People like me.
That hit. I looked down, not trusting myself to speak.
“If we’d figured out who was left, or who went in after us,” Hayden went on, voice quiet, “we could’ve tried to track them. Maybe warned them. But it was like shouting into the ocean—no names, no faces, nothing. The training groups changed locations, too. We never managed to find a pattern. Every time we tried to get close, it was like the ground shifted under us. All trails vanished.”
Nico’s voice was barely a whisper: “So you have no idea what happened to those who took your place, or if anyone ever completed the Course?”
“That’s right.” Hayden’s eyes narrowed slightly, their peculiar color catching the candlelight—sharp, almost metallic—and I found myself wondering, not for the first time, who he’d really been before all this. Even now, with every answer, he remained an enigma to me.
“No contact, no rumors. No word from anyone who finished,” he continued. “It felt like anyone who lasted long enough either disappeared or got… swallowed up by the system.”
He glanced at me, the seriousness in his gaze holding me in place. “I didn’t even know the Course had started up again, not until you. You said some things, I tried to warn you off, but…”
“But I still went through with it,” I finished, my throat tight.
“Yeah. Not like you had much of a choice.”His gaze lingered on me for several heartbeats, but I struggled to read what he was thinking.
Robert cleared his throat, shifting in his chair. “So… you and your friends just went back to work?”
“Survival first. We had to,” Hayden replied. “But that wasn’t all. We kept meeting. Stayed in contact. Compared notes.”
“Like a therapy group,” Jessie murmured.
A quick, sardonic smile flashed over Hayden’s mouth. “If you want to call it that. Maybe a little less helpful than actual therapy.”
“But that’s not all you did, right?” I pressed. “That doesn’t explain… this.” I gestured around at the secret chamber, the candles, the weird network.
“No,” he agreed, gaze steady. “Sitting in a circle wasn’t enough. We’d already spent too many hours hanging suspended, working the grind… We wanted to do something. To own something of our lives again.”
His voice sharpened, energy crackling beneath the surface. “We started claiming our nights. It began small, just watching, listening, trying to figure out who ran what. Sometimes we’d just walk, ghosting through the fancier districts, listening to the elite chatter in the restaurants, trying to piece together how things really worked here… I call it ‘breathing room.’”
A fierce light caught in his eyes—alive, unyielding. Not just resistance, but a fire where most would’ve broken. A refusal to vanish into someone else’s design.
“During the nights,” I echoed, quieter, caught in his current.
He gave a subtle shrug. “Sleep’s for the innocent.”
Jessie shook her head. “Don’t you get sick from running yourself into the ground?”
His gaze flicked to her. “I’d rather be sick from lack of sleep than from rotting inside.”
Nico leaned forward. “So you… mapped out Fairwell? All of it?”
He nodded. “As much as I could. It’s an obsession now. One I’m not ashamed of. When I became an ‘employment officer,’”—I was half amused to watch him use air quotes—"I figured it gave me an excuse to see more. To know more.” He looked around the candlelit room. “And then I found this place, on a night when I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know what it was originally. Some kind of lookout, apparently. But the tunnel network? Someone built it to be hidden, and for a reason. I’m still puzzling over why.”
“Is anyone else using it?” Robert asked, glancing at the walls.
“Not that I’ve seen,” Hayden replied. “You’d have to know where to look. Unless you’re Miranda, apparently.”
Robert smirked. “Seems Miranda’s sharp like that.”
Jessie jumped back in, drawing Hayden’s attention to me. “So, after you started this whole ‘mapping’ thing, you met Tani…”
Hayden’s gaze locked onto mine again, steady and unflinching, the quiet stretching just long enough to make me think it meant something. “Yeah,” he replied, voice even. “That’s when things got a lot more complicated. And a hell of a lot more interesting.”
FORTY
Hayden slid backinto his chair, shoulders tenser than they’d been a moment ago. But his eyes stayed on me across the table.
