Another week passes before Eren feels comfortable setting his plan in motion. However, it feels exciting in a fake, “this isn’t really happening” way. It may have been his plan, but it all plays out in front of him like a movie. Maybe it’s because the reality of potential consequences hasn’t quite settled yet, or the fact that if this fails he will almost certainly be killed.

  Then again, just as Cris said, it’s better to die trying than rot away here for the rest of their lives, or worse.

  Eren gives the signal to begin via Morse code in the morning, and now all he has to do is wait. There is no way to determine if everyone else is playing their part, so every ounce of mental fortitude he has left to muster goes towards his portion of the plan, and the remainder to hope.

  The Dinner slop is delivered at 190 seconds past 6pm. Eren counts every second, and damn is he good at it by now. He had plenty of practice over the past weeks and could get well into the hundred thousands without so much as a yawn, which is good—a yawn will ruin everything at this stage.

  He doesn’t need to count that high today, only to exactly 200 seconds after his food is delivered. While he counted much higher in the past, this is the most important one. He can’t afford to be off by more than five seconds, or whoever is watching the cameras will pick up on their plan.

  Eren shuffles around his cell. His bindings still hold his arms and legs together. Breaking them off would likely warrant another beating so he hadn’t bothered. His joints are stiff, not having full mobility for weeks made it nearly impossible to even think about moving them apart. Still, he did his best to keep stretching and moving every day.

  150 seconds, and he’s almost there. Eren sits down against the wall to continue his routine, one he has been at ever since he proposed the plan. A routine he diligently followed to the exact second for a week now.

  It’s hard to work through the pain, the broken bones, the sore muscles, and the cold concrete. He limits mobility to what can be done without causing more damage and expands the range of motion as he feels it out. Today feels the best, but not by much.

  180 seconds. Eren lays down on his back, the most comfortable position to be in for long periods. He made sure to schedule his routine so that when this time came, this would be his position.

  193 seconds. Eren relaxes his muscles entirely after finishing the stretch, flexing his hands and feet to display movement even during rest.

  200 seconds. Eren freezes.

  His eyes remain closed, his chest expanded in practiced fashion, and he is positioned with his feet at the door and his head at the toilet.

  And now he waits, and waits, and waits.

  Keeping his chest expanded to minimize the visibility of his breathing is harder than he thought it would be, but he strains through the ache in his muscles, through the growing discomfort of the solid ground against his back.

  Just a little longer. He just needs to wait a little longer.

  Eren can hear something muffled just beyond his door. Given how little sound ever travels through the walls, it means that one of the other doors is open, and the sound is now bleeding through the halls.

  Just a little longer, a little longer. He struggles to stop his chest from falling, taking every ounce of strength he has to avoid a visible breath. Just a little longer.

  The muffled sounds get closer and closer until it is finally his turn.

  The light from beyond his door is obscured, and Eren jumps upright, shuffling as quickly as he can to the space right beside where the door swings open.

  With less than a second to spare, his cell door swings open, and in storms two guards and a repair man.

  All three men are battered, their faces bruised, their knuckles bloody and their jaws clenched tight. They are furious, and now their fury is turned on Eren.

  As soon as the guards enter, Eren throws himself at the one closest, sending the man into the wall across from the others with a grunt.

  The other guards are quick to pull Eren off. He can feel their firm hands on his shoulders. Eren bucks violently, driving his head down into the beltline of the guard he had tackled.

  The other two tear at him, but without any clothes and covered in sweat from his stretches, he is too slippery to get a good grip on. Their hands glide off him at first, long enough for Eren to push at the guard’s hips, tangle his hands in his belt line, and continue to headbutt him over and over until he is torn away and sent clattering to the ground.

  It was very, very risky, but it was the only way he knew to get a hold of the key.

  The tackle and the previous attacks on the guards are nothing more than one large misdirection. Their expectation of a fight is solidified, evident now as they punch at Eren’s ribs and knee his stomach to try and rip him away.

  His headbutts are nothing more than a strong sensory distraction, focusing all of his force and attention on ramming the same spot over and over and over again, forcing the guard’s mind to only register that one intense spot of pain, making Eren’s sloppy pickpocket job on the key at his belt a lot less obvious than it would have been otherwise.

  A strike comes in hard at his face, sending blood spattering to the concrete.

  Perfect, Eren waits for another hit to the stomach and lets himself buck downward, pulling his arms in tight to his body while stuffing the now stolen key into his mouth for safe keeping.

  Another punch to the stomach, a kick to the head, and Eren collapses to the floor entirely, bracing for the beating to continue.

  It never comes, and he whispers a silent thank you to the others in the line before him. Beyond the exhaustion on the guard’s faces from trying to keep the others in line from their “break-out attempts,” Tony must have really put that judo red belt to work. Even from Eren’s spot on the ground he can see one of the guards limp badly, the other holding tight to his chest as he struggles not to throw up, dabbing a hand at a face so bruised one eye is swollen shut.

  None of them had the energy to continue the beatings, they barely had the energy to stand. They are at the end of their 12-hour shift, beaten and bloody, with still 18 cells left to feed before they can go home.

  Eren lets out a breath and closes his eyes, listening to the guards groan in pain, rushing the technician to finish examining the camera. After all, they all think it’s broken from the “freezes” they performed in their cells.

  After a few minutes, the guards leave, though not before striking Eren one last time on their way out for good measure.

  It cost the guard though. The foot comes to stomp on Eren’s head, so he pulls himself up and punches down on the guard’s knee, once, twice, three times until he hears a crunch, and the other guard has to pull Eren off of him.

  The guard grunts, staggers, tries to put weight on his leg, and then nearly falls to the floor with a shout. He wants to beat Eren, punish him, but his companion hauls him out of the cell. Eren would make them pay for every strike, and the guards couldn’t afford any more damage, not if they wanted to walk back to wherever they came from.

  The guards curse, the door slams with a vibrating crash, and Eren smiles.

  His body aches, but not nearly as bad as the first time he was beaten. Blood pools from a split lip, but this time, he got something out of it, this time, they have a plan.

  The first phase is complete, and now all he has to do is wait a little while longer.

  Eren pulls himself off the floor and sits on the toilet to check in on the others, everyone eager to hear if the plan worked.

  “Got it,” Eren taps triumphantly with one hand while pulling the key from his mouth with the other. With his back turned to the camera, they wouldn’t see he got it, and with 18 more cells to feed and no more cameras to check in on, they likely wouldn’t notice it was missing until it came time to end their shift in a few minutes.

  “Ow,” Cris responds.

  “We did it?” Tony asks.

  “We did, ready 4 part 2?” Eren asks.

  “Ready,” both Tony and Cris reply in near-tapping unison.

  Eren is shocked it had worked as well as it did, but then again the facts were all there from the beginning.

  Ever since Tony mentioned breaking the cameras, Eren had been stuck thinking about his little escapade with breaking the toilet apart and the beating that happened after. The one thing he couldn’t understand in the beginning, but was later explained by that incident, was why he never felt like he was being watched despite the camera in the room being pointed at him all the time.

  It was bizarre. Eren had felt like he was being watched when he found the camera in his air vent, but why didn’t he feel it now? That was because he wasn’t actively being watched. Sure, this place had staff, but the ability to simultaneously watch well over two hundred individual cameras would be a nightmare. You would need dozens upon dozens of employees around the clock actively watching any little thing that happens. The cameras weren’t there to livestream a feed of the room. They were there to record.

  From the time he had tried to break the toilet to the time a guard entered his cell was around five minutes. That meant there was an active five minute delay between what was happening in the cells and what was being reported to the guards on standby. After all, a single guard entered his cell at first, and only after a bit of time had passed did the technician and other guards appear to fix the toilet.

  It is hard to forget the shape of the hands that beat you, so from breakfast to dinner Eren paid close attention to the hands responsible for serving him food. It was the same man that had initially beat him, the same man working the same shift for 12 hours a day, every day, for weeks now. It was why he had timed it to happen after dinner. It would be when the guards were at their most tired, the tail end of their shift, before very likely rotating with the night shift, operating on another twelve-hour schedule.

  If you have so few guards working such long hours, you don’t have the staff to monitor every camera, and you certainly don’t have the staff to send multiple groups of guards into each person’s cell when the cameras are presumed to be broken.

  That was the other thing, the cameras. This place is old, the pipes all run in sequence, and according to Cris, who seems to have some passing knowledge about electronics, all of the cell cameras were likely operated in a chain, like a string of Christmas lights. Each camera acts as a continuation of the circuit in a line. Eren had planned for each person to stop moving their bodies at a set time after dinner, staggering each person’s “pauses” so that it would appear that the cameras were all failing in sequence.

  Of course it was possible the cameras were not wired like that. However, the probability of five cameras all freezing up within the exact same period of time, all a few seconds apart, would be too big of an anomaly to ignore.

  Eren had timed it all out so that by the time the guards reached his room, the recording feed would be approximately four minutes delayed. Once the guard entered his room, he could proceed with his next step.

  Setting up a routine was critical. Whoever was monitoring the cameras would see it as perfectly normal that Eren would work up a sweat around this time and make it all the more obvious something was wrong with the cameras when he never went on to continue his exercise after his lying down rest period. Tony gave him that particular idea. He had been working out and stretching every day since his arrival to ensure he had the best chances against a guard should the opportunity ever present itself.

  The hardest part of it all was resigning to the fact that no one would get out of this plan unscathed. Eren had asked each member to attack the guards as they entered the room. They would be furious, but with too many other cells to get to and quickly, they wouldn’t have the time or the energy at the end of their shift to commit to beating any one person too hard. Attack after attack after attack, they would get used to it. Who wouldn’t attack them at this point? It was only natural for the children you captured to want to fight back.

  That all led to Eren, the last in the line. Spinning the key around in his hand he keeps the count in his head going, waiting for the guards to reach the end of the feeding line.

  With his hands tightly bound with zip ties, it wasn’t unusual to keep them closed, especially with how crooked his fingers had begun to heal. It wasn’t as bad had he not set them, but still, his hand had a passive curl to it, and he needed only to tighten it to disguise the key.

  The wait for the next steps is mind-numbing. The adrenaline coursing through Eren's broken body is enough to keep the pain at bay.

  The first part went off without a hitch, but phase two will be the real struggle, the actual test. It’s do or die almost literally, but as they all kept saying, to die trying is worth it.

  The seconds tick by, each one weighing heavier than the last. Eren can feel his breath pick up, feel the jitters emerge as it gets closer and closer.

  Sleep tugs at his eyes and pulls at his muscles. Everything starts to hurt again. The adrenaline can’t keep up for so many hours but Eren doesn’t care.

  “100, 101,” Eren braces himself and brings himself to stand. With his arms raised, he drives both of his hands down across his waist, and in the very moment they make contact he pulls his wrists apart.

  The zip ties dig into the skin but give under the force, snapping and scattering against the ground.

  “121, 122, 123...” Eren grabs hold of one of the pieces and bites down hard on it, pinching off the end into a point. Using that point, Eren depresses the tab to the zip ties at his feet and slips out of them with much more ease.

  “170, 171, 172...”

  Eren places his hands on the food slot. He had seen it open many times and never once noticed an external locking mechanism. It would be a pain to lock and unlock every time, so the more likely option was that it was just a simple slide or, at best, a magnetic hold.

  Pressing himself into it and wiggling slightly, he feels the slide give and open just a crack.

  He has three total minutes, 180 seconds he needs to wait out as the guards work their way down to the remaining 18 cells to his right before reaching the end of the hall.180 seconds to feed everyone, maybe more given how badly the one in his row is limping. There is just barely enough time delay on the cameras too. It has to work, a few minutes longer and they are ruined.

  “178, 179...” Eren grunts, sliding the food slot all the way open.

  As quickly as he dares, Eren takes the guard’s stolen key and taps the door where he saw the lock when it had opened the most recent time. He can’t tell precisely where the locking mechanism is though. The door swung outward and away from him, but he could see the deadbolt’s position in elevation and estimate its distance from the frame with resounding accuracy.

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  After three taps the key slides home in the lock, and with a twist, it opens.

  Eren throws himself from the cell, his heart thundering in his chest, the sound of the door opening alerting the guards at the far end of the hall in a matter of seconds, and seconds is all Eren has now.

  It took the man 180 seconds to reach the middle cell from his starting position, and an additional 180 seconds to go from the middle to the end of the row. At an average speed of 3.5 miles per hour, subtracting the time it took to do the feeding, the distance between the guards and Eren is approximately 350 feet. At a sprint, a full-grown man can cover that same distance in less than 15 seconds, and they have already started, though luckily, they are limping.

  Eren’s legs ache, and he feels something tear as he pushes his stiff muscles beyond their limits. It takes seconds to run past Cris’s door. The guards are already gaining much faster than Eren expected. Even at a limp the fear of an escape must be pushing them to their limits too.

  Putting the key in the door and turning the lock takes another five crucial seconds, five seconds too long.

  The guard bears down Eren. One shouting, hand on a radio at his shoulder.

  Eren bangs on the door once, reaches for the handle on the outside but his fingers barely graze it before one of the guards tackle him to the ground.

  Eren is crushed under the man’s weight, his skin peels against the concrete as he slides against it. Eren screams, kicks, and throws wild elbows. One connects against something solid but doesn’t get much further than that before the guard grabs hold of it, twisting it behind Eren’s back.

  His wrist bends at an odd angle, higher, higher, much higher than he thought possible, until a sickening crack releases the pressure, and his arm shatters at the shoulder and wrist.

  Spit bubbles and spills from Eren’s mouth in time with a scream, his eyes roll nearly into the back of his head. He can’t breathe, a knee drives into his neck, crushing him. The air won’t come in, stars spot his darkened vision, He failed, he failed, he failed and now they are going to kill him.

  And then nothing. The pressure on Eren’s back releases, entirely.

  Eren’s arm falls limp to the ground, he struggles to lift himself with the other, but he can’t. He can only roll himself over onto this back.

  Sucking in desperate breaths of air, Eren watches as a shorter kid grabs a guard and throws him over his shoulder in one smooth, practiced motion, driving the man into the ground with an echoing thud.

  The guard’s head cracks against the stone, sending a faint spatter of blood onto the ground. His body seizes, stiffening like a cartoon character might when they get electrocuted. He makes a strange, sucking, gurgling sound.

  Eren can’t help but watch with wide eyes, and neither can the boy who did it. As soon as the guard stops moving, Tony brings his hands to his face, his whole body shaking violently.

  The second guard has already called something in on their radio as he limps toward Eren and Tony.

  “Tony! Tony, we need to get the others!” Eren cries out, peeling his eyes from the man on the ground. “Tony!” Eren stands, but a jolt of pain stops his left leg from moving correctly. He screams, half collapsing onto the ground next to the other guard, snoring loudly in unconsciousness.

  On instinct Eren tries to bring both arms down, sending yet another wave of pain through him as his broken left shoulder refuses to budge.

  The limping guard screams something at them, pulling a stun baton from his belt as he closes the distance, now only feet away and fuming with rage.

  Grinding down hard, Eren pushes himself upright with his one good leg, lunges forward and slaps Tony across the face.

  Tony recoils, staggering backward with wide eyes, suddenly remembering where he is

  His eyes lock on the guard fast approaching, and closes the distance in two long steps.

  The guard’s arm lances out to strike Tony, but he ducks the blow, grabbing hold of the guard’s wrist and twisting it inward. With another step the guard’s stun baton is pointed in on himself, and with one more quick movement Tony pivots, sending the guard crashing against a cell door, driving the breath from his body while he forces the crackling baton into the man’s chest.

  Tony screams, shoving himself hard into the guard over and over and over again until his eyes roll into the back of his head and foam gathers at the corners of his seizing lips.

  The guard’s radio crackles to life, something inaudible coming from it in response to his call for help.

  “Tony.” Eren grabs the boy’s shoulder and spins him around, forcing his eyes off the guard guards lying limp on the ground.

  “Eren?” He asks, voice stuttering.

  Tony looks much older than Eren expects, with tan skin, brushed-back black hair, and the hard calloused hands of a kid who’s seen years of labor. Despite looking older, he is still just a kid, still only fourteen, and right now, he’s panicking.

  It doesn’t matter how old or mature you are—when something scary happens, it’s easy to regress into something much younger.

  “We have no time!” Eren shouts, motioning to the key still lodged in Tony’s cell door. “We need to move, now.”

  Tony nods softly and then more feverishly as he moves to the door.

  Eren returns his attention to the guards on the ground, trying his best to ignore the dying gurgles of the one still bleeding profusely from his cracked skull.

  By the time Tony has all of the cells unlocked and opened, Eren has stripped the stun batons from the two guards, as well as their radios and key rings.

  The hall fills with the sounds of clamoring voices, some screaming, others crying, some don’t emerge at all, likely dead in the cells.

  Eren tries to look around to the north and south to get some indication of where to go. He recalled coming from the north, but that was also where the guards came from to start their round of food deliveries. Looking south, there appears to be another set of double doors that lead elsewhere, though likely didn’t wrap around to the entrance of this facility.

  The technician and other guards would also fix things from north to south, which was likely where the reinforcements would be coming from.

  “We need to go south!” Eren calls out, hobbling his way in that direction, but his voice can’t make it over the noise of the other children that quickly fill the halls as they escape their cells.

  “South! Let’s go!” Eren cries out again, only to be drowned out once panic sets in around him.

  He searches wildly for Tony or Cris but doesn’t know what Cris looks like, and Tony has already become lost in the crowd.

  “Tony, Cris, South!” Eren tries again, this time getting a response.

  One voice rises up, far louder than the screams and cries.

  “SOUTH!”

  It has been a while, but Eren recognizes Cris’s voice as he tries to regain control of the crowd.

  “Over here! I need help!” Eren shouts again, waving the stun baton above his head until one boy breaches the crowd, swooping Eren up under his good shoulder.

  “Cris?” Eren asks, looking at the person responsible for his assisted hobble southward.

  “The one and only.” Cris smiles a broad, broken smile. It would have been perfect had several teeth not gone missing around a nasty swollen and split lip.

  He’s tall, nearly a full head taller than Eren, with almost the same build and broad shoulders on an otherwise thin swimmer’s frame.

  “Why south?” Cris asks, helping Eren take his first steps.

  “Guards start their rounds in the north. Safer bet, I’m guessing. I don’t want to run head first into reinforcements.”

  As if on Queue, the radio Eren wears like a bandoleer crackles to life, a distorted voice confirming the request for backup.

  “Shit, alright, let’s go.” Cris pushes through the crowd, most of whom seem to be headed in that direction, passing by the open cell door to Eren’s right.

  Sparing a glance inside out of curiosity, Eren is shocked to see the occupant isn’t dead. Instead, they sit curled up in the corner of the room, far from the door. The figure is similarly naked to Eren, as are a shocking number of other prisoners, though some more than others.

  He can’t make out any more details before he is ushered along. Tony calls out to them, helping carve a path through the other kids to access the door for Eren and Cris.

  “Thanks!” Cris smiles at Tony, who returns the smile with far less enthusiasm.

  Taking the key from Eren, Cris slots it into the door and turns it.

  The double doors opening coincided with the sounds of footsteps flooding in from the opposite end of the hall.

  “Move move move!” Tony demands, throwing open the door as a flood of children press themselves through the threshold as guards crackle their stun batons on the north side of the hall.

  Only some people went south, while others lingered near the north entrance or mulled about the central spaces, while others were too stunned to follow orders and still stuck to the safety of their cells.

  They are the first to go down, as six guards who make up the first row of attackers throw children to the ground, press them up against walls, crack them over the heads with the stun batons or shock them until they foam at the mouth.

  A scream rises up over the escaped children, finally getting the message that north is not the place to be. They scramble south, trample one another as those who stayed in their cells are too late, overrun by the press that joins the others in the south doorway.

  “There was a kid in the cell next to mine!” Eren cries out over the roar of bodies all fighting to be the first to escape into the next room.

  “Shit!” Cris stands on his toes, trying to look over the heads of the others. “I got him!”

  “You get Eren, you’re taller and stronger!” Tony shouts, driving his way against the flow of teens. “I’m a better fighter, I got it!”

  Without waiting for a reply, Tony sprints head first towards the guards, who have now fanned out, allowing the back row of additional five to progress through the lingering prisoners to subdue them.

  “You heard him!” Cris hauls Eren under his shoulder again and joins the bodies as they fill an ample, mostly open space.

  People are already hunting for a way out and finding nothing. Eren’s heart sinks as he too assesses their new surroundings.

  Did he just sign their death warrants? The room has no additional exits. It’s a break room, with wall lockers against the south side, a horseshoe couch in the middle facing a television. A pool table, dart board, and vending machine occupy the west section, and a table with a kitchen to the east.

  “Barricade the door!” A voice cries out, and the mass of confused teens are eager to obey. In the absence of direction, the person who sounds the most like they know what they are doing is the leader, Eren guesses.

  “Tony is still out there!” Cris tries to block the door, but the others aren’t having it. They fight past him with ease. The numbers are just too many as they gather and drag the couch towards the door.

  “Tony! Quick!” Eren calls, struggling to limp closer to the opening.

  “Coming!” he calls back, though it’s hard to hear over the sound of the screams and cries echoing through the hall.

  “Just stop for a second!” Eren demands, begging the other kids to halt their progress just long enough to let Tony through.

  They don’t.

  Eren can see the faint traces of Tony’s frame, carrying someone on his back as he charges down the hall, the guards not far behind.

  “Fuck!” Cris throws himself at the people pushing the couch, sending them clattering to the ground, tripping over one another. The left side pushers continue, but the right side is in shambles. The couch pivots awkwardly, halting for a second.

  “You’re going to get us killed!” one of the boys cries, throwing down a hail of punches aimed at Cris’s head.

  Another joins in, kicking Cris in the stomach while a third calls for more people to help.

  “Just a second!” Tony gasps, shifting the naked boy on his back and throwing him through the doorway and onto the couch before leaping towards the crack in the door himself. “Go go go!” Tony coughs.

  One of the guards lunges for the doorway, but the other kids have already started pushing the couch again, more of them this time as the call for aid is heard.

  The guard screams as his arm is crushed between the closing doors. He struggles to wiggle out of it. He tries to plant his foot on the couch on the other side, but it’s too late. Fifteen teenagers shove with all of their strength against the single guard.

  His bones crack and snap until they go limp, held together only by the black uniform cloth as the door is forced shut. His muffled screams and sobs echo through the room in time with the pounding drum of the other guards eager to get inside.

  Eren spares a glance for Cris, who slowly rises from the ground, coughing and spitting from the kicks inflicted on him.

  If the loudest voice rules, then he would be the loudest voice.

  “The vending machine, the pool table, now!”

  No one listens.

  “Shit!”

  It’s crucial that they all come together on this. They need to barricade the door further, but no one can hear him, no one listens.

  Eren looks around frantically. It’s like the hallway all over again. Why won’t they just listen to him?

  “You heard him!” Tony shouts loud enough to vibrate the room. “Vending machine, pool table, all of it over here, now!”

  This time, they listen.

  Eren helps Cris up fully, who nods his appreciation. “What do we do now?” Cris asks, stepping aside to join Tony and the boy he just rescued nearer the kitchen.

  “We need to arm ourselves,” Eren suggests. “Break the pool sticks in half. There are darts on the dart board. We can fill socks with pool balls and check the kitchen for utensils.”

  “Good idea. Any preference before the others get the same idea?” Cris asks, already noting one of the prisoner’s eyes up the rack of pool sticks against the wall.

  “Knife, I only have one good hand right now. Can’t risk anything too big.”

  “Got it, Tony?” Cris asks.

  “I’ll pack my fists with a pool ball.”

  “Heard.” Cris nods and rushes to the kitchen, pulling open drawers quickly.

  Eren bends down to look at the boy Tony risked his life to save. He’s still nearly motionless, curled in on himself, skinny, pale, and on the verge of tears.

  “Hey, you, what’s your name?” Eren asks softly.

  The boy doesn’t respond.

  “My name is Eren, this is Tony, and the other guy is Cris. We are going to get out of this mess, alright. Can you stand for me?”

  The boy shakes his head.

  “Why not.”

  “I’m scared.” His voice is raspy, barely over a whisper. He likely hasn’t spoken in weeks—no surprise.

  “We are all scared, trust me... hey, look at me.” Eren softens his tone as much as he can, bringing a hand to rest on his shoulder.

  The boy looks up at Eren, their eyes meeting.

  “I got you, alright? We got you. But you need to be able to walk and stand. Alright?”

  The boy shakes his head.

  “I can’t, I can’t do it!”

  Tony squats down next to Eren, resting his hand on the boy’s other shoulder. “Yes, you can. I know you can.” Tony’s smile is infectious. From the moment it spreads across his face, Eren thinks for a second that they might actually have a shot at this.

  He has no idea what’s coming next, but he knows that if they have any shot at finding it out, they need to work together.

  “So, mind telling me your name?” Eren tries again, standing upright.

  “Hayden... I am Hayden.”

  “Pleasure to meet you Hayden, let’s live through this thing, yea?” Tony smiles wider and offers his hand to the boy, who takes it.

  Cris returns with a knife for Eren and a broken pool stick for himself. By now the others have barricaded the door further, adding the pool table and the vending machine to the mix.

  “So Eren, the plan?” Cris asks, looking around at the others. “I count maybe fifty of us here, and I don’t see any exits.”

  “No, no exists, but I feel a breeze, do you?”

  “Might just be because everything is hanging out for you,” Cris teases.

  “He’s right, I feel it too,” Tony notes, holding his hand out to the air.

  “A place this massive has to be pumping an insane amount of AC, all industrial. The vent systems are probably large,” Eren notes, looking around the room before settling on two sizable vents to the east and west walls.

  “We should have time, They need us alive, right?” Cris asks, though the number of people pressed tight into the break room implies otherwise. Some children never left their cells, and the guards weren’t being gentle with the ones they caught.

  “If they wanted us dead, they would have killed us. Maybe only the strong survive? Weeding out the weak and all that,” Tony offers.

  “Makes sense. It’s possible that if we happen to die, we die, but they won’t actively kill us. This much money, this big of an operation, it would be too wasteful to start—”

  Eren’s ears pop and then ring. He doesn’t know why at first, not until he sees the smoking hole in the barricaded doorway and watches two bodies nearest crumple like puppets with their strings cut.

  The ringing pierces his brain. He can’t make out anything at all. Cris’s eyes are wide, Tony mouths something, Hayden just gapes as blood showers the surrounding kids in the room.

  POP - Ringgggggg

  POP POP POP - Ringggggggggg

  More smoking holes, more bodies crumple, more blood mists the air.

  “Air vents, now!” Cris cries out, his voice barely audible.

  Eren was wrong, Terribly, horribly, dreadfully wrong.