A thick blanket of fog covered the city. Little could be seen in the darkness that filled every crevice, every corner, every hiding place. The dark hid many secrets.

The fog crept through the streets, swirling in the inky blackness of the night. The sky was cloudy and dark. No light was visible, save for the full moon that hung above, shining weak rays through the clouds.

A chill was in the air. The night was cold and black.

Then, in the sky, something stirred. The clouds billowed as if caught in a strong wind. Red light seeped through, eerily lighting a small patch of the sky the color of blood. A faint, steady whirring noise came from above, and then, a black form emerged from the dark clouds.

Almost invisible in the darkness, the helicopter descended toward the fog-covered streets below. Crimson light broke through the fog and smoke, shining from the underside of the helicopter. Its blades sliced through the cold night air, stirring the fog below.

The blood red light focused on a large, dark building below. It was hexagonal, its black walls forming angular edges, and stood three stories high. Soldiers clad in shining black armor lined the perimeter of the rooftop, and a row of tanks and armored trucks stood in the front. A large, raised landing pad one story from the ground was connected to the building by a narrow platform leading to a large metal gate in the front wall.

As the helicopter approached, the gate across from the landing pad slid open slowly. Two rows of soldiers marched out from inside the dark building, crossing the thin platform and spreading out along the perimeter of the landing pad in tight formation. They stood impassive to the harshly blowing wind around them.

The black helicopter’s red searchlight shone down on the landing pad as it descended, and the light formed a symbol. A symbol that stirred fear in even the bravest hearts. A symbol of power. A symbol of the unstoppable force that ruled all. A symbol of a blood red snake wrapped around a razor-sharp knife.

In unison, the black-armored soldiers saluted. They stood firmly still as the helicopter’s blades whipped the cold air into a whirlwind.

The helicopter slowly touched down on the landing pad, the red light intensifying as it did. Nothing could be heard over the deafening whir of the helicopter blades. All attention was on the black chopper.

The soldiers standing on the landing pad and the roof of the building above knew that this was no ordinary night, and this was not just a routine cargo shipment. What this helicopter carried was much more than cargo. This helicopter carried the most powerful person on the face of the planet, the most powerful figure in history, as far as they knew. This helicopter carried the Sovereign Supreme.

After a minute of nothing but cold, wind, and darkness, the ramp that led to the inside of the helicopter slowly lowered. The soldiers didn’t move, resisting the fierce wind.

The clang of boots against metal coming from inside the helicopter could faintly be heard through the roar of the copter’s blades, and seconds later, a row of soldiers identical to the ones that lined the landing pad emerged, holding their rifles against their chests in perfect position. They marched out of the helicopter, walking down the ramp and joining the other soldiers positioned on the perimeter of the landing pad. They all faced the helicopter, waiting for whatever or whoever would come next.

A company of half a dozen soldiers appeared at the top of the ramp and started marching down. These were no ordinary, mass-produced soldiers like the ones before. These were the Elite Guard. Clad in sleek, black armor equipped with dangerous, high-tech weaponry, they were the highest-ranking soldiers in the Authorities’ army. Two crimson red stripes down the side of their helmets and armor signified their rank and duty.

The appearance of the Elite Guard could mean only one thing. The Sovereign Supreme was coming.

The Elite Guard stood on either side of the ramp, their weapons held in their hands. The dark red visors on their helmets reflected the light from the helicopter. At the top of the ramp, a figure appeared.

A chill crept through the air. In unison, the soldiers and the Elite Guard all raised their right arms in salute. Slowly, the figure walked down the ramp.

The very sight of the Sovereign Supreme was enough to strike fear into anyone. The soldiers stared up at his deathly pale face, holding their salutes as his cold, black eyes looked down at them. His pale, unnaturally waxy face was impassive as he strode down the ramp, carrying an aura of power and formidability about him.

The Sovereign Supreme walked to the end of the landing pad and across the narrow platform connecting it to the black building. The Elite Guard turned in unison and marched behind him, coming to a stop in front of the large metal gate. With a gush of air, the gate slid smoothly open, revealing a dark hallway leading deeper into the building.

The Sovereign Supreme paused for a moment in the dark doorway, his figure casting long, black shadows on the platform behind him. He turned around to face the helicopter and the rows of soldiers around it.

“Take them to the cells,” he said venomously, the words slithering out of his mouth like snakes. “Await further orders. And don’t do anything else to them until I say so.”

The soldiers saluted, and the Sovereign Supreme turned around, striding through the open gateway and into the black building. The Elite Guard followed him, their footsteps echoing in the dark halls of the building.

The gate slid shut with no audible noise amidst the howling wind. The soldiers turned back toward the helicopter, and eight stepped forward, marching toward the copter and striding up the ramp. Red light shone from inside the helicopter, lighting the landing pad around it.

No one moved for a minute, and then the soldiers emerged at the top of the ramp. Four came out, walking down the ramp and onto the pad. They were holding a man.

The soldiers stared down at the slumped figure the four dragged with them, silently observing his tear-streaked face and ragged clothes. They had no idea what had happened to this man, or why he was on the same helicopter as the Sovereign Supreme, but they didn’t need to know. Soldiers were considered low-class and inferior in the chain of command, and they just did the dirty work without even being informed of its purpose. They were mass-produced slaves of the Authorities, sent out into battle to die. They knew the horrors their rulers were capable of, and they were terrorized into submission. There were no defections in the Authorities’ army. There were no traitors. No one was crazy enough to try to resist.

The man didn’t look up at the soldiers holding him or the soldiers standing on the perimeter of the landing pad. He just let himself be dragged along the ground toward the metal gate, toward the black building. Tears dripped from his face, and his eyes were squeezed shut. Whoever this man was, all the hope had been crushed from him. But the soldiers didn’t care. They were trained from birth not to care. They were trained to kill and to terrorize, never to care.

The man was dragged across the narrow platform and to the gate, which slid open once more. The soldiers carried the man inside the building, and they disappeared into the dark halls.

The other four soldiers came into view at the top of the ramp of the helicopter. Slowly, they marched down and onto the landing pad. A woman was with them.

Unlike the man, this woman was not being dragged along the ground. Unlike the man, her eyes were open and alert. Unlike the man, she was not broken—not entirely, not yet.

Even the soldiers could see it. A fire was in the woman’s eyes. A determination. A spark, though it might have been small. Something was there. But there was pain, too. The soldiers could see tear streaks on her face. She had suffered, just as the man had. But somehow, she had held on. Somehow, she still had hope, despite how hopeless her situation was.

The woman kept her eyes straight ahead, fixed on the open gateway and the darkness of the building beyond. She didn’t look at the soldiers around her, or the helicopter behind her, or the rows of armed vehicles on either side one story below the landing pad, or the soldiers lining the perimeter of the roof above.

The soldiers and the woman reached the open gateway, and the woman turned around for just one moment. She gazed off beyond the soldiers, beyond the helicopter, to the horizon in the distance. To the one thing that still gave her hope. The one sign that it wasn’t over yet.

Far away, on the edge of the city, the sun was rising.

The woman took one last look at it, took a deep breath, and turned around, letting the soldiers lead her through the gateway and into the black building.

The metal gate slid shut behind them.

• • •

The soldiers led the woman down the dark entrance hall, which was lit only by glowing blue stripes on the floor and ceiling. No one spoke a word. The only thing that could be heard was the echo of their footsteps on the smooth metal floor, and the soft hum of the glowing stripes of light.

At the end of the hall was another metal gate. Control pads shone with red light on either side. The soldiers marched straight toward it, and the gate slid open smoothly. They walked through and entered a dimly lit elevator. The gate closed behind them, and the elevator slowly descended.

The woman stared at the narrow window in the elevator door as they went down, watching floors flash past. She counted them, trying to figure out how deep they were going. By now they had descended at least five stories, and still the elevator didn’t stop. They were five stories underground… six stories underground… seven stories underground…

The elevator slowed to a stop at eight stories underground.

The facility was much bigger than it had appeared to be on the outside. What seemed like a short three-story building from ground level actually went much deeper, with a total height of at least eleven stories. Most of the building was underneath the surface, and the woman wondered what the Authorities could be holding in the large facility.

The elevator door slid open, and the soldiers marched out, taking the woman with them. They entered a large room with several hallways branching off of it and a security checkpoint in the center, where an operator clothed in a white suit stood behind a desk of screens. A quartet of helmeted guards stood behind the operator, their weapons held firmly across their chests.

The operator looked up from a glowing screen at the four soldiers and the woman walking toward her. She tapped a console with a gloved hand and waited for the group to come to a stop in front of the security checkpoint.

“Take the prisoner to cell nine-twenty-eight, cellblock four-N-zero,” the operator instructed. “This one has been classified as a Red One-A.” She glanced down at a screen, her eyes darting over lines of information. “The Sovereign has issued specific orders regarding the prisoner. Those orders will be relayed directly to your individual systems.”

The operator looked up at the soldiers and gestured with a gloved hand for them to continue on.

The soldiers turned to the left, taking the woman past the security checkpoint and through a doorway. They walked down a hall and came to a barred door, which, unlike the others, didn’t simply slide open without a sound. One of the four soldiers stepped forward and scanned a device across a pad, and then entered a complex code on a keypad above.

The barred door slid upward, disappearing into the ceiling, and the soldiers led the woman through the doorway.

The woman knew that they had reached their destination when she saw where they were. Rows of barred cells lined the walls, most containing people. The woman stared at the shackled prisoners inside the cells, their faces weary and gaunt. She saw bloodstains on the floor that reflected the strange, dim yellow light that shone from above.

Some of the prisoners put their faces to the bars when they saw the new arrivals, staring at them with sunken eyes. The woman heard screams echoing through the cells, adding to the eerie atmosphere. This was a place of suffering, a place of hopelessness. They had sent her here to finish her off, to try to crush what was left of her.

The woman took a breath to stabilize herself, trying to look away from the faces of the prisoners. She heard some of them whispering things, their voices haunted and hoarse. Someone started crying in the distance, a broken sob of despair. The whispers of the prisoners grew more intense as the soldiers led the woman down the row of cells, and arms reached out through the bars to try to grab them.

The woman remained calm, or as calm as she could be in her current state. Her eye caught a glimpse of one prisoner staring up at her gravely, his features skeletal and pale. His head shook slowly, and he mouthed two words. It’s over.

The woman tried not to think about what that meant. There had to be hope here somewhere. But there wasn’t. There was no sun in sight; there was no light at all other than the dim, sickly yellow light that shone from the ceiling.

They came to a fork in the row of cells. More cells stretched on in either direction, with signs overhead that signified the designated number of each cellblock. The soldiers turned right and took the woman down another row of cells, filled with prisoners just as hopeless and pale as the last ones.

The woman closed her eyes, letting the soldiers lead her down the hall. She didn’t want to see all this.

Even with her eyes closed, she could hear the terrible moaning and pleading of the prisoners around her. Soon, she would become like them, her mind said, and quickly pushed the thought away. She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t give up hope. No matter what the Authorities did to her, she would resist. She wasn’t done yet. She had to keep fighting.

The soldiers stopped abruptly, and the woman opened her eyes. They were in a different portion of the jail, and the light shining from above was deep red.

They were in front of a dark, empty cell. Iron bars rose from the floor to the ceiling, and the metal door was controlled by a glowing control pad. A thin beam of light grew from a small device above the cell door, scanning over the soldiers for a few seconds. A small light next to the control pad glowed green, and the iron door slid back.

The soldiers led the woman into the dark cell, which was lit only by the crimson light from the hallway outside. The woman tried not to panic as the four soldiers released her, backing out of the cell and into the hallway. She turned around to face the bars and rushed for the door, but it slid shut with lightning speed, locking the moment it closed. The control pad glowed red on the door, signifying that it was locked for good.

The woman stayed, frozen, staring out from the darkness of the prison cell at the hallway beyond. Her hands clutched the cold, hard bars, and she pressed her face against the metal.

It was over. She was locked in. No matter how hard she tried to tell herself that there was hope, that she could somehow escape, she couldn’t completely convince herself that it was true.

Her only chance at escaping had been when the soldiers were taking her here. And now it was too late. Really, if she had tried to escape then, it wouldn’t have worked. No matter what she did, she was trapped. Caught right in the Sovereign Supreme’s inescapable grip.

The woman was torn between hope and hopelessness. Now, here, locked in the depths of a place she could never escape from, it seemed that the hope she had felt not long before was draining away fast. It seemed that the hope was gone, that it was pointless, that it was fake. There was no sunrise here to encourage her. There was nothing she could do to stop her fate from coming true.

She felt a tear slide down her cheek and hit the cold metal bars she held onto.

Desperately, she tried to stop herself from crying. She couldn’t give in to despair now. There was still hope left in her. She still had fire inside. She couldn’t give up, not yet, not here. But holding on was so hard.

The place she was in was, perhaps, a worse place than she’d ever been in. Before, she had been outside, in the city, the place she’d grown up in and knew how to survive in. She had been able to run. But now, here, she was caught. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The Authorities finally had her, and they would never, ever let her go.

She shut her eyes tight, her shoulders shaking from the weight of it all. She had to stay strong. She couldn’t collapse under the might of the Authorities. She still had the will to fight.

The Sovereign Supreme hadn’t won yet, she had to remind herself. He had won a battle, but not the war. She wasn’t completely gone yet. Not… yet. She knew, though, that she would be crushed if she stayed in this place for too long. This prison was a place where hope came to die. And it might be the place where she came to die, too.

The woman sank to her knees, still gripping the iron bars of the cell as if her life depended on it. As if she could bend them by sheer willpower to let her free. The bars, though, would not move. She knew they wouldn’t. There was no escaping this place.

She heard a noise to her left. Slowly, she raised her head, turning to look through the bars and to the cell next to hers.

The cell to the left of hers was the exact same as the one she was presently in—just as dark, cold, and inescapable. There was a man hunched in the corner, hidden by the shadows. He slowly edged himself toward the bars that divided his cell from the woman’s, the rags he wore dragging against the cold floor.

The woman saw him more clearly as the red light from the hallway outside illuminated his thin figure. The man was older than she was, and his hair was long, scraggly, and graying. His clothes were faded and shredded, mostly just heaps of dirty, dark fabric covering his bony body. The man’s face was dark and sunken, and a deep scar ran from his chin through his lips and all the way to his right ear. One hand was shriveled and deformed, bent at an odd angle and missing several fingers. His skin was dark, mottled, and wrinkled. The man’s eyes were haunted, staring at the woman from deep sockets.

“Who are y-y-you?” the man stuttered, his words slurred by the scar that ran through his lips. His voice was low and raspy, and when he stuttered, his right eye twitched strangely.

The woman didn’t respond for a moment, silently watching the man. Slowly, she said, “My name is Ash.”

The man raised his deformed hand, and said, “A g-g-good name. F-f-fitting f-for someone in a world as d-d-dark as our own.” He paused for a moment, his eye twitching involuntarily. “W-w-where did you get it?”

Ash swallowed, glancing away from the man briefly. “A boy gave it to me.”

The man nodded jerkily, and he took in a raspy breath. “What boy?”

Ash sighed. “It’s not really your business, but… his name was Alex.”

It pained her to say his name. The last time she had seen him had been just an hour or two ago, and he had been sleeping soundly. She had no idea where he was now, or what had happened to him, and the thought of the danger he might be in was frightening. At least he was with Scarlett. That girl knew how to fight well; and the two of them, though they were young, could survive for a while on their own, Ash hoped.

Though the answer didn’t seem to be exactly what the man had been looking for, he inclined his head and asked no more about the boy.

“What’s your name?” Ash asked the man. If they were going to be stuck together for as long as she was trapped inside this prison, she might as well know him.

The man coughed, and then replied, “L-L-Lucius. My n-name’s Lucius.”

Ash tried to ignore the man’s twitching eye when he stuttered, and rested her back against the cold metal bars. They were both silent for a while.

After a while, Ash asked, “Where are we, exactly? And why haven’t the Authorities just killed us? Why send us here?”

Lucius took in a shaky breath and said, “You w-want the long answer, or the short a-answer?”

Ash sighed. “I don’t really care. I just want an answer.”

Lucius nodded. “No one really kn-kn-knows where exactly we are in the f-facility. We’re in the Red One-A sector of the j-jail complex down h-h-here.”

Ash started to ask what the Red One-A sector was, and Lucius cut her off, raising his shriveled hand.

“Red One-A is what they c-call the high-priority p-prisoners. M-m-meaning the people who th-the Authorities hate the m-m-most. Higher s-security than other a-areas.”

Ash’s shoulders slumped. Things were getting worse by the moment. She still didn’t know why the Authorities didn’t just kill them, though. She started to ask, but once more, Lucius already knew what she was going to say.

“Th-they haven’t killed us y-y-yet,” he interrupted, “b-because of one reason. Death is too peaceful. Death is t-t-too quick and merciful. Th-they want to c-crush all hope out of us b-by making our lives worse than d-death. A way to crush h-hope. To crush resistance. S-so they keep us a-alive, as an e-e-example. Th-they crush us slowly and p-painfully. This is what h-h-happens to those of us who r-resist.”

Lucius’ eye twitched again with even more fervor than ever before, and he groaned in pain. Ash could hear his labored breathing grow quick and shallow, and Lucius grabbed the bar with his good hand for support. He took a long, shaky breath, and slowly sat up again.

Lucius stared at Ash, pain in his haunted eyes. “You see w-what they turn us into? Th-they… destroy us. T-tear us apart. Break us.”

His words struck Ash with an icy fear, and she edged back uneasily.

Lucius took a raspy breath, and said, “There is n-no hope here. T-this is the place that hope comes to d-d-die.”

It was an eerie echo of what Ash had been thinking to herself earlier. And it was terribly true.

“A-Ash…” Lucius rasped. “It’s over f-f-for you. Over for a-all of us. The Sovereign S-Supreme always wins i-in the end. H-he always breaks us.”

A shallow, fear-filled laugh rose from Lucius’ throat and then died down. He spoke once more, and his tone was tinged with sadness. “You c-cannot escape what your future holds. Y-you will become one of us. A-and you will never, ever get out of this place.”