Chapter 4: Names Don’t Matter Here
Names Don't Matter Here
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There were no names in the Pit.
Not real ones.
Not anymore.
Names were for people who expected to be remembered.
Here, they called each other things like Dust, Ash, Blade, Numb, Thread, or Cricket. Small things. Meaningless things. Things that couldn't be mourned.
Rael sat near the fire that night — if you could call it fire. Just burned rags lit with melted plastic and gas, giving off black smoke.
Across from him sat a girl with buzzed hair and a jagged scar across her mouth. She chewed on something — maybe rat, maybe not. She looked like she hadn't blinked in years.
"Name?" she asked.
"…Rael."
She frowned. "Too clean."
Rael didn't answer.
Dust whispered beside him, "Call yourself something else. Names make you a target."
Rael clenched his fists. "I want to keep mine."
The girl looked at him for a long time. Then shrugged.
"You'll learn."
---
They took him deeper into the tunnels.
Not everyone was allowed there.
It was called The Silence Room.
There were no fires. No lights. No speaking.
Just a place where the walls were coated with names, scratched in with knives and fingernails.
Some were in blood.
> "Those are the ones we lost," Dust whispered.
"Some wrote their own names before they died. Some had their names written by friends."
"Some just wanted to exist for one last second."
Rael stood silently, staring at the wall.
So many names. All meaningless. All forgotten.
There was no war memorial here.
No soldiers to salute. No flags. No parades.
Just scratched walls and cold air.
---
Later, he helped Dust bury a body.
A girl, maybe ten years old. No name.
She had been found in a drain pipe. Starved. Frozen.
Rael said nothing. Just held the body while Dust wrapped it in plastic.
"You ever heard of the prison camps in Sector Twelve?" Dust asked while they dug the shallow grave.
Rael shook his head.
"They take kids there sometimes. Not to kill them. Worse. They use them for... practice."
Rael stopped digging.
Dust stared ahead.
"One soldier bragged once that he took a ten-year-old girl and her brother. Cut the brother's legs off and made the girl crawl with his blood on her hands."
"He said her scream gave him goosebumps."
Rael wanted to scream.
But he didn't.
He just kept digging.
---
That night, he had a nightmare.
But it wasn't a dream.
His eyes opened.
And the wall across the chamber shimmered again.
It was happening again — the visions, the memories, the illusions.
But they weren't just his anymore.
He saw others.
A child in a cage, covered in bugs.
A girl forced to stand naked in snow while soldiers laughed.
A boy burned with boiling water.
An old woman hung upside down from a pole.
A doctor smiling while injecting something into a child's spine.
They weren't dreams. They were real memories.
Someone else's.
The Pit remembered.
Rael's power was growing.
It was starting to connect to the pain around him — to the pain buried in walls, bones, and minds.
It was like he had become a mirror.
And this world could no longer look away.
---
The next day, Rael met a boy named Numb.
He didn't speak. He hadn't in two years.
Soldiers had killed his entire school in front of him. Made him watch. Then made him clean the blood with his shirt.
Rael sat next to him. Didn't ask questions.
They just sat there.
Two broken boys in a broken world.
---
That week, the rumors began.
A convoy was coming.
From the Capitol.
To "cleanse the lower zones."
They called it Operation Hollow Root.
It wasn't an operation.
It was a slaughter.
The rich had decided the slums were "statistically unviable."
Too many mouths. Too many sick. Too much filth.
They would send drones. Firebombs. Mercenaries.
Make it look like a civil riot — then erase it.
No witnesses. No trials.
Just ash.
Dust gathered the older survivors in a hidden chamber.
Rael was there too.
"There's no help coming," Dust said, eyes cold. "There never was."
"They're going to kill us. Not quickly. But with smiles."
"We've got weapons. Rusted blades. Old pistols. Barely working gas masks. That's all."
Rael looked around.
Children. Teenagers. Some barely walking.
None of them soldiers.
All of them broken.
But then someone asked, "What do we do?"
And Rael stood up.
---
"I don't know how to win," he said quietly.
"But I know how to make them look in the mirror."
"They've never been scared of us."
"Let's change that."
---
That night, Rael created his first phantom field.
He stood in the center of a destroyed chamber, closed his eyes, and focused.
The trauma of this place. The blood in its walls. The memories of screams and pain.
He let it all in.
And then—
He let it out.
The field expanded like a wave.
Anyone who walked through it would feel what the children felt.
Would see what they saw.
Would scream like they screamed.
Not illusions.
But imprinted pain.
Psychic radiation made of sorrow.
---
And then… the first soldier stepped into the tunnel.
Rael stood alone in the dark, facing the man.
The soldier raised his gun.
But then he stopped.
His eyes twitched.
He blinked.
Then he dropped the gun and screamed.
He clawed at his own face.
He fell to his knees.
He begged.
He cried.
He puked blood.
He tried to tear his own eyes out.
He saw it.
Everything.
Rael didn't speak.
He just watched.
When the man finally passed out, shaking in a puddle of his own fear, Rael whispered:
"This is just the beginning."
---
Somewhere far away, in a marble tower, a politician shook hands with a businessman.
"We expect Hollow Root to finish in three weeks."
"And the poor?"
The politician smiled. "They'll vanish. Just like before. No one will even ask."
---
But this time, they would.
This time, Rael would make sure they did.
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