Following the guard's order, all the prisoners knew what they had to do and when they had to do it, as such, the eleven men constituting the rightmost row in the cell started to walk straight ahead while the prisoners of the other four rows stayed motionless.

When the first group arrived at the guard's level, each prisoner without exception went around him to the point of skirting the walls, avoiding him as if they were trying to avoid plague...

Heads down, fearful eyes glued to the ground, none of them wanted to attract the guard's attention.

Once the first prisoners had passed the guard, it was the turn of another row of prisoners to do the same, and the same spectacle occurred; like just before, no man showed the slightest sign of rebellion and that to the delight of the guard.

Little by little, the cell emptied itself until there were only two people left in it; the guard and the boy.

Because of his nearsightedness, the guard was unable to clearly see the kid from where he was so he took a few steps forward while making sure not to walk in the filth littering the ground...

After having covered the equivalent of 15 feet the boy's appearance became much more distinguishable to the guard, and although it was far from the first time he had seen him a strong feeling of disgust came over him when he saw the state the kid was in.

The boy was basically a living mess; his initially white skin was completely covered with a layer of dirt, his mid-long black hair was dry and full of knots, his uniform was ripped in many places, especially on his legs and arms, which further revealed the various bruises and scars of varying depths that were scattered across his atrophied body...

In every aspect, the kid was in worse shape than any of the other prisoners, 'And yet he still lives.' The guard thought with a frown.

One of the things that fascinated the guard was the morbid statistics related to this place and in these statistics the biggest anomaly was without a doubt the boy...

Most of the time, the men who arrived here as prisoners decided within a month that keeping their lives wasn't worth the hell they were enduring and would find a way to commit suicide, the others would also die sooner or later, whether from exhaustion, disease, malnutrition, an accident or because they had simply pissed off a guard...

In the end, taking each information into account, it can be predicted very roughly that out of 100 new prisoners, only 3 will still be alive after one year...

And yet...

The kid was already there before the guard was even hired two years ago.

How he was still breathing was beyond the guard's comprehension; the boy was nowhere near as tough as an adult, he worked well but not to the point of being entitled to substantial benefits in terms of food, and although there was definitely no one here mentally tougher than he was and he usually was able to make the guards forget about his existence (except on occasions like this when he needed help to move), this couldn't explain why he was still not dead.

During several seconds, the guard continued to watch the kid fail to pull himself up onto his legs even with the help of his arms that were supporting his knees, then he sighed, knowing that the boy would be unable to understand the insults he wanted to throw at him for being so pitiful, he didn't utter them and simply lifted him by the collar abruptly.

"Step forward." The guard ordered dryly.

The boy complied without saying anything, these two words, he had heard them far too many times not to understand their meaning.

***

The ground under 3109's feet was getting colder and colder as he was walking down the hallway, that would be something he would worry about if he believed in his survival but fortunately or not that wasn't the case, it never was.

For as long as he could remember, 3109 had always been imprisoned in this place, and for as long as he could remember, he had never been referred to as anything other than the number which was on his collar, '3109'...

He knew it wasn't a normal designation since guards tended to refer to each other with words that sounded quite different from this one, but since he couldn't think of anything that made more sense to him than that number, he preferred to keep it as his own way of referring to himself too.

The guard who was following closely behind him hit him on the shoulder with the tip of his truncheon, nearly knocking him over with the force he put into his gesture, "If you don't hurry there will be no food left for you." He said harshly.

3109 didn't understand the sentence immediately, but the mention of the word 'food', which was a term he knew, the fact that he could no longer see the rest of the prisoners in front of him, and the fact that the guard seemed to want him to speed up his pace were enough for him to understand that the latter was trying to make him understand that if he didn't hurry up he would have his meal stolen.

After hearing the guard's warning, 3109 didn't go any faster, not that he was trying to piss him off or that he wasn't taking what he said seriously since even if the guard had kept his mouth shut he would have known this was going to happen, the problem was that 3109 simply couldn't go any faster, his legs were too worn out to handle more than what he was inflicting on them right now.

After some more painful walking ponctuated by angry sounding words coming from the guards, 3109 noticed that the brightness coming from the strange balls on the walls of the hallway was gradually eclipsed by a natural light; he wasn't far from his first stop of the day.

---

Once they reached the end of the corridor, 3109 and the guard found themselves in what looked like a man-made circular open cave of about 500 feet in diameter.

All around them, there were many hallway entrances similar to the one they had just left, rows of prisoners were pouring out of some of them.

To their right, they could see the beginning of a huge spiral staircase which was espousing the walls of the cave and connecting all the different floors of the latter between them, from the bottom, where they were, to the top, 150 feet higher.

Lifting his head, 3109 saw the only way out of here that he knew of, a glowing hole from his perspective...

Never in his short life had he even hoped to see what was beyond this hole, prisoners like him couldn't go higher than the first floor... literally.

If any of them tried, his collar would do its job, and when these things activated, it always ended up messy.