Life in the Gray Wing

They called it the Gray Wing.

Not a prison, exactly. Not freedom, either. Somewhere in between. The place where prisoners with "potential" were kept.

Niklas was moved there with minimal explanation. The guards gave him new clothes—a plain tunic, rough pants, and sandals. Still no belt, no laces. Nothing that could be used as a weapon or a noose.

Everything about this place whispered controlled threat.

The cells here weren't barred. They were stone rooms with heavy doors and no windows, opened only from the outside. Each prisoner had a cot, a bucket, and a slot for food. Niklas had one additional feature: a guard posted just across the hall, watching through a small grate.

She had sea-blue hair cropped short and a scar across her lips. No name. No smile. Just a ledger and eyes that didn't blink.

Niklas didn't talk. He watched.

Three days passed.

Each morning, two guards brought gruel. One tall, one shorter and chatty. The tall one always unlocked the door; the short one carried the tray. Every third day, a bucket boy came to clean waste. The torch in the hall was changed at dusk, and during the change, visibility dropped for exactly sixteen seconds.

Niklas counted.

He listened.

He noted which doors creaked, which hinges were oiled, which guards looked lazy. He noticed a wall hook that bent slightly under weight. He measured footsteps based on echo timing. Even the rope used to pull the waste buckets was a clue—woven hemp, dry, brittle, but long.

On the fifth day, he saw the pulley.

Two rooms down, a cleaning woman struggled to open a hatch where food was delivered via a small winch-and-pulley system. The rope jammed. A young male prisoner reached to help and got cuffed for the effort. The pulley jammed again. The guards kicked it and cursed.

Niklas smiled to himself.

Weak system. Poor maintenance. Improper weight distribution.

He remembered his father showing him mechanical blueprints on Earth. Pulleys, levers, tension balancing. Force equations. F = ma, still relevant even in a medieval world.

That night, he tested his body.

Quietly, when he was alone, he dropped to the stone floor and performed push-ups. Then planks. Then vertical presses against the wall. The body responded surprisingly well—better than expected.

His breath held longer. His recovery was faster. The soreness that should have lingered didn't.

Alerik's body, he realized, was conditioned. Possibly military-trained.

Not just that—it had muscle memory. Hidden strength under lean mass. He'd inherited a chassis far stronger than the geeky, lanky frame he'd grown up with.

Useful.

The next evening, while being led to the bathing chamber—escorted by the same two guards—Niklas stumbled. Hard.

The shorter one caught his arm.

"You planning to eat the floor?"

Niklas laughed softly. "Would be the first decent thing I've eaten here."

She rolled her eyes. "Soft little shit. Not like the real Alerik."

He blinked. "What was he like?"

Her eyes narrowed. "Mean. Angry. Big on speeches. Tried to lead a revolt with sharpened spoons. Thought he could make women follow him."

"And they didn't?"

"They followed him straight into a slaughter."

Niklas nodded, filing that away.

The original Alerik had been brash, charismatic. Probably a good fighter. But he wasn't a planner.

Good. No one expected cunning from this body. Only violence. That was his edge.

That night, Niklas stood on his cot and reached for the hook near the ceiling. He tested its bend. Weak. Cracked stone. Barely fused to the wall.

He sat and began weaving.

The hem of his tunic could be unwound if rubbed against the coarse stone floor. It took hours. He rolled the threads into makeshift twine. Added strands from the cot's blanket. Reinforced it by braiding tightly, reverse-twist style.

He tied a loop, hooked it on the stone pin, and leaned his weight against it.

It held—for now.

Not strong enough for climbing, he noted, but enough to trip, mislead… or fake something else.

By the seventh day, he had what he needed: knowledge of guard routines, approximate structural layout of the wing, an understanding of the pulley system, a rough mental map, and a body growing more responsive by the day.

He even started whistling. Quietly. To time the footsteps. Two guards rotated every three hours. That meant eight shifts per day. The overlap between the fourth and fifth shifts—mid-afternoon—was the weakest, when the least experienced guards covered the wing during torch resupply.

He waited for confirmation.

Day ten.

Shift overlap. Same green-haired guard on duty. The pulley jammed again, this time directly above his hall.

She kicked it. Swore. "Damn thing's gonna fall one day."

Niklas watched as the maintenance girl tugged on the rope, overcorrected, and the pulley board snapped halfway off the wall.

Niklas grinned.

There it was.

The weak link.

He turned, picked up a spoon from his tray, and dropped it onto the floor near the cot.

It bounced. Rolled under.

He knelt down—and smiled.

The floor sloped.

Just barely. But it meant drainage. And drainage meant plumbing lines—or at least runoff paths.

All he needed was time, a distraction, and the right misdirection.

He whispered to himself in English, just to feel sane.

"You gave me a prison," he murmured to the walls, "but you forgot I was born in a lab."