The pen scratched loudly in the quiet room.
When the minutes ran out, a guard collected the sheets one by one and stacked them. Hela did not look at them. She only nodded to the warden, and the warden nodded to the guards, and the room began to move.
"Stand," one of them barked.
Alex stood. The chain clinked against the table, then fell slack as the cuffs were unlocked from the ring.
The same speech had been given to other groups across the block, he learned as they were marched into a long corridor. Hundreds of feet shuffled in the same direction. At the end there was a wide hall with a painted line down the middle of the floor. A guard with a clipboard stood at the head of it.
"Signed to the left," he called. "Refused to the right. Do not cross the line."
The crowd split. Alex went left with the others who had signed, and did not look at the right side. He heard it though. Muttering, cursing, one man laughing in a high, cracked way that made the hair on his arms stand up.
’Goosebumps’.
A second guard walked the line and counted under his breath.
"Left side, sixty six," he said at last.
"Right side, twenty eight," said the first.
’Twenty eight people chose the door,’ Alex thought. He stared at the floor. ’I don’t blame them.’
Two guards opened a steel door on the right side of the hall. Beyond it there was a narrow passage and a second door, and past that Alex could not see. The twenty eight were herded through one at a time.
Some walked in silently. One dropped to his knees and had to be lifted. The laughing man was still laughing.
The door closed with a dull thud.
Nobody on the left side spoke. After a while a single guard came back through the door, wiped his hands on his trousers, and picked up the clipboard again.
"Signed group," he said. "Back to your cells. You will be called."
They marched. Alex counted turns in the corridors without meaning to. Left, left, right, a stairwell.
He was placed in the fourth cell from the end on the second tier.
The door slid shut behind him, and the lock clicked.
The cell was small. A bunk bed pressed against one wall, a toilet in the corner, a sink, a tiny window near the ceiling with wire mesh over it. Sunlight came through in a gray rectangle and crawled slowly across the floor.
He sat down on the lower bunk and let out a long breath.
’Ok. Think. What do I actually have?’
He had a body he did not know, a sentence he had not earned, and a month. He had one percent of a chance. Less than that, according to the doctor.
Days began to blur after that.
The first morning they were woken at five by a horn. Trays came through a slot in the door, and the food was gray and warm and tasted like nothing. Then a guard escorted them to a medical wing, where they were weighed, measured, and scanned. Needles went into both arms. A man in a blue coat asked questions about sleep and appetite and wrote down each answer without looking up.
The second day was training rooms. Pads were stuck to Alex’s temples and chest, and he was told to sit and breathe and count while lights flickered in patterns on a wall. It went on for hours. His head ached afterward, a dull pressure behind the eyes.
On the third day he ran. Laps around an indoor track until his lungs burned. On the fourth he did it again. Then the fifth. The body he was in was stronger than his old one, which surprised him, though it was slow and out of practice. Every day it got a little better.
Some faces disappeared during those first weeks. New ones came in though.
He noticed a man who had been beside him on the first morning was gone by the second. Nobody talked about it. Some of them had likely failed the early screening. Some of them had likely been sent back. Alex did not ask.
On the fifth night, the door of his cell slid open and a guard shoved someone inside.
"Your cellmate," the guard grunted. "Play nice."
The door slammed. Alex looked up.
The boy standing there could not have been older than sixteen. Thin, pale, with a messy mop of brown hair and eyes that darted around the cell and never settled.
"Uh," the boy said. "Hi."
"Hi," Alex said.
"Is this bunk taken?"
"The top one is free."
The boy climbed up carefully, sat, and pulled his knees to his chest. For a while neither of them spoke. Then his voice came again, very small.
"I’m Jerry."
"Alex."
"Are you... are you scared?"
Alex thought about lying. He thought about the flat calm he had felt in the room on the first day, and how it had never really gone away.
"Yes," he said. "A little."
Jerry let out a shaky breath, like it was a relief to hear it. "I thought it was just me. Everybody else seems so, I don’t know. Tough."
"Most of them are pretending." Alex wasn’t so sure but he said it anyway.
Jerry was silent for a moment. "I didn’t kill anyone," he said. His voice cracked. "I mean, I did something. But it was a robbery that went wrong, and the guy... he wasn’t supposed to be there. I didn’t mean it."
’Neither did I,’ Alex almost said. But that was a different story, and not one he could tell.
"Hey," he said instead. "Look at me."
Jerry looked down over the edge of the bunk.
"Whatever happened before, you’re still here. That counts for something. You signed. Most people in that hall didn’t have the guts."
"In my ward almost ten said no."
"And fourteen said yes."
Jerry swallowed. "Do you think I’ll make it? I heard the numbers. They said point one percent."
"I heard them too."
"That’s nothing."
"It’s not nothing," Alex said, echoing the doctor without meaning to. "It’s small. But someone gets it. Why not you?"
Jerry stared at him, and for the first time his shoulders eased a little.
"Why not me," he repeated quietly.
"Right. So get some sleep. It’s going to be alright."
He did not know if it was true. He said it anyway, because the kid needed to hear it, and maybe he needed to hear it too.
Jerry lay back on the top bunk. After a long while his breathing evened out, and Alex knew he had fallen asleep.
Alex stayed awake, staring at the underside of the bunk above him.
’Ok. Now for the thing I’ve been avoiding.’
He closed his eyes. In every story he had ever read, this was how it worked. You died, transmigrated or you got hit by a truck, and then you woke up somewhere new with a gift waiting for you. A system, a panel, something that made the world make sense.
’Status,’ he thought.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, deliberately, in the same voice he used in his head. ’Status. Open panel. System.’
The darkness behind his eyelids stayed dark. No window. No text. No chime.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.
’That’s strange.’
He tried a few other words he half remembered from novels. Interface. Menu. Inventory. He tried to say them aloud in a whisper, so quiet the boy above him would not stir. Still nothing.
’How did I even get here? Did I die? How did I..... I woke up in a stranger’s body on death row. That’s a transmigration. That’s the whole setup. Where’s the cheat?’
He lay very still.
’A body with a death sentence. No system. No panel. No skill. Just a one in a thousand chance from a suit that may or may not pick me.’
The thought sat heavy in his chest.
’Did I get sent here without anything?’
A sharp knock rang against the cell door, three heavy strikes of a baton.
Alex flinched. Jerry jolted awake above him with a gasp.
"Up," a guard shouted from the walkway. "Inmates to the yard now."
The lock clicked. The door slid open, and a rectangle of harsh light fell across the floor. Alex swung his legs off the bunk. Jerry scrambled down beside him, still blinking.
The guard did not wait. He stepped out, walked to the next cell, and slammed his baton against the door.
"Inmates to the yard now," he repeated, louder, and moved on to the one after.