The Graduation List
It was exactly six days after his bunk was taken that Marek was officially ‘graduated.’
0500 hours, morning roll call. Over the loudspeakers, a shrill whistle screeched, followed by an ominous recitation of numbers.
“Subject 309, Subject 321, Subject 344... and Subject 335.”
Number 335. Marek. Having a crushed toe and getting stripped of his ration coupons had wrecked his training scores for the entire week. His final cumulative score sat at eighteen points—dead, uncontested last.
“All named subjects will report to the central corridor immediately and kneel.”
The heavy iron door swung open, and two security guards armed with rifles strode into Dormitory 3. Curled up on the freezing bunk right by the door where the drafts leaked through, Marek stood up, trembling violently.
Instinctively, his eyes darted toward the steam heating pipe. It was a desperate plea for salvation directed at Grad—the bunk boss he had served so deferentially over the past two years, bribing him with crusts of bread.
Yet Grad remained turned toward the wall, not twitching a single muscle. No matter how tight you were yesterday, the moment your performance slipped and your name landed on the redundancy list, this hellhole treated you as less than garbage.
“Grad... big bro... please save me...!”
Even at Marek’s pathetic whimpering, Grad’s broad shoulders did not flinch. In the end, a guard’s leather glove clamped onto the scruff of Marek’s neck like he was luggage.
As he was dragged across the stone floor, Marek’s eyes met mine. A gaze tangled with terror, resentment, and venomous curses. When he passed my bunk, I rested my chin on my pillow and whispered just loud enough for him to hear:
“Happy graduation, Marek. Should’ve padded your résumé while you had the chance.”
“You... you fucking cunt...!”
Smack! A guard’s rifle butt slammed into the back of Marek’s skull. With a bloody scream, Marek was dragged down the hallway toward the northern elevator, and the iron door slammed shut with cold finality.
That was all.
On Marek’s bunk, only a dented pillow remained.
The kids on the surrounding bunks held their breath in silence. None mourned. Only a chilling dread—Will next week be my turn?—hung thick and suffocating over the cramped dormitory.
Ten cutoffs every week. Occupational Safety and Health violations, wrongful termination, not to mention child labor exploitation. Doesn't this backwater have a Department of Labor?
Clicking my tongue, I got to my feet. I had no leisure to grieve. Marek’s elimination simply meant my own turn had been bumped up a week closer.
Following Marek's disappearance, Grad and I settled into a strange symbiosis. He wanted me not to undermine his authority in front of the other kids, and I needed the security intel he had gathered over the years. We became the sort of companions who sat together only during meals.
“Did you figure out the specs on the pass for the laundry room?”
I asked over our trays at morning mess. Grad spooned up watery soup and shifted his gaze.
“There's a brass ID tag on the axle of the laundry cart that comes every two weeks. You have to tap it against the scanner on the primary security gate to open it.”
“And the guard pushing the cart?”
“Usually just one. But the moment that door opens, the firing ports on both sides of the corridor slide open immediately. You have to use the key around the guard's neck to unlock the secondary security door, and if you screw up, they turn you into a sieve.”
“What about the ventilation shaft leading outside?”
“Roughly thirty centimeters in diameter. You couldn't fit even if we folded you in half. Besides, the interior is wired with a double layer of high-voltage mesh.”
Grad wasn't just a mountain of muscle. To survive, he had spent years observing every crack and corner of this facility like a rat.
“Are you seriously planning to break out?” Grad set his spoon down and murmured in a low voice.
“What, you want me to choke down this slop for the rest of my youth and get shipped off to a warzone when I turn twenty?”
“The outside's hell too. It's crawling with bastards who treat things like us as monsters.”
“Who gives a damn if it's hell? At least out there, they pay you for the labor they squeeze out of you. Here, it’s unpaid forced labor with zero overtime pay.”
“...The hell is overtime pay? Whatever. If you get caught, I don't know a thing.”
“Ignorant bastard.”
The terms were clear. I filed Grad’s information neatly into my mental catalog.
The issue was that our allowed movement was suffocatingly restricted. From dormitory to mess hall, mess hall to testing lab, the injection room, the central assembly hall, and the solitary cells if you caused trouble—that was all that was permitted. Wherever you went, you had to keep your feet on the red control line painted on the floor, flanked at all times by a three-man armed security detail. Windows were set near the dizzying heights of the ceiling, bolted over with iron bars, meaning you couldn't catch so much as a sliver of blue sky, let alone outside scenery. Movement between floors was strictly handled by hydraulic elevators reserved for administrative personnel.
The facility's routine was monotonous and sadistic. Monday: load-bearing endurance training, hauling heavy iron plates up steep ramps. Tuesday: reflex drills, dodging or catching iron balls shot from mechanical launchers. Wednesday: neural response testing, enduring cycles of sudden acceleration and screeching deceleration. Thursday: mutual sparring with wooden swords and daggers. Friday: scheduled augmentation injections and blood harvesting.
Nowhere did they teach tactical combat or marksmanship. Daggers were blunted practice blades chained to our wrists, and rifles were welded firmly to shooting stands, used strictly for target identification drills.
They’re keeping us from learning real tactical doctrine because an uprising of augmented humans would be hard to contain.
Their vicious design was to completely castrate our critical thinking and raise us solely as bio-weapon components that moved only on command.
Three times a week in the auditorium, we were taught the common tongue, arithmetic, geography, and history. Military installations and the facility itself were redacted from the maps, but railway routes and currency units could still be learned. Those were the only classes worth a damn once outside.
Just like teaching only Excel shortcuts and spelling rules to exploit company drones.
Yet I didn't waste a single minute. Knowing geography was vital to plotting an escape route, and knowing currencies meant not getting fleeced. The Herzen Empire, the Urgan Frontier League, the Eilbar Royal Union, and the transcontinental railway conglomerate ARC—I carved every term from the margins of those textbooks into my mind like studying for the college entrance exams in my past life.
To escape, more than anything, I needed to grasp the precise performance and limits of my body. With every training session, I rigorously broke down my physical data.
First: burst strength and initial acceleration. Under extreme duress, my maximum load capacity probably capped out at around one ton. My reflex speed once the indicator light flashed was number one in the entire facility. Dynamic visual acuity allowed me to snatch seven out of eight flying iron balls barehanded. I could track the finger muscles of a shooter pulling the trigger and evade the trajectory before the round even left the barrel.
Up to that point, I sounded like the elite lieutenant of some overpowered protagonist in a fantasy novel. But there was a fatal defect.
Second: stamina and durability. A dead sprint at maximum output had a hard limit of exactly thirty meters. If I pushed peak speed any longer, the muscles in my thighs and calves locked rock-hard, dropping me to the floor. Holding maximum load lasted only a handful of seconds.
Like dropping a dump truck’s engine onto the chassis of a compact city car. The frame can't handle the strain, so it groans and snaps.
This was why the researchers labeled me an ‘unstable failure.’ Top-tier explosive burst, but garbage fuel efficiency—in any prolonged engagement, I would overheat and break down on my own. Lowering the output allowed me to move longer, but the trouble was that whenever adrenaline spiked, my power burst forth all at once. Without knowing proper regulation techniques, all I could do for now was move in short bursts and stop to catch my breath.
If a fight dragged out, I would gas out first. I made a rule never to approach a doorway held by two guards, even if I could ambush one.
For six months, I prowled like a rat, searching for cracks in the facility’s armor.
Month two: While Grad staged a brawl at the mess hall by flipping his tray, I crammed myself inside a laundry cart awaiting pickup, lying flat under sacks of damp, sweat-stinking inmate uniforms. Clack-creak, clack-creak. Just as Grad had said, the warped wheel knocked in a rhythmic two-beat. Two right turns, one left turn, a gentle downward slope for about twenty seconds.
Just as I was tracing the schematic in my head and counting the seconds, the cart halted with a jolt.
“Why's the cart so heavy today?”
“Laundry must've soaked up water.”
“Strange. Better check it.”
A gloved hand reached through the sacks. Getting caught was a matter of seconds. Without hesitation, I tore through the canvas on the opposite side, vaulted out, and threw myself around the corridor corner.
Shouts erupted behind me. An alarm would sound any second, and a security guard already blocked the route back to the dorms. I grabbed a high-pressure steam valve for fire suppression and yanked it with all my might.
Hiss—! Boiling, blinding white steam flooded the corridor. Taking advantage of the total blackout, I slammed my shoulder through the lock of the nearest treatment room, burst inside, and began smashing medicine vials in a frenzy.
Fortunately, the incident was written up not as an ‘attempted escape,’ but as ‘seizure and property damage induced by augmentation side effects.’ My stability score was docked seven points and I was tossed into solitary confinement for three days, but the harvest was invaluable. I had laid eyes on the two layers of security doors Grad had described. Even if I bypassed the first gate with an ID tag, without the officer’s key, I would be trapped in front of the second.
Month three: I tried finding an escape route by prying open a drainage pipe, but the fumes of strong acidic runoff pouring from the pipe nearly incinerated my nasal lining. No point dissolving into liquid waste before making it out. Dismissed.
Month four: I attempted to pry open the elevator ceiling vent, but the spoon handle I’d stolen from the mess hall snapped first. In a place devoid of even a basic screwdriver to loosen a bolt, it was impossible. Dismissed.
Month five: Using stolen candles from the treatment room and beeswax smuggled in bread, I managed to take an impression of a guard’s key. But the facility lacked any files or precision tools to carve iron into that shape. Utterly useless.
Six months passed since I awoke to my past-life memories in this facility. In that time, at ten per week, hundreds of children vanished up the northern elevator under the euphemism of ‘graduation.’ Of the original batch in Dormitory 3, only three or four remained alive, myself and Grad included. The empty bunks were continuously refilled with orphans dragged from the Western Front or fresh brats transferred from other closed internment facilities.
The concrete wall beneath my bunk was scored with maze-like lines carved with my fingernails. Dormitory, mess hall, testing lab, treatment room, and the primary security gate beyond the laundry—every route I had walked and verified with my own eyes was connected. Yet before the final secondary security door, a pitch-black question mark remained etched.
“You’ve been staring at that for half a year.”
Grad drifted over, squatting beside me and muttering as he pointed at my drawing.
“That door is fifteen centimeters of special alloy steel. Without the officer's key, even blasting powder won't scratch it. And the corridor in front has machine-gun ports manned around the clock.”
“I know.”
“Then drop it. Your scores aren’t bad. You can survive until twenty.”
Thanks to the influx of new kids, my ranking stayed buoyant. But that was no guarantee I’d be safe come next week. I brushed the stone dust from under my fingernails. I couldn't breach that door. Even if I got my hands on the key, I still had to get past the gun ports on either side. I hadn't found a solution yet.
Should I just settle like this? Coast right on the margin of the testing threshold, swallow the enhancers, and hold out until twenty?
Like hell I will.
At twenty, you got sold off as a ‘finished product.’ After that lay the frontlines of war. Rather than living that dog’s life, it was better to thrash and die trying.
Mom. Little brother.
Faces of my family from my previous life flickered across my mind. When I was hit by a truck at that crosswalk and died, how much did they cry? How bitterly did they resent me as they ran through the courts with mountain of debts and renunciation of inheritance papers in hand? In my past life, I was always the one who chose to run. Refusing medical treatment was framed as an excuse for my family's sake, but in truth, I had simply fled out of terror at the thought of a grueling, agonizing battle with illness.
I refuse to spend this life running away only to get dragged to the slaughterhouse.
I turned toward the wall and shut my eyes. I will wait. Until the opportunity comes. Until a single crack opens. I will hide my fangs and wait, and wait again.
Four days after that conversation with Grad, at dawn, the opportunity came.
BOOOOOOM—!
A thunderous roar shook the earth, vibrating through every wall of the dormitory. Bunks bounced off the floor, and the ceiling lights shattered in an explosion of sparks.
“Aaaah!”
“Wh-what is that?!”
Sleeping children screamed as they tumbled to the floor. I kicked off my blanket and rolled beneath the bunk.
Ruuuuumble!
The second blast hit much closer. Spiderweb cracks ripped across the thick bulletproof viewing pane above the entrance door. In the corridor, blaring emergency sirens deafened the ears alongside the staccato thunder of fierce gunfire.
Crack-crack-bang! Bang! Bang! Rat-tat-tat-tat!
These weren't the single-shot bolt-action rifles the facility guards carried. These were the heavy, destructive cracks of rapid-fire automatic weapons. Someone from the outside had brought heavy firepower and was assaulting the facility.
Grad kicked aside an overturned bunk and hauled himself up.
“An enemy attack?! Who the hell—?!”
“How should I know?!”
BAAAANG—!
A third explosion scored a direct hit on the wall right beside the dormitory entrance. The thick concrete sheared inward, raining brick rubble and pale plaster dust like a hurricane. Panic seized the children, and they scrambled screaming toward the opposite corner. But I went the other way, lunging full tilt toward the collapsed rubble.
Through the acrid haze of gunpowder smoke, a blood-spattered corridor came into view. A security guard in a navy uniform lay slumped against the wall, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Three gaping bullet holes were punched through his chest, and the silver ring of keys around his neck slid down into a puddle of crimson with a soft splash.
And right beside him—the heavy blast door separating the dormitory from the hallway had been warped and blown clean off its hinges.
The secondary security gate leading outside would still be standing past the laundry room, but the first wall that had locked me in every single day was gone. A window of opportunity to fetch the key had opened.
Over the loudspeaker, the duty officer's desperate scream tore through the air:
“The western perimeter is breached! The intruders are Urgan forces! All personnel rally——”
BANG! A gunshot cut the transmission short.
I vaulted over the rubble and burst into the hallway. In one fluid motion, I snatched the bloodstained key ring from the dead guard's corpse.
Grad scrambled out behind me, turning pale as a ghost at the sight of the bodies strewn across the floor.
“Sonya! If you go out there, they'll gun you down!”
I clenched the keys so hard the metal bit into my palm.
To the right lay the central sector where the firefight was raging. To the left lay the emergency route running past the laundry room toward the outside.
Wiping a splatter of blood from my chin with my sleeve, I smirked.
“Like I give a fuck.”
“Like you give a... what?!”
Without looking back, I took off running toward the left.