In which secrets peek out from under dusty, dark hiding spots, bloody and unkind. And Leo meets the crew planning for the world's most daring prison break.


Taffer Notes: Hi.

I'm back. And ho-ly-shit-have-I-missed-you-all.

We'll start slow. Get reaquainted with Leo, the reported who we met at the beginning of the season, who asked about the most important question ever: Kyle Crane who? He'll help us understand the situation a little better, and ease us into Part 2.


PART 2: No Gods or Kings. Only Man.

Unknown Caller


"I'll call you."

With that, and a handshake firm enough to make Leo flinch, Sebastian Hyan had taken his leave. And vanished off the face of the Earth for almost a week. Logically, that meant he'd fallen for some sick joke, or a really bad prank, considering how no one was laughing. Not as far as he could tell, anyway. So Leo had tried to forget about that brief meeting the day he'd been sacked, and gone to nurse his beaten ego back at his apartment. Then one morning, while he'd been furiously scrolling through Twitter with his blood boiling and his coffee turning cold, the phone had rung.

Unknown Caller.

Was denn jetzt, he'd thought, irritation swelling, and almost considered not picking up at all. Almost.

"You all packed?" Sebastian— Seb —had asked, skipping past all notions of hello and how have you been, and sorry for making you wait so damn long.

Turned out Leo hadn't needed an apology, and turned out Leo had, indeed, been packed. Packed and oh-so-ready, he'd almost forgotten to lock up after himself before he'd practically fallen down the stairs, into a taxi, and off to the airport.

One flight later, he'd met Sebastian at a private airfield that looked about as run-down as the American's tousled hair (which was to say, very). They'd exchanged greetings, too firm handshakes (on Sebastian's end), and been back in the air before the slight sting in Leo's finger bones had worn off.

And now he was here.

Not in Harran, no. Close to it though, fairly, but still at enough of a distance to allow for a somewhat normal life churning on around them. Because Turkey, try as it might, hadn't really done too well with having a festering, and infectious, wound in its side. For one, there was Syria's and its promises to cauterize said wound if they didn't do so themselves, a threat which cropped up anew every second month or so. And then there were economics, everyone countries true enemy, and Turkey really wasn't doing rose on that front, either.

Tourism in the entire region had yet to recover, since there were only so many people willing to sunbathe or sightsee within a couple of hours of the hottest threat the world had seen since— well— a good long while, if not ever. Worse still though, had been the mass exodus of cities and villages closer to the quarantine. People had, with damn good reason, decided they wanted to be anywhere but there.

Especially after Cyprus.

Though the list didn't end with economics or Syria. There were politics, too. And religion. Worse still, a mix of both, and it hadn't taken long after the outbreak before everyone had found their scapegoat. He'd heard them all. Must have been the homosexuals, a bunch of camps had said. Or anyone who didn't fear God enough, bringing His wrath down on the sinners dancing in Harran's streets. Fucking idiots. It had quickly spurred more hatred for the West as well, ignited fires that, to some extent, the Harran games had been meant to douse.

Because humanity was funny like that. Quick to point fingers wherever there was an opportunity to, and point them with enough fervour to leave the ground scorched.

Leo had reported on a lot of those powder kegs as they'd gone up one after the other, some more volatile than others, but each and every one harmful in its own right.

Not having much else to do for the time being, he'd picked those back up. The tweets had gone out, and the posts up, and he'd kept asking, over and over again: Don't forget the shit you started, because Harran's pain didn't stop with the walls around it.

Walls which, he now realised, reached a lot further than he'd ever thought. Than a lot of the world had thought. Though had that really come as a surprise?

No. And that was depressing by itself.

Leo leaned against the table that'd been set in the middle of the room, his thighs bumping into the wood, and studied the map laid out ontop of it, an open paper notepad by his hand. Hasted scribbles filled the pages, defying any concept of lines and order. He'd sort them later. His pen he kept tucked over his right ear.

He hadn't been here long, in this tight, dark room with dirty slits for windows, which didn't do much good at keeping the noise of a busy street out. Cars. Scooters. Raised voices. They all pressed in, albeit a little muffled. No, he hadn't been here long, but still long enough to figure out that he'd been blind.

Blind and ignorant to just how effed up the Harran situation had really been. Right from the very start. That annoyed him.

Leo rubbed at the bridge of his nose, pushed his glasses up a little further, and kept staring at the map.

Smack in the middle was the City of Harran, Jewel of the East, proud and expansive as it ate outwards and spilled against the ocean line. And over it, too, where lagoons and channels of wide salt water drove between different districts.

Thick, red lines had been drawn around (and through) the better part of the inner city districts. Those were the ones the world kept seeing on TV: the official Harran Quarantine. What most everyone hadn't bothered questioning, was whether or not that orange line that sat at a distance to the red one meant anything more than Careful, don't go there, as they'd all been led to believe.

Or the yellow one that swallowed up leagues of land before the mountains got in the way. That wall had, far as Leo had known up until now, been only there as a precaution.

Everything is cool in there, they'd said, but you aren't allowed in anyway. Just stay there behind that green line, there's really nothing to see here.

Maybe everyone'd known it was bullshit anyway, hadn't bought into the convenient lie, but it felt better pretending that things were under control, than thinking the problem was a lot worse than originally expected.

To convince yourself that Harran was just a papercut, and not stage 4 cancer.

Grrrm— Leo scoffed.

Not like any of that mattered anymore, right? Since, now that the problem had gone and spread, who the fuck cared? Didn't matter if the Quarantine was one block, two blocks, a city, or even a whole damn country. For a good long while, ' Just burn it all to the ground ,' had been popular, even after the first botched attempt. Had, in fact, gotten really loud with Cyprus, since who needed that island anyway?

Except then Italy and the United States had happened. Whoops. Suddenly, people had started being a little less vocal about using fire to treat the problem, since it was a little different when you considering torching something that close to home.

You didn't want to turn your own backyard to ashes, after all.

"Pretty expansive, isn't it?" Sebastian moved up to the right, a cup of steaming coffee in one hand. Behind him, the room filled up with three more people, all a little rugged looking, with dusted clothes and messy hair. Katrin, Eyal, and Gus— the work horses of this particular group of activists trying their best to work around a system that wouldn't let up.

And yeah. It was. Expansive. The system and everything it fought to contain.

Leo nodded and tapped at the green line wobbling across the landscape. "So, this is the real border?"

"Yeah. Everything beyond is considered dead. The yellow vector hasn't received supplies for three months now, and been officially declared as some backwards DMZ. Nothing in. Nothing out. They call it their fallout buffer, and it's as far in as their cameras still point."

"And you're certain about survivors in there? I mean, in that yellow zone?"

"Definitely. Just because they're not trying to climb the wall any more after they've shot down enough of them, doesn't mean they're all dead. Just not stupid."

People. Getting shot for wanting out. Of course they'd done that. Everyone knew that, even if the Ministry, the military, and all those relief organizations working with them denied it. Vehemently.

Leo's jaw clenched a little and he inhaled sharply. That let him catch a whiff of the bitter, strong brew Sebastian was nursing, and he wondered how the man wasn't yet vibrating all over the place, considering how he wouldn't stop drinking the stuff.

"I don't get how they managed to keep this out of the news."

Sebastian shrugged. "A lot about Harran can easily be considered the world's best kept secret. Bit like KFC's spice mix, yeah? They've outdone themselves right from the start." He sipped on his coffee. Smiled a little, though Leo thought it was a bit of short lived and sad smile. "Fuck, if Kyle hadn't been in there to send that message, we wouldn't be standing here. Neither would Harran, but who's counting."

A message that, Leo'd had to find out, hadn't made it past the radio blackouts. The only thing that'd made it out, had been how the GRE had tried to profit from the pathogen, signing Harran's death warrant almost immediately.

But then something had happened, a mystery that'd puzzled people for two weeks. The planes meant to end the threat to everyone and everything, had come back. Harran hadn't burnt. And while the GRE had paid its price for trying to fuck everyone over, Harran had quietly lived on. Until one day, out of nowhere, had come the voice of the lost.

Suddenly, the world was told: We're still here. We've got names. Don't forget us, don't give up, because we won't. We can't.

Leo'd almost had puppies when he'd heard the first recording, and for a little while, he'd wrongfully assumed that this was it. This'd fix it. This'd save Harran, since it hadn't taken long before families had come forward, put faces to the names that'd come out of the Quarantine, and there'd been hope.

But not even that had lasted. Eventually, some jackass had crawled from the woodwork with the ridiculous notion that isolating the survivors and moderating contact with them was for the Better Of Everyone Involved.

What. Utter. Bullshit. This whole thing was nothing but a nightmare circus, going round and round in circles, every lap a little shittier than the last.

So— no wonder he'd never heard of Kyle Crane. He was just another secret tucked away by whoever had the most to lose. Though this secret had a friend. An absurdly stubborn one.

Leo quirked a brow at Sebastian. Nudged his glasses up a notch again. "And how do you know all of this? And what's your plan? I've been waiting long enough now, don't you think?"

"Seb knows, because he has mates in just the right places," Katrin put in, coming up behind the American who stood a good head taller than her. She was, Leo had to admit, a cute, round thing, with the rosiest of cheeks and a tendency to smile so damn brightly he feared she'd blind him one day. Except he'd not mind too much, to be fair.

She placed a laptop on the table, pushed it a little towards him. It was the same one she carried around all the time, the one with the scratched up, worn silver case. Damages which she'd carefully covered up with stickers of bright yellow emojis.

"Mhm," Sebastian confirmed.

"And his friend, Kyle, is an awful chatterbox. Told him a lot more than he should have before being deployed."

Another "Mhm."

"That's all well and good, but how do you know he's still alive?"

Katrin shrugged. "Supposedly he's also an ornery bastard that's harder to kill than a cockroach on steroids."

Sebastian snorted.

She flashed the room a smile. "Did I get that right?"

"Perfect."

"Excellent. Plus," she flipped the laptop around, and Leo leaned forward, his glasses getting yet another nudge as he peered at the screen, "bunch of weeks ago we started picking up a cleverly dug in distress signal from inside the Quarantine."

"And that's your friend, Kyle?"

"Nah." Sebastian shook his head once. "He's too busy being a hero, but we're talking to a friend of his, Rory Simmons. Rory is what's left of Katrin's people that got stuck in there when they brought the walls up. She's organising the whole thing from the inside. And Kyle, along with these people-" He jutted his chin towards the laptop, where Katrin had opened a list of names. Five altogether, and Leo thought he recognised half of them from when the initial list of survivors had been made public. "-they're sick of this shit."

"That's not a lot. You can't tell me there's only five people left in there."

"Fuck no. No one knows just how many. Hundreds? A thousand? But those— those are the only ones willing to risk an escape."

"Hm." Leo frowned. His brows pinched, right along with his stomach. They weren't kidding. And better yet? This might actually work. Crazy as it was. Insane, even, there was a chance that this was what they needed. What Harran needed.

A good old prison break.

"I think he gets it," Katrin said, still smiling.

"Yeah, 'course he does." With his coffee cup motioning generously, Sebastian indicated the Quarantine's yellow vector. "We'll get them out. Kyle. His friends. And they'll be our start. A spark." He paused just long enough to jug the rest of the coffee, and to set the mug down with a hard thump. It was a miracle the thing didn't crack. "We get them, we'll have everything we need to burn right through all those shit lies. Through every- single- one. When we are done, Leo, we'll make so much fucking noise, the world'll have no choice but to listen. "