"Do you know why you are here?"
His intense gaze pierced the bars of the cage, locking dead onto Atlas.
Atlas, despite being slumped against the wall, held that gaze. Not out of defiance, but because his mind was racing. Despite the scenarios swirling in his mind, he couldn't fathom where he was, why he was there, or who this man was.
"No," he finally breathed. "But I imagine that if you're asking, you intend to explain it to me, don't you?"
"Well, well, it seems we have a lost dog here. Let me explain. You've arrived in a kennel. Or rather, you were sold, and I, Isaac, am the master here. From this moment on, you will be trained, and then you will fight in the arena for my utmost pleasure. Because an anomaly like you is very expensive, you know? You are a rare pearl. Do not disappoint me," he finished, his stern tone bordering on a threat.
Atlas took the shock head-on. Despite his desperate efforts to keep calm, an absolute storm raged in his mind. He was, for all intents and purposes, a slave.
Though his thoughts scattered before a myriad of questions: Fight? Against whom? And what do you mean, an anomaly? There were too many unknown elements. Atlas had to gather more information by order of priority. If he was here, it had to be related to this so-called "anomaly."
"Expensive, huh? Why would my value be worth more than anyone else's? It's because I'm an anomaly, isn't it?"
Isaac narrowed his eyes. He didn't expect this reaction. Usually, after his speech, theses men would collapse, beg him, reducing themselves to an almost subhuman state, ready to do anything to avoid going down into the arena. They had all heard the rumors regarding the arenas of Rohar, few made it out alive, and it was never a beautiful death...
But the young man in front of him showed no apparent fear. Worse, he was asking questions. Isn't that kind of absurd ?
But it would take a lot more to unnerve a cunning old man like him, who had been running this place for decades.
"Questions, questions... Why would I answer you? A man who might be dead in a few hours."
Atlas clenched his teeth, visibly annoyed by the answer.
While analyzing the refined man's posture as he spoke, Atlas noticed a crucial detail, his watch. The stranger wore the exact same model as the military... and the same one Atlas himself now wore on his wrist.
"Where did you get that watch?" he blurted out suddenly.
Isaac was stunned. For the first time in a long while. In his line of work, surprise had not been a factor for years. The question was so stupid that he felt compelled to answer.
"What do you mean, my watch?" he choked out. "Everyone has one. It's the proof of identity for every human in Odyssey! And you also had one too, so what are you talking about?"
His bewilderment abruptly turned into anger.
"That fucking Franz, he sold me a mad dog!" he roared, slamming the bars.
While Isaac cursed, Atlas remained perplexed. His identity? And what is Odyssey? He had been incredibly lucky to pick that watch up by pure chance. What would have happened to him if he hadn't had it on his wrist?
Suddenly, he remembered Emma. She didn't have one. Where had she gone? He couldn't remember... But his own situation was far too precarious to worry about others, especially a girl he barely knew. He didn't know where this feeling came from, but he knew she would make it, and that one day, their paths would cross again. He moved on.
Completely ignoring how stupid he must look to the old man, Atlas felt curiosity burning on his lips.
"Odyssey? What is it?"
He knew this question would have repercussions. It had to be terribly mundane information to them. But for him, who had just "woken up" barely a few hours ago, whose frail body could barely stand, the mystery was too heavy. The question hammered in his skull : But damn it, how long was I unconscious? And why only me?
This time, Isaac's incomprehension was such that all emotion drained from his face.
Beside him, the guard with the burned head burst out laughing. Doubled over, hands on his stomach, he couldn't contain himself.
"Ah ah! He's not crazy, he's just completely stupid, I think! Ah ah!"
Atlas didn't even bother turning his head toward the sound. The laughter rolled off him without leaving so much as a scratch, distant, irrelevant, the kind of noise his mind no longer had room to file under anything worth reacting to. There were more pressing questions to solve than a guard's opinion of his intelligence.
Isaac, however, was not laughing. Much more educated than his lackey, he had done his own research on the First Awakening. Although the subject was poorly documented and the most sensitive information was jealously guarded by the Capitole, out of public reach, the process by which their ancestors had seen their consciousness elevated was common knowledge, the famous call of the Tohotsi.
With an absolutely deadpan tone, so much so that his brute stopped laughing immediately, feeling the freezing pressure rise in the room, Isaac asked:
"Boy... when did you wake up?"
Atlas didn't try to be clever and answered frankly:
"A few hours ago. Why?"
The shock hit Isaac head-on. He opened his mouth to form a sentence, but no sound managed to pass his lips.
The Burned-face guard, whose limited knowledge grasped nothing about the historical Elevation, blinked blankly. Doesn't everyone wake up normally in the morning? Did this kid just sleep in a bit too much?
"A few hours..." Isaac repeated in a whisper.
Atlas felt the heavy unease settle in the cell. He took the opportunity to extract the final truth about the length of his "unconsciousness," even if he couldn't understand the rest.
"How long was I unconscious?" he pressed, a hint of cold malice in his voice.
Isaac answered purely on reflex. His aristocratic dignity had been swept away by the sheer shock of the revelation, he was standing in front of a living relic of the past.
"A little over a two centuries..."
A dead silence fell over the dungeon.
Atlas heard the words land, but for a moment, they refused to mean anything at all. Two. centuries. He turned the number over in his mind the way one turns over a stone too heavy to actually lift, testing its weight from every angle without ever quite managing to pick it up.
Two hundred years. Not a metaphor. Not an exaggeration born from some old man's theatrical flair. Two actual century, stripped from his life in the space of what had felt, to him, like the length of a single dreamless nap on a university bench.
Everyone he had ever known. Gone. Not dead, not exactly, but worse, perhaps, erased by sheer distance, buried under a hundreds years of a history he had never lived through and would never get the chance to. His parents. His professors. The pigeon he'd been watching the very second the Tohotsi's voice had torn his world apart. All of it had aged, decayed, and vanished into the same dust that now coated every wall of this cell.
He waited for the grief to arrive. For the scream, the collapse, the same blind panic that had nearly swallowed him whole back in that ruined amphitheater.
It never came.
There was only a flat, cold clarity settling in where the horror should have been, and somewhere beneath it, the faint, distant echo of a question he didn't yet have the strength to ask out loud.
What else, exactly, did that voice take from me, the day it decided I no longer got to choose?
Isaac, for his part, had gone very still, studying the boy in front of him the way a man might study a coin he'd just discovered was worth a thousand times what he'd paid for it.
"A relic," he murmured, almost to himself, the word rolling off his tongue like something half sacred, half profitable. "Well, well. Franz, you absolute fool. You had no idea what you were selling me, did you."