping, some begging for mercy or release, when they had been shoved into the metal-walled sleeping chamber. They did not know what it meant; they did not know whose cots were whose, where they were, how long they would be there. And they never would—it was a realization every child came to if given enough time. Eventually they would all get over that fact one way or another.

One child that had arrived with the girl, an overweight little boy with strawberry blond hair, kept crying that he could not sleep on these staw-filled cots, that he had allergies and needed medical attention. He kept claiming that somewhere in his bag—that had of course been taken from him upon arrival—was a device that assisted him with breathing. He begged the guards to bring it to him, but they ignored him.

On his first night, his feeble wheezes could be heard echoing throughout the Block C sleeping chamber. Some of the other children yelled at him from their own cots, telling him to shut up and let them sleep. Others said nothing, just listening to him struggle to breathe in, breathe out, knowing there was nothing they could do for him. Until they grew up and could work, the Desians offered little in the way of medical care. The children were not valuable enough to waste important resources on them.

In the middle of his second night, the wheezing boy passed away. His breathing became shallower and shallower, and then, a few hours after they were all put to bed, it stopped. L033 could tell that every child was awake at that point. They had grown so used to his tortured breath that the sudden silence hit their ears as hard as a loud noise. They all woke up, some of them sat up to look over at the dead boy, but nobody got out of bed. They weren't allowed to.

Some of the children managed to get back to sleep, some of them stayed awake until morning, when the guard came by for attendance, found the boy dead, and disposed of him. The girl who had come to the ranch with him, the girl with the cache of names, had not taken the loss too hard.

"He's probably better off that way," was all she said. She carried a long face with her for the next little while, and didn't say much. But, like everyone else, she learned to forget the dead and focus on keeping alive.

That was a while ago. How long, L033 could not tell. Time was a strange thing in the ranch, mostly because the children never saw the sun. They never witnessed the seasons turn or the clouds pass overhead. L033 could not even remember what the sky looked like, even though he was sure that he had seen it. When he imagined the sky, he only imagined the ceiling of the sleeping chamber, low to his head, painted blue. He could not conjure even the idea of anything so vast as the real sky.

If the boys and girls of the ranch survived their childhoods and turned fourteen or fifteen, they were able to move out of the cramped room and work in the yard outside. Some of the children referred to it as "graduation" and it was something all of them looked forward to. As soon as they gave you your exsphere, you got to go outside, and the mere thought of escaping the cramped halls of the facility made the children behave. It made them put up with the gruel they called food, the beatings, the cruelty and the hours and hours of dangerous work—just for the chance to see the sky again.

The children's tasks varied according to their stamina and talents, and their ability to tolerate certain conditions. The weakest children, the children with no skills, or those who had come to the ranch later in life and did not have the guts to survive other tasks, were given the responsibility of keeping the interior of the ranch clean. They trudged through the halls with mops and sponges and caustic cleaning agents, scrubbing the walls and floors and polishing the shoes of passing Desian guards. You could tell those children by the state of their hands—usually the skin was bleached white, dry, peeling. Some of them had worn their skin down to the bone.

The toughest of the children were given work hauling cargo from block to block. They were often seen slouching under several huge boxes, full of fresh food for the Desians, and packaged, dehydrated protein for the prisoners. They carried mechanical equipment, cases of weapons, supplies, even the corpses of their unluckier comrades, from room to room—from the kitchen to the mess hall, from the sleeping chamber to the crematorium, from the loading bay to the Cardinal's quarters. This work mostly befell the older kids, those boys and girls who were closer to graduating age, who had the strength and endurance to lift and carry heavy things for hours on end. Their strength was usually praised by their Desian supervisors when they went into the medical wing to have the exsphere implanted. Then they were never seen again.

L033 was one of the children who had been tasked with something between the two extremes. Because he was dextrous, lean, and small for his age, he and some other kids managed the electrical systems on the interior of the building. Every morning, after their usual meal of gruel, L033 would be set loose inside the walls of the building like some hairless, barefoot rat, to seek out and repair any faulty wires in the system. It wasn't pleasant work. One boy recently had his hands burnt by a stripped cable, and another had shocked himself to death trying to pry a blown fuse from its circuit. It had taken a few days for them to find his body, and even then it was only because they were able to follow the trail of his excruciating stench. After they had dragged him out and sent his body to be burnt, the overseeing Desian Lord, Forcystus, issued insulating gloves for the children to use while they worked.

Forcystus' decision had been met with criticism from quite a few of his underlings, or so L033 heard from the older children who were prone to overhear the juicer bits of internal politics at the ranch. They had thought his decision too merciful, they feared that the would spoil the children. They had insisted that the those kids who were equipped with enough strength and cunning to survive childhood—without the privilege of safety gear—would make better workers when they grew up. It would bring down the ranch's average work quota, they said, to help children survive who were not fit. Forcystus could not be swayed. He said it wasted money to waste lives.

L033 was not displeased with the development. He had quite liked the boy who died earlier that month. He did not want to lose more company. Whenever he put on his gloves and goggles and descended into the cramped inter-hallways of the ranch, he would remember that boy. He had an odd way of smiling—and he liked to play games while at work, games that the guards would not pick up on. He would leave little messages on the inner walls for L033, etched into the metal with his electric welder. They were drawn with a clumsy, almost playful haste: an arrow here, a circle there, a cross or a smiling mouth (neither boy were taught to read, so they had to settle for broader symbols). L033 took these shapes to heart and sometimes reciprocated the courtesy by leaving a small burn mark or two behind him when he went from one crawlspace to another. Now that the boy was dead, there would be no new messages. But L033 could still look for those tiny shapes in the walls that he had missed before. It would be like he was still there.

He almost looked forward to work that day—thoughts of his old friend set his spirits higher than usual. He would try to slack off as much as he could, searching the walls for marks instead of faulty cables. But after the guards lined up all the children to make sure none of them died or escaped during the night, he was not handed his usual equipment, he was not led out into the hall and stuffed into the trapdoor that led down to the innards of the facility. Instead, when all the other children were dismissed, he was commanded to stay behind. As the other children filed out, herded between the guards, some shot him frightened or sympathetic looks. When the door closed behind them and he was shut alone in the sleeping chamber, he tried to figure out why he had been chosen to stay behind that day.

Being singled out could mean several things. It could mean that he had done something well and may receive a piece of fruit or buttered bread as a reward. Since he hadn't done anything particularly extraordinary recently, he discarded that possibility. It could mean that he was a candidate for early graduation—although, at the ripe young age of eight, that was not likely at all. So, the only possibility left was that he was to either be punished for his wrongdoings or exterminated altogether. He shivered. If a child became too sick, or too rebellious, he or she would simply disappear. No questions were asked when this happened, because none needed to be asked. General consensus was that the child was shot and sent to the ovens.

L033 began to panic, searching through his past transgressions, trying to single one out that would necessitate his execution. Perhaps they had known about him and the other boy leaving shapes in the insides of the walls. They had an uncanny way of knowing everything that went on—yes that was it—he would be amply punished, then let go. They couldn't kill him for that, it wasn't that bad, not as bad as trying to escape or inciting a mutiny or stealing food or anything…

His desperate mind trampled through the list of possible punishments. Usually beatings were the most common, and the most manageable. Many of the physical punishments were half-hearted, either because the guards had a sliver of mercy for a wailing, bleeding child, or they simply thought that flogging a creature so weak was not worth their time. Either way, L033 had been hit many times, and recovered as many, so he could handle that eventuality. Starvation was a crueler, more insidious tactic they used… along with prolonged isolation. He had never experienced these punishments, and hoped that neither was was in his near future.

When the Desian guard reentered the chamber, he didn't have the courage to ask which punishment he was to receive. The guard did not seem to care. He simply grabbed L033 by the upper arm and roughly led him toward the door.

"The Grand Cardinal wants to see you… for some reason." He added the last bit indignantly, as if he knew that this weak little human boy was not worth his commanding officer's time.

L033 had never personally seen Grand Cardinal Forcystus, but he knew that this wasn't good. It wasn't good at all.