The floor is cold beneath my bare feet. I stand over the kneeling figures, and a spark of hope, stupid as it is, takes root. I have to know if they're still in there.

  I single out the first one. His left eye is gone, the socket a wet, weeping pit from which a single, pale nerve ending still twitches.

  I crouch, trying to meet his eyes as an equal. "Tell me your name."

  Are you in there? Is anyone in there?

  His throat works. I see the muscles in his scarred neck strain, but only a soft, guttural pop escapes him. He looks at me, and his awe is now tinged with a terrible, canine shame. The shame of a dog that cannot perform a trick for its god.

  The silence that follows is my answer. I am alone.

  No. Not yet.

  I move closer, my knees pressing into the grimy floor, my own revulsion pushed aside.

  I place a hand on his shoulder. "I know you're in there," I say, my voice rough. "I know you can hear me. We are not dogs. Stand up. Stand up with me."

  He rises. They all rise.

  "Take me to the one in charge."

  We step back into the yard's cold air. Every silver mask, from the watchtower to the pens, fixes on me. They begin to move toward me, a slow, shuffling tide of broken men. My escorts form a circle, a fortress wall against a sea of silver.

  The entrance to the main building is a wound in the dark metal, pulling the weak light from the yard into its throat. Inside, the air changes. It becomes thick, warm, and damp, like the inside of a mouth.

  It opens into a small, bare antechamber. A great iron door waits on the far wall, its surface sweating a foul mist. A deep line is gouged down its centre. The Abacus Seal. The door pulls inward with a wet, sucking sound.

  In the room beyond, he stands. He is wearing his cloak of faces, and it seems to draw all the warmth from the air.

  He lifts the mask from his face. The movement is heavy, as if he has done this a thousand times.

  His face is a battlefield. The war was lost long ago. Scar tissue is a blanket of wax over his jaw, his throat. But the battle was not a total victory for the monster. On his cheek, a small patch of original skin remains. Soft. Human. A single dark mole sits in its centre like a seed in a patch of dead earth. That small piece of vulnerability makes the surrounding ruin unforgivable.

  His mouth, a web of tight scars, twists. "Well, well. Look what the catalyst coughed up this time. Another one."

  He touches his ruined cheek. Then eyes crawl over my skin, on its unnatural glow. He sees skin without a single scar. A face that has never been ripped open, never been stitched back together wrong. Only the hard perfection of polished stone. He looks from my face to his own reflection in it, and for a heartbeat, he flinches.

  His eyes harden. "Perfect. Unmarred. An insult."

  He begins circling me. The only sound is the soft drag of his cloak on the stone.

  "We have a process here," he says, as if confiding in an old colleague. "The brand for the psyche. The water for the flesh. Simple. It turns them into tools."

  His stare pins me. He stops so close I can smell the rot on his breath. "They tried it on me. Forty years ago. I was the first."

  His lips pull back as he speaks, revealing teeth filed to sharp points, like a row of tiny daggers. "A boy from Greyhollow. They chose me because I was weak. Dispensable."

  The scar tissue around his mouth pulls tight. "Just Max."

  "Elder William, that sanctimonious bastard," he says, his voice losing its rasp, sharpening to an articulate bitterness.

  He looks me in the eye, as if I am William himself.

  "He said, 'We've chosen you, Max, because your sacrifice will protect those who truly matter.' Can you believe that?"

  A harsh, broken laugh rips from his throat.

  His right hand, knotted at his side, gives a small, violent tremor. "Then came Elder Agnes. She pinched my chin." He mimes the gesture in the air, his scarred fingers forming a cruel pincer. "Her fingers were like bird talons. 'The weak are culled so the strong survive,' she told me. 'It is nature's way.' She said it like she was pruning roses."

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  His voice lowers, the anger buried under the wound of a forty-year-old humiliation. "But Elder Herbert. He was the worst."

  He leans in. "He put his arm around my shoulder, and said, 'Consider it an honour, son. You are serving a purpose that keeps our families safe.' Their families. Not mine. Never mine."

  The memory is thin, faded from my youth. Max is a ghost, a name lost to time. But the Elders faces are clear. I remember my fear. As a boy, you learn which houses to walk past quickly. William's was one. He had a temper that could curdle milk. Agnes was all sharp angles and sharper words. But Herbert was poison wrapped in kindness. He had a soft, kind voice that made the hairs on your arm stand up. They lived long lives. They died in their beds. A quiet, peaceful end for those who fed a boy to the wolves.

  He pulls back, pacing in a circle. "I proved them all wrong, didn't I?" His fist connects with a nearby metal table. The sound is a flat, ugly thud that rolls through the chamber. "I wasn't weak. I wasn't dispensable. I survived. I thrived."

  A sneer reforms on his ruined mouth. "Their process was clumsy. Run by old men who preached of strength but had none. They put the iron to my skin. They thought they had broken me."

  His voice becomes a low, savage growl. "But they turned their backs and never got the chance to finish. A cornered boy with nothing to lose is a dangerous thing."

  He leans in close. "And now?" A terrible smile stretches the scar tissue. "Now I'm the one in control. I am Maximus Reap. I took their clumsy ritual and I perfected it. It's justice. A punishment for every villager who ever looked down on me."

  He speaks of justice. All I hear is the whining of a wounded child, a small and pathetic sound.

  My judgement must show on my face. He sees it. The fire in him gutters and dies, leaving only a cold silence in the room. He was a shouting man a moment ago. Now he is something else entirely, something colder.

  He looks away from me.

  "My mother. She taught me alchemy." The words are soft, stripped of all performance. For the first time, he is just speaking. "She said it was about turning iron into silver." He gives a dry, broken laugh, a sound so full of self-loathing it makes me flinch. He gestures to his own ruined face. "Look what I turned into."

  His hand lifts, and his fingers brush against the small patch of clean skin on his cheek.

  In that moment, the monster vanishes. I see a broken man. I see the boy, Max, who once learnt about miracles at his mother's knee.

  The glimpse is brief. A crack of light under a closing door. His hand falls from his face as if burned. His eyes find mine again. The softness is gone, replaced by a hard, flat deadness.

  The monster is back.

  He sweeps his arm wide. "This is just the beginning."

  He pauses, savouring the words, and when he continues, his mouth hooks upward at one corner. "You've seen the black fortress over the swamp, haven't you? Hard to miss."

  He begins to pace again. This time in a straight line, back and forth. "It's a prison. Full of worthless scum. But it will be my stronghold. From there, I will seize everything beyond this wretched swamp."

  He stops. His stare feels like a hand closing around my throat. "The fortress is sealed. Flooded with hell-water. For ten years. The corrupted cannot pass the gates. They would dissolve."

  His eyes fix on my perfect skin. A muscle in his scarred jaw twitches. "But you. You are untouched. You are pure. You are the key."

  He moves closer, his voice low. "You will swim to the gate. You will open it. You will trigger the drain cycle. My army will walk in. And I will take my throne."

  He sees the defiance in my eyes. He smiles, the slow, tired expression of a man looking at a child who has just made a foolish boast. "You think you have a choice."

  He signals with a glance. A Collector steps forward, offering a small box lined with dark wool. Maximus takes it, his ruined fingers handling it with a strange delicacy.

  His smile is a cold, dissecting thing. His eyes aren't on my face. They move from my clenched fists, to my tense shoulders, to the frantic pulse in my throat.

  "The last 'god' who stood where you stand was a disappointment," he sneers. "All that power, and he just broke. Fled into the wilderness like a panicked animal. A complete waste. And yet, here you are. Same perfect skin. Same arrogant silence. Thought his purity was a shield. It was not."

  He opens the box. On the dark wool lies a wooden man, no bigger than my thumb. I look at it, my eyes tracing its clumsy, hand-carved lines. A phantom weight settles on my shoulders. A cold pressure, like a collar, closes around my throat. This small, worthless piece of wood is the most dangerous thing in this room. Because it was made with love. And he has kept it all this time.

  Maximus watches me, and his smile widens. He sees the understanding dawn in my eyes, the shift from curiosity to dread. A quiet, cruel pleasure glints in his own.

  With a scarred thumb, he presses a nearly invisible stud on the toy's back. A faint whirring sound, and the tiny arm lifts in a slow wave.

  "It meant something to him," Maximus says, his voice low. The automaton continues its slow wave in his palm. "The boy who carved this had a messy transformation. But he's still useful. Still mine."

  "He still makes a wretched little sound for his friend sometimes." He tilts his head. "I wonder what sounds your daughter would make?"

  My hands ball into fists so tight the unfamiliar bones grind together. A low growl rumbles from my chest. "You will not touch her."

  Maximus snaps the box shut. The sound is a cell door slamming on a part of my soul. He smiles. "Good. You love something. Just like the last one. That makes you easy to use."

  He turns his back. "Now, get out."

  I step out of his chamber, and take my first clean breath since entering. The Collectors who escorted me turn, their path leading not back the way we came, but toward the barracks.

  I stop.

  They stop a pace ahead of me and turn, their silver masks now facing me, blank and questioning.

  I look at them. Not at the masks, but at the broken men inside them. The men who knelt to me. Men now caught between their new god and their old master.

  I raise my hand. I point to a different building. A low, windowless archive built of dark, weeping stone.

  I say nothing. The silence is the real test.

  I watch them. There is a hesitation. A shared heartbeat where they are frozen between two poles of power. I can feel the struggle in them, the silent, grinding gears of their broken wills.

  Then, as one, they turn away from the path to the barracks. They begin to walk down the new path. My path.