They led me back to the cells and left me there in the dark. I didn’t say anything, but I heard the words ringing in my mind. Officer Heirdic, could you take this prisoner back to his cell, please?

  When they dropped me off, I turned around and watched them leave, studying the green-eyed officer. Theo. Theo Heirdic. I could remember the guard’s green eyes, how distinct they had been. Distinct… and familiar, familiar as that name.

  The bars were cold to the touch with my hands pressed against them, and I realized I was shaking. My throat seized up with what I realized was oncoming laughter. I pressed it down desperately, squeezing my hands against the wire mesh cage so hard it hurt. If I started to laugh, I wouldn’t stop; it would be hysterics until I couldn’t even breathe.

  It was absurd. It was ridiculous. Here, more than a decade after I stopped crying myself to sleep with the desire to see my family again. After letting go of hope and fear, setting myself up with the expectations and challenges of a new family, after being captured and tortured. Here, I would meet my brother again. My legs felt weak and my head dizzy.

  I dragged myself to my cot so I could curl up and fall asleep. Later, I woke up to Nalei softly calling my name. The guards had come and gone, leaving food and water in the cells.

  I spoke with Nalei in the dark, back to back in our respective cells. Neither of us understood why, exactly, the interviews were so focused on us personally, but we both agreed that it was creepy. We talked about the unsettling friendliness of Hendar and the coldness of the nameless female note-taker, but I didn’t mention the green-eyed guard Theo Heirdic. I couldn’t.

  None of the recruited Biraleis mentioned our family publicly. First because it was too painful and then because it was a taboo reminder of a world we’d left behind. Adain had, publicly and privately to me, but Adain had always been different. He’d paid the price for it. It just wasn’t done. And even if it was simple, how could I say I think my blood brother is one of our captors? I pushed the thought away.

  If the interviews were unsettling, it was even more creepy when they took Officer Genner out again. There was no light, so I could not say for sure how long she was gone, but I’d ended up falling into a fitful sleep again. She wasn’t back when I woke; it was at least a day.

  I paced back and forth in my cell. It seemed longer, this second time taking her out, though I couldn’t truly know. But I could imagine too many terrible things.

  I could remember the intolerable sensation of the shock collar running through me. I stopped occasionally, reaching up and putting a hand on the thing around my neck, like exploring a new body part I’d grown spontaneously. It was a dark parallel of how I’d run my hands over my new hair and chest, after Sharmora had put the spells on me to change my body as I’d wanted. A strange change toward restriction and a loss of freedom, instead of a gain.

  I tried not to think about what it would be like to be shocked over and over. I tried not to think of all the other things that could be done to prisoners. I tried not to think of what I’d done to the prisoner for the Mage Division, the fear and devastation in his eyes. I could remember warm, praising voices after the job was done, easing the sick feeling in my stomach. Good job, Izak. I know it was hard, but we can see how loyal you are. How much you understand what we have to do.

  The cage was small, not giving much space for pacing. I occasionally sat against the wall next to Nalei’s cell and thought of things to say. What questions do you think they’re asking her? Do you think they’re going to hurt her? Did they hurt you, like they hurt me? Not as much as they could have, but enough to show that they could?

  Yet somehow I didn’t say any of those words. Talking about it would make it too real. It felt like bringing up the danger that Officer Genner was in, that we were all in, would enhance it somehow. To speak of pain, of torture, would somehow make it inevitable.

  So I stood and paced and didn’t speak. Nalei didn’t say anything to me, either. Sometimes I stopped and looked around, observing the situation. I pulled at the wire of my cage, which I could just put my fingers through, until guards passed by. Plans to escape dashed through my mind, but all of them relied on magic.

  Adain had said we were all useless peacocks without magic. I wish I could tell him how right he had been. It was not the first time I wished he was here with me, but it was a more selfish and desperate desire than ever.

  Sounds echoed through the cells themselves, a tap of water somewhere and the footsteps of guards, but no sound came from the outside world. With the closing of the door at the end of the hall, came the closing out of any sound. I had heard not a word, laugh, nor shout from outside the hall. Silence left me to brood and pace at the mercy of my own head. Quiet stood uninterrupted for hours and hours.

  Which made the horrible screaming, muffled and no less disturbing for it, particularly startling.

  The noise was distorted by the concrete walls and there wasn’t quite enough of it to echo, giving it a strange flatness. I froze. It was some mixture of scream and shout of pain, and it went on and on. Not continuously, breaking up with short sobbing pauses, but it kept picking up again. Again and again, notably hoarse even through the walls, until I wished it would just stop.

  It finally did stop. The silence rang in my ears. I sat down on the bed, trembling. In the surreal silence it was hard to tell how much time had passed, but I didn’t think it was that long until the door to the cellblock opened again.

  Two guards carried a stretcher, a body loose and limp on it. I stayed sitting on my cot at the back of the cell. I didn’t want to look closer at the body in the stretcher, to see who it was. I knew.

  I saw them take the body to the cell where Officer Genner had been kept.

  If they’re taking her back down then she must be alive, right? I thought. It seemed unthinkable to take a corpse back to her cell. She might have just been unconscious, though there had been something strange to that limpness. Maybe I should have looked closer. I dragged myself up, taking slow steps to the wire mesh separating me from the wall. The guards were too far away and, with guilty relief, I realized I couldn’t quite see Genner’s cell.

  There was a noise near the entrance and then the green-eyed guard—no, then Theo entered. He was in his uniform, but his eyes were wide with a shocked expression that looked a bit how I felt. It made him look even younger.

  I stared as he hurried up the hall. I had full awareness of the situation, too much so, but it was so impossible that I could feel physical numbness in my extremities. It was strange, surreal. It was like when I had been drugged, except completely sober. It was worse sober.

  I watched Theo Heirdic scramble after the other guards.

  “Be careful!” he chided them. “Don’t hurt her!”

  I only heard half the reply.

  “...think she feels it anymore?”

  They were finally exiting the cell, coming back into my point of view as Theo seemed to shoo them out. He turned to close and lock the door behind them.

  “It just went wrong, but we’ll put it right,” Theo said. “Just keep her alive and we’ll fix her once the machine works right!”

  One of the men chuckled darkly. “I don’t think there’s enough of her left to fix, my brother. Anyway, we’ve got more little Mage rats to fix your machine on.”

  “It’s not like that!” Theo spun around to face him. “The machine is going to make things better for everyone! It’s not a punishment! It’s just that we need to get it working right-” He was gesticulating, cutting off his own sentences with frantic motions.

  The other man who’d helped carry the stretcher put a hand on Theo’s shoulder. Theo’s hands slowly sagged down to his sides.

  “You will, though it may take some sacrifice,” he said. His voice was warm, reassuring, like the Mage who’d taken me down to the prisoners on Oblivion Isle. “You need to be ready to handle that, little brother.”

  I felt a hard pang in my chest at those last words. I realized I’d worked my fingers into the wire mesh of my cell wall and was gripping it tight enough to hurt, but I couldn’t stop.

  “Yeah…” I heard Theo say. “You’re right, sir. I know. It’s just that this… this isn’t what I wanted.”

  “I know,” the man said. He gently pulled Theo along with a hand on his shoulder, taking them out of the cells. The third man tagged along behind them, rolling his eyes and crossing his arms.

  I didn’t retreat when they passed me. My hands were aching with how hard I was gripping the wire mesh, but I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what my expression was as I stared at the men passing by, but Theo glanced at me and blinked. He looked away.

  The man trailing behind them slammed the wire mesh when he passed by, startling me into letting go.

  “Stand back!” he said. “Arrogant fucking scum.”

  Thankfully the man seemed to have no more interest than making me step back. I made my way over to the corner of the cell near Nalei, the few steps feeling much longer somehow, and collapsed in a heap. I sat in silence, breathing hard and heavy, unable to speak for several moments.

  But the grim need to know eventually drove me to speak.

  “Nalei?” I said. My voice came out as a dry croak. “Are you there?”

  After a moment I got a shaky reply.

  “Yeah,” she whispered back. “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Did,” I paused to lick my lips, my mouth was so dry, “did you see Officer Genner? Coming back?”

  It was an even longer moment before the reply this time.

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  “...Yeah.”

  “Was she injured?” I asked. “Could you tell?”

  “She didn’t look injured,” she said. I could hear her tone turning professional, her Mage healer training taking over. “There wasn’t any blood and the way she was resting didn’t show any broken bones. There weren’t any signs of bruising on her face, though I couldn’t see the rest of her. But she was…”

  She faltered and fell silent. I automatically scooted closer to the corner of my little cage, as best I could come to trying to comfort her.

  “She was unconscious?” I asked after the silence had stretched on.

  “Her eyes were open,” Nalei said. There was no professional gloss at all to her voice anymore, only raw, shaky fear. “She was looking out and she stared like- like a dead woman, but her chest was moving.”

  I licked my lips again. My mouth was so very dry.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She hasn’t gotten up,” Nalei said. “She’s nearly across from me, I can see into her cell, but she hasn’t moved. It’s like she’s dead, but I saw her moving… I saw.”

  Her voice was strained, full of something like hope or fear. I sat huddled in my own cell.

  “Maybe she’ll recover,” I said, to myself as much as Nalei. The words were empty. I was empty.

  I could hear the angry guard’s voice in my head. I don’t think there’s enough of her left to fix, my brother. I could remember the broken prisoners I’d left in my wake on Oblivion Isle. My mouth was dry, but my cheeks were wet. I startled when Nalei responded:

  “Maybe.”

  There was more silence. There were more things I could say, but none of them were useful. None of them were right.

  “You’ll tell me if she moves, won’t you?” I asked.

  “I will.” Her voice was a little steadier now, as though reassuring me made it easier. “I’ll help her when she gets out of here.”

  “I know you will,” I said. “I know. You’re the best of us, Nalei, better than me and Milo. You actually wanted to help people.” I sighed. I hadn’t known Nalei well before this, but she had been one of Adain’s few friends, and that was enough. “We just wanted to prove we had the mettle to keep illegal Mages in line.”

  I could hear a breathy noise almost like a laugh from her.

  “I wanted some of that, too,” she admitted. “And here we are defeated without a Mage in sight. Funny, huh?”

  It was not even remotely humorous.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Listen, I’m going to sleep now. I think you should, too. We need to… need to stay healthy. Keep our spirits up. Maybe we’ll think of a way out of here.”

  “Do you have any ideas?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I looked at the door at the end of the hall, where the guards had so recently left. “Probably not.”

  “That’s better than me,” she said. There was a pause. “But you’re right. Let’s sleep.”

  I pulled myself up, using the rim of the sink to help, and stumbled over to my cot. The lights never actually went fully out in this place, only dimmed, but there was a blanket and pillow on the hard little bed I could put over my head.

  I stared at the ceiling and thought about how huge my problems had seemed when I was moping around in the Memorial Courtyard. I felt that I had discovered a kind of deep sorrow that physical pain and danger could not touch. I hadn’t been entirely wrong, I just hadn’t realized that physical pain and danger could also occur with that deep sorrow and make it worse. I didn’t know if the pain, the fear, the danger, or the boring hours that let me think and remember too much were the worst parts of this place. My only escape seemed to be in sleep.

  Just before I fell asleep, I realized something. I could no longer sense Genner magically. Not only could I not sense her as a Mage, but I couldn’t even sense the normal magic that all living humans had. I curled in on myself and wouldn’t let myself think about how deeply wrong that was. Thankfully my exhausted sleep left no room for dreams.

  Things were not better when I woke up, but there was more food. Theo and two guards were delivering it, kneeling on the floor to shove a bowl through a tiny flap on the bottom of the cell door. He hesitated before retreating.

  “What you said before, about us being self-righteous and worse than Mages…” he said in a soft tone. “It’s not true. I was held by the Heirs of Empire, once. The regular people taken by them don’t survive.”

  So maybe that was how the Hands knew something about the Cult’s runes. It was interesting information, especially since supposedly no one left the Cult of Tyrants. I was too tired and hungry to truly care, but I stored the information away for later.

  I couldn’t bring myself to respond to or even look at him. Not when the memory of screams and the hollow absence of Genner’s magic still rang through me.

  Despite the mental echoes of horrible screaming, hunger drove me to tear the food apart. It was simple bread and a thick broth, not great, but better than I might have expected here. At least there seemed to be no intention of starving us.

  But maybe there were worse things than starvation.

  I paused eating at the thought and shuddered, but then I got back to the food. I had always been good at putting feelings away when they weren’t immediately necessary, excepting Adain’s death, and it seemed I still had the knack of it. The experience of hearing that scream had been terrible, but it was over now.

  After eating the meager meal, I laid down in my cot and tried to think of any way out. Maybe if I could pull off one of the sink’s handles, somehow without the cameras noticing, I could sharpen it until I could cut through the wire mesh? Or, even better, my collar? A few of my fingers pushed searchingly at the anti-magic collar, trying to get underneath it between the thing and my own neck. The inner part was padded with soft cloth, just enough to let me breathe. It didn’t let my fingers through.

  I sighed and gave up. More fruitless plans gave way to sleep once more. This time I didn’t have the blessing of dreamless sleep. I saw my old roommate Adain turn into Theo, then melt away. Screaming started and haunted me continuously through an endless rescue mission for some ambiguous person I cared for.

  My dream-rescue finally led me to my mother. Her ash blonde hair was in that distinctive braid down her back, which I remembered better than her face. I called out for her and she turned around, revealing Genner’s terrified face. Her hands tightened around my throat and I couldn’t breathe, choking until I woke up gasping. I still felt strangled, with the collar uncomfortably tight around my neck.

  I scrabbled at it with my fingers, shaking and dry sobbing, until my training finally kicked in.

  I was a Mage. I couldn’t afford to be emotional like this; that was how Mages lost control and hurt people. I had seen the prisons where they had to put the Mages that lost control, and felt the suffocating weight of spells against magic. I breathed in and out deeply, focusing on how the air moved through me, how I really was breathing no matter what it felt like. Breathing until I was finally calm.

  Calm enough to sleep, almost, except I’d been sleeping too much in this empty cell. I ended up awake, staring numbly at the ceiling, so I heard the door to the cellblock open.

  It was Theo, coming back down with some piece of equipment.

  I turned my head as Theo went past, wheeling an awkward medical appliance. It took me a moment to recognize it as an IV drip. I watched as Theo walked determinedly past the other cells, not even glancing side to side. There were no other guards with him, just one young uniformed man pulling a wheeled IV drip.

  An aching curiosity and odd sense of duty drove me to stand up.

  I walked over to watch Theo disappear with the IV drip into Officer Genner’s cell. It took long, tense minutes of waiting before Theo walked out again. He moved heavily even without the IV. He leaned against the wall in between cellblocks and slowly collapsed against it until he sat on the floor.

  He didn’t put his head in his hands, but gazed unblinking at the opposite wall. His expression was all glassy-eyed blankness, and some weary dread made him slump. I knew that feeling intimately.

  "Oh, Theo," I said, in despair rather than sympathy.

  I didn't think I’d said it loudly enough to be heard, but Theo looked up at the sound of his own name. The terrible emptiness of his expression was gone; he was frowning.

  "Did you just say my name?" he asked. He got up to move across the hall and stand in front of my cell, arms crossed. "How do you know my name?"

  "Your boss said it during the interrogation.” It was the only thing I could bring myself to say. “Theo Heirdic."

  "Well, now you know my name, but I don't know yours," Theo said. His arms were still crossed, but he didn't seem angry. His face, as far as I could read it at all, was thoughtful.

  “Theo,” I said. I swallowed. None of my escape ideas, plans of bold ingenuity and physical prowess, were feasible. If I had any chance at getting out of here then my best bet was the one standing in front of me, making me ache with memories I hadn’t touched in years.

  “Is your name Theo, too?” Theo asked. “That seems unlikely.” His frown deepened. “I’m not going to hurt you, you know. I understand if you’re afraid, but I’m really not like that.”

  “I know you’re not,” I said. Then I shook my head at my own words. I hadn’t seen Theo since we were less than ten years old, I didn’t truly know anything about him now. He’d watched as they hurt me. What did a sad face mean?

  Except he’d said they weren’t cruel. He’d looked so tired and sad. He’d looked the way I felt before, collapsing in my room after using magic on prisoners on Oblivion Isle, and that gave me hope. I needed hope more than air. I bit my dry lip and watched him.

  “What’s your name, then?” Theo asked.

  I hesitated. “You won’t use it against me? You don’t have, like, files on the Mages of the Division?”

  “We have files on the leaders, sure,” Theo said. “Not random Intermediate Mages. It won’t tell us anything except, well, your name.”

  “My name,” I said. I swallowed nervously, though I shouldn’t be so fearful. There was nothing in my name for Theo to recognize. “My name is Izak Biralei.”

  Theo paused, leaning in and studying me. “Was that always your name?”

  I flinched away, looking down. “No. It- it was different when I was a child.”

  “Izak,” Theo said softly, “how old are you?”

  I looked back up sharply. I saw the curiosity in Theo’s eyes, the trepidation, and I knew. My brother remembered.

  “Twenty-one. Two years older than you,” I said, soft in return. I felt knowledge floating up from the depths inside me, a memory of counting dates on tiny fingers. “Two years, three months, and five days.”

  Theo stared at me a moment and then stepped back. His voice louder, he asked: “Are you playing with me? Is that some kind of joke, some weird manipulation?”

  “No!” I pressed forward against the mesh, pushing my fingers into the grating. My heart pounded. Of course he didn’t recognize me. “No, Theo, you have to listen-”

  “You knew her,” Theo interrupted. “You must have, you couldn’t have guessed the dates like that. You- what happened to her? We can’t find her in the files.”

  I blinked, pulling back. “You said you didn’t have files on us!”

  “Not really!” Theo said, waving a dismissive hand. “Just a basic record of Mage names and positions. We could have probably guessed who you all were, mostly, but it didn’t tell us anything. But you knew Maxine.”

  He stepped forward eagerly and I choked on a bitter laugh. It was ridiculous. This situation was absurd. I was in an underground cell waiting to be tortured as one of my comrades died, talking to my long-lost little brother, and I had to… I had to come out. I hadn’t come out in, well, years. Everyone in the Mage Division knew. Did I even remember how to do this? I’d never truly been good at it.

  I was scrambling to find the words, pushing away the laughter that wanted to edge its way out. I dug my hands into the wire mesh of my cage against the shaking.

  “What happened to her?” Theo pressed, putting a hand forward and almost touching the metal wires that separated us.

  “It’s a lot to explain,” I started.

  “Is she alive?” Theo asked.

  “Yes, but-” I said.

  “Is she held prisoner? Did she escape?” Theo asked.

  I bit down on another bitter, almost hysterical, laugh. I thought: Yes, he’s held prisoner, but he’d like to escape! Except I couldn’t, that would make no sense. Theo was intense and wary, and I needed to say something, the right something.

  “Theo, are you familiar with the terms transgender or transexual?” I asked, just to establish a baseline.

  Theo stared at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  The door opening at the end of the hall made us both jump.

  “Comrade Heirdic!” another guard called. “The fluid infusion should be done by now! What’re you doing?”

  Theo sprang away, running back to disappear into Officer Genner’s cell. He appeared again soon after, awkwardly dragging the IV again, this time with a much thinner bag of fluids.

  “Later!” he hissed at me as he passed my cell. Then he was gone.