CH2

They tossed me, cage and all, into the dust.

The moment the bars lifted an emaciated figure stooped beside me and hauled me upright. His face—if it could be called that—stunned me: smooth skin where a mouth should be, ribs moving like bare sticks beneath a ragged tunic, and one pale eye ringed with exhaustion.

Beyond him stretched a settlement of crumbling gray blocks. Men and women moved through the rubble, each bearing some visible wound the world above could not tolerate: a deaf boy tapping questions on a wall, a veteran who dragged useless legs behind a crude sled. In Oustaria the Council had exiled not only the powerless, but anyone whose ordinary body dared to be imperfect.

I walked among them asking the same question over and over: Why did the Machine reject me? I had no strength of a Guardian, no perfect hearing, no iron memory—yet I was not frail either. The device might have chosen something. Instead, it chose silence.

A guard shoved me toward a squat concrete block. One room. No window. No lamp. A single torn mat lay on cracked stone; even water was absent. So this was Oustaria—ugly beyond imagining, a place where color came only from rust and old blood.

Exhaustion won. I curled on the shredded mat and let the darkness press down. Somewhere inside that black a whisper stirred, too faint to grasp. Wind, I told myself—or a trick of fear.

Dawn crept in like ash. Hunger drove me outside the ruins until bleak forest swallowed the horizon. Fortune—or cruelty—sent a lone deer limping through the trees. I had nothing but a fallen branch, yet desperation sharpened every muscle. I lunged, drove the wood into its hide, felt its final breath shudder against my hands.

I dragged the carcass back toward the gray blocks. Halfway there the mouthless man appeared again, an old scar blazing white across his scalp. He leaned close and rasped through the hole where a voice should have been:

"Don't listen… to the walls."

The sound came from somewhere deep in his throat, a hoarse vibration forced past ruined tissue. I laughed—nervous, sharp. Madman, I thought, and promised nothing.

Night fell. I kindled a fire from splinters, roasted thin strips of venison, and stared at the black doorway that pretended to be a home. What would tomorrow bring? More emptiness, more questions—

Oustaria… Oustaria…

The whisper slid across the walls like frost. Three words followed, colder still:

"Oustaria was a man."

I held my breath, listening for footsteps, wind, anything that could explain the sound.

Nothing answered but the crackle of dying embers and the furious pounding of my own heart.