He glanced up, locking onto my gaze, then just as quickly looked away, as if he was weighing how much to trust me, how much to risk. “You’re already in deep just being here. Figure you deserve the truth, or at least the part of it I can give,” he muttered.
I tensed, a little breathless with anticipation. For a second, Iimagined he might actually lay everything bare—the things he’d kept hidden for weeks. The sense of old contracts, of rules about what could and couldn’t be said, had always hovered over us like a plague.
He cleared his throat, his voice lowering. “After I arrived at Fairwell, I threw myself at the work. Anything to keep from… thinking. Got myself to the top of the settlers’ board soon enough. That’s when Anna found her excuse to reel me in. Picked me for what I understand you’ve just been dragged into: the ‘Course.’ Or as they say, the General Induction Course for Founders of the Future.”
I hardly breathed as I watched him, every word pressing closer to something vital. So he had been exactly where I was. Under Anna’s thumb.
“She gave me the same pitch she probably gave you,” he continued. “Only I was in the first batch: her little experiment. The whole Course was still in beta. I didn’t have a reason to say no, not back then. So I said yes. Figured it couldn’t be worse than the alternative.”
He looked up, his eyes a cold, deep blue. “So far, your story? It’s tracking pretty close to mine.” He raised an eyebrow, inviting me to contradict him.
I nodded, silent, my pulse thrumming in my throat.
“I agreed to a pre-screening with her,” Hayden went on, voice level but taut, like he gripped a little too hard to each word. “It was… intense. Unlike any screening I could’ve anticipated. But I pushed through. Anna seemed pleased. That should’ve been my first warning.” His lips tugged into something between a smile and a grimace.
He looked down, hands flexing on the table. “But the truth is, I didn’t have anything left to lose. I’d already lost everything that… made my life make sense. Moving forward, no matter where, felt better than rotting in place.”
His words cut deeper than I wanted them to. I swallowed, that lump in my throat growing heavier. I knew what inertia felt like—the suffocation of it, how it gnaws at you until running headlong into pain almost feels like hope. It’s all I wanted to do since my sister and parents were taken from me: keep moving, somehow, anyhow, to get them back.
For almost a minute, none of us spoke. The air in the cave seemed thinner, the candle casting a faint, restless glow.
Hayden took a measured breath, letting it sharpen his focus before he continued. “So, I signed the Course’s ‘registration form.’ Anna informed me I was about to become part of something bigger… But ‘training’ wasn’t training. Not by any definition I know.” He hesitated, eyes darting between us. “It’s not easy to explain. It’s like her goal was to… break every last bit of control I had left. Autonomy? Forget it. The device in my ear was just the start—it wasn’t for guidance. It was to make sure you couldn’t turn away. That you hear her, even if you want to claw your own head open to make it stop.”
My chest tightened. My hands curled involuntarily, aching with memory. I didn’t want to remember that voice, those orders, the agony pulsing through my head. But it was impossible to shut it out.
“Why?” I croaked. “What are they trying to do to us? What’s the point?”
Hayden’s eyes flickered, a flash of something wild and guarded beneath the surface. “I never found out,” he murmured. “I didn’t last that long. Before the end of my first day, things… escalated. I lost it. Tried to fight back, maybe. Don’t remember. I blacked out. When I came to, I had this.” He pulled up his shirt enough for us to see the brutal, purplish scar slashing across his chest.
Nico let out a low, shocked whistle. Robert’s jaw tightened, eyes dark. Jessie sucked in a shaky breath.
Hayden dropped the shirt. “Let’s just say, things went further than what you got today. Anna calls it ‘progressing the curriculum.’ I call it something else.”
Something ice-cold settled over us. My pulse hammered in my ears. “So you know what they put us through?” I whispered, barely trusting my voice.
He nodded, gaze steady, a flicker of grim amusement on his face. “Oh, I know. Trust me—I know. If you want to understand, picture what you just went through, and then picture it being the warm-up. The opening act. I was told I would acclimate to… whatever that was, but I never got that far.”
For a second, the room felt smaller, the walls closer. Hayden’s voice was lower now, threading darkness through the air.
“After the injury, I was out. Anna didn’t even try to keep me. Just transferred me to the hospital, left me to heal. When I got out, for some reason, she gave me compensation. A payoff. More coins than I’d seen in my life. Maybe it was hush money, maybe some kind of pity. Maybe she just didn’t want me too bitter and talking. Whatever the reason, it’s how I reached bronze so quickly.”
He looked at me, jaw set. “But it didn’t make me forget what happened,” he continued, voice rough. “When I got out of hospital—hell, even while I was lying in that bed, half doped and stitched together—I hit the same wall. Stagnation.” He shifted, rising from his chair and crossing to the rough stone wall, the candlelight sketching sharp lines over his face. “What then? What was left? The grind. The jobs. Hours and hours of the same, just to keep above water. Sure, I could get paid more. But it’s not a way out.”
He pressed his fingers to the pockmarked wall, glancing out through one of the lookout holes. The moonlit water glimmeredback, indifferent.
“I kept asking myself, what now? Get a ship and leave? Yeah, maybe in another lifetime. Even if I somehow scraped together a hundred thousand coins, the expansion means all the materials are tied up. Nothing for outsiders. Fairwell would never approve it for someone like me.” He turned, mouth twisting in a bitter smile. “Time here is a sick joke. You notice it? One hour on the job feels like a week. Months pass, and you barely move.”
“We notice,” I said softly, and the words from my friends echoed mine. “It’s like that for all of us.”
He gave a short, humorless laugh. “So what do you do when every option’s closed? Turns out, I wasn’t alone. There were other people who dropped out. The ones who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—go through what Anna and her colleagues wanted.” His gaze swept over us, something haunted flickering in his blue eyes. “I found some of them. We started meeting, talking, trying to piece together what happened to us. I needed to hear it from someone else. Needed to know I wasn’t losing my damn mind.”
I glanced at the passage behind us, toward the main chamber and the group huddled there. “The people with you tonight, did they all drop out from the Course?”
“Most of them,” Hayden replied quietly. He looked back at me, the firelight throwing deep shadows over his features. “So… we started talking. Pooling what little we had. We were all looking for the same things—some way to make sense of what we’d just gone through, and… some way out. But both were nearly impossible. For one, we weren’t even supposed to mention the Course to anyone, let alone dig for more. And for another, once you’re out, they lock you out. No access. No contact with anyone still inside. We didn’t even know which settlers replaced us, or who—if anyone—was still in the ‘training.’”
“You’re assuming they kept running it?” I asked.
He nodded, a muscle working in his jaw. “I’m sure they did. There’s always a new wave coming through here. Always desperate people. People with sick relatives, or debts, or some kind of noose tightening around their necks.” His eyes flicked to mine, sharp.
