Chapter Text
Prompto was in Medical again – what a great way to start the new year – because his stupid arm rejected the chip that just went in a few months ago. The technician pulled the chip, cleaned up the messy hole, and glued the wound shut, just like all the holes before. Prompto had so many scars there the techs prepped the next site on his left arm, taking pictures and notes and samples of blood and tissue.
He hated it. He knew that when he was fully grown he'd be Evolved into a soldier and his physical vessel would be left behind, whatever that meant, but that didn't mean he had to like having his arms all lumpy and weird.
He was put on a drip and told to lie still until it finished. There were a few comics – MagitekTrooperz backissues – and weapon manuals on the side table, but he'd read them all before. Medical was boring. He waited until the techs were busy off in the pharmacy and then got up. He was allowed to go to the toilet, and that was about as exciting as it got here.
He rolled the drip pole carefully down the corridor to the toilet, swiped his code to get access, peed, and then gave in to temptation. He wanted to see what the new wound looked like, so he tugged the bandage down carefully. The glue was bloody and gross, and he felt a bit sick when he poked it. But that was probably due to the drip; he always felt queasy when he was getting treatment. He went out, and that was when he noticed the room next to his was Occupied.
He didn't think before he slid the door open; he hoped it was someone he knew and could pass the time with. He was utterly shocked to see an unfamiliar boy – or so he assumed. All boys looked like him (blond hair, freckles, blue eyes) even if the specifics of height, weight, eyesight, and intelligence varied depending on how their genetics had been tweaked. He'd never seen one like this, though, with dark hair and green eyes and the wrong shape of face altogether.
He could only think of one explanation, and he blurted it out: "Are you a girl?" He'd never met one, but they were in stories, sometimes. Meeting one would be cool.
But the kid on the bed stopped staring at Prompto like he was scared of him and instead squinted like he thought maybe he was stupid. "No," he said, slowly, as if he was being patient with one of the V-series toddlers. "Are you?"
That sounded snotty; the bullies who picked on Prompto for being husky and needing glasses and stuff like that. He'd be facing whispers in the dorm today again, saying if he couldn't even keep his chip in, there was no way he'd ever Evolve, which was usually good enough reason to try and grab his rations or mess with his stuff. Prompto pulled his shoulders back and refused to let his chin wobble, his hand clenching tight on the drip pole as he took a step back.
"Don't go," the boy said, sitting up even though he winced and pressed his arm across his stomach. His eyes were wide and he looked scared again. "I'm sorry."
Prompto bit his lip. If he wasn't a girl, there had to be another reason he'd never seen this boy in the dorms or cafeteria or gym. He took in the boy's painful thinness, the way he squinted, his gnarled fingers that bent oddly and hand swollen stiff that way; combined with his odd coloring and what sounded like a speech defect – he must be a failed clone, kept viable for some reason despite his mutations. He was probably sick a lot, maybe that was why he was rude. He didn't have a dorm-cohort, older series to take care of him or younger kids to look after.
"There's comics in my room," Prompto offered, deciding to take pity on the kid. "Do you want me to read them to you?"
"Please," the boy said, still looking agitated. "May I have your name?"
"Prompto. What's yours?"
The boy swallowed hard, and then took a deep careful breath. "Ignis."
Prompto had never heard of an I-series. On the one hand, now he couldn't tell how old Ignis was. On the other, this was a real-life mystery, just like in the story books, and he got to be the investigating MP.
"Give me a sec," he said, and slipped back into his room to grab the comics. Ignis was lying down again when he came back, and Prompto sat on the edge of his bed carefully. "I got issues 34, 45, 46, and 72. Any requests?"
"Begin at the beginning?" Ignis said after a moment. He sounded amused and confused at the same time. "I don't have my glasses."
"You can borrow mine," Prompto said, feeling generous as he handed them over. He opened up the well-worn pages and started reading.
When he judged that he had five more minutes before the drip finished and the ear-piercing beeps would alert the techs, he gathered the comics up and said goodbye clumsily. Ignis looked actually sad that Prompto was going. Or maybe he just minded handing the glasses back.
"What dorm are you in?" Prompto blurted out. "Maybe I can – " He mimed swiping doors open with the code on the back of his hand. (He felt awkward; he didn't want to seem like he was showing off. He'd noticed that Ignis was too defective to have been given an access code. He couldn't even open the door to his room to go to the toilet, and that had to suck.)
"I'm in the holding cellblock," Ignis said quickly, like he was afraid. "In prison. Don't come looking for me. If you got caught..."
Prompto wanted to ask a hundred questions: what cellblock? Where was it? What had Ignis done? But he didn't have time, and Ignis' nervousness was contagious; he didn't want to get caught by the techs. Especially in here, consorting with a prisoner.
"Bye," Prompto yelped, comics crushed to his chest, and ran, half-dragging the pole behind him.
Once he was released from Medical and back home safely in his dorm, he tried very hard for a couple of hours to forget about Ignis and all his mysteries. But he'd never had a natural aptitude for doing the right thing, even when he meant to. And until now, he'd never met anyone who was more defective as a clone than he was, so he felt the same protective urges he was meant to feel toward kids from younger series.
After dinner (which he didn't eat much of, still feeling the effects of the medicine), his cleaning squad was assigned to scrub out the bathrooms and empty the trash from R Sector, and change the bedding on all the bunks. The squad leaders were going to be Evolved in a few months, and they were bossy assholes (said everyone behind their backs). But Prompto got along well with Nisus, who'd be one of the new leaders once they were gone. Nisus was gangly and had a sharp narrow face with a perpetual grin. He knew everything. Or at least bragged that he did.
Prompto grabbed a scrub brush and went to join Nisus in washing down the communal showers, biding his time until they got a moment alone and then asking in a fast nervous whisper, "Is there a prison here?"
Nisus squinted down at him, hands still automatically wiping away soap scum. After a moment he made a face, wrinkling his nose. "You're not defective," he said, obviously meaning to be kind. "Don't listen to what the other kids say, okay? They just want to get a rise out of you. The techs sent you back, so you must still be viable. You'll get re-chipped, it'll be fine."
Prompto rocked up on his toes with the force of his secret and his frustration, trying to think of a plausible story. "The Oracle," he blurted out. "She's our prisoner now, I heard from – you know." The dorms officially only got carefully curated, educational news reports, but there were always rumors, fed by the kids who hacked their way into off-base systems. Nisus was friends with them, he knew, if not necessarily involved in the rule-breaking. "Wouldn't it be cool if she was here? We could talk to her," he added, padding the fiction out. "She could tell us about life outside."
Nisus wiped his hands off on his pants and then gave Prompto a clumsy one-armed hug. "Don't stop trusting in Father Besithia," he said bluntly. "The Oracle wouldn't help you even if she was here, which she isn't – she's too important. Probably she's in Gralea, being shown why it's useless to resist the might of the Empire. The people who get locked up here are just waiting for trial, like Darriun and Raxo, remember them?"
Prompto nodded. They'd been on the service staff and were supposed to be good examples for the younger series, but instead they'd stolen stuff out of the medlabs one night, got high on it, and smashed up two snowmobiles trying to race through the woods.
"They got sent to Gralea, too," Prompto recalled gloomily. "To be made an example of."
"Pretty sure that's the sanitized story for little kids, and they were just shot after their judging," Nisus said, with a weird frisson to his words. "Even outside-born get deactivated if they're not viable, and they were dumb as rocks." And then he glanced at Prompto and pulled on a fake-looking reassuring smile, his eyes cutting quickly to the corner of the room. Prompto never really understood why anyone would want surveillance cameras in the showers, but now... he supposed maybe because people talked there, and said things they shouldn't. Maybe he had said something wrong. "You'll be fine, though."
"I just want to be normal," Prompto said, and rubbed at the bandage on his arm when the words came out more like a bratty whine. "Hey, will you help me with the auto crossbow? Skills trainer said I need to improve."
Nisus looked relieved to be offered something concrete he could do, and to have the subject changed. He was going to be a good leader; he actually cared about the younger series. "Sure thing. Now stop goofing off and get back to work."
*
Once he knew there was a prison, Prompto started looking. The secure areas where kids weren't allowed were grayed out on the access maps, but the base had produced thousands of clones, engineered to be intelligent, who'd years ago reached a critical density of curiosity about their surroundings. If a door opened, odds were a kid had slipped inside at some point and reported back his findings. By subtly asking around (and keeping one eye on the cameras), Prompto was able to build a decent mental map of the hidden-away parts of the base.
He had, he thought, two big advantages over the others. One, he had an older training tablet that had been reported as lost, that he found mixed in a pile of blankets in Storage Closet 15. He'd disabled its connection to the system, of course, which meant it was more of a toy than a tool, but the camera was good. Once he removed all the textbooks and instructional videos, he had lots of storage, too, and he'd been very careful to never let anyone know he had it. Like a secret weapon, kind of.
The other advantage was that he couldn't be tracked or shut down without a chip, and he was the only clone he knew who was without a chip for large chunks of time. Eventually, he knew this would be what got him terminated; the last time he was in Medical, having the new chip site examined, he'd noticed the techs flagged his file with red, not yellow. He didn't tell Nisus or anyone, but the secret made him feel... reckless, he supposed. Sneaking into prison to go see Ignis was a risk, but what was the worst that could happen? He was already defective and living under an impending death sentence.
It took a couple of weeks of diligent work before he had a satisfactory plan. He used his secret tablet to snap pictures of staff IDs (not as easy as it sounded; he had to be good at peering around corners and lying in wait in closets and under desks), and enhanced the images of their barcodes until he had a nice library of people he could pretend to be. The custodial and maintenance staff, he decided, were the best – they had legitimate reasons for going everywhere, like frozen pipes and burned-out lights. As long as no one noticed that they were in two places at once, he'd be able to move smoothly out of the clone dorm areas and into the rest of the base itself.
He put his plan into action one afternoon after a sports lesson. He swiped himself into the shower locker room, and then in the chaos of sweaty, rambunctious boys, swiped himself out with his tablet, using Qin-from-the-room-next-door's code. That bought him half an hour or so, he hoped, to get as far as he could before someone noticed he was gone.
He still half-clung to the idea that he'd be coming back, even though his sports bag contained changes of clothes, a week's worth of energy bars filched from snack times, and two pairs of sturdy combat boots. He wasn't sure he could find the prison, and even if he did, Ignis might not be there. It'd been weeks. Maybe he'd been sent to Gralea. Maybe he was doing all this for nothing.
But he didn't have much time to worry about that, though: too busy trying not to get caught. He'd broken into the service corridors before; he liked them because there were fewer doors to swipe through, and more unlocked stairwells and closets to hide in. Plus no one was usually on the lookout for stray children back there; they were busy with their work, pushing trolleys of supplies or gossiping with each other. Most uniform jackets had their barcodes sewn on the front pocket and the left sleeve, and Prompto grabbed seven of them, easy-peasy, as he made his way down to where he guessed (hoped) Ignis was.
No one he'd talked to had ever found a cellblock, therefore there were only three possible places it could be located, according to his (admittedly amateur) deductions. One was inside Environmental; it probably contained laboratories, he thought, because it was shielded, temperature-controlled, and consumed huge amounts of power – the kind of place Prompto would build if he wanted to contain daemons for experiments. The other was sandwiched between the adults' dormitories and their cafeteria, and Prompto couldn't imagine why anyone would design a living block where you'd have to walk past the prison all the time. It'd be a good deterrent, but he bet that area housed a gym or a shop or even a library. Maybe all of those mixed together.
Which left an uncharted corner of the sub-sub basement, squished between the generators and the loading dock for supplies. Prompto figured that prisoners probably came and left by a different entrance than the one high-ranking visitors like the Chancellor used. And access to the outside meant it'd be easier to walk them outside and... well.
Take them to Gralea. He wished he didn't know that was a euphemism. He kept picturing blood in a vivid splash, fanning out over the snow, hot enough to melt it at first, but then eventually freezing over.
The problem with learning that people had been lying to you all along was that it made you question what else you'd been mislead about. Maybe that was why so many of the older series were so cynical; maybe they knew something big, like why no one ever came back to visit after they'd been Evolved, even if they'd been sibling-close to the younger kids.
And – also terrifying – maybe fighting for the glorious advancement of the Empire wasn't all that glorious. Next year Prompto would have been eligible for axe training, if the chip took and he was still viable. He was a big kid – brawny – and he'd been assured he'd be solid muscle by the time he was ready to Evolve. Axes looked very cool when they were spinning. You'd have to be an idiot to mess with someone holding an axe – or, he thought, an enemy soldier. Because those axes would be used against people as well as mecha. You could take someone's head right off, and their blood would fountain all over, and you'd be a glorious murderer for the Emperor.
Prompto'd loved a lot of the older kids who'd raised him. He still remembered their names, as far back as the L series. Maybe they were already dead, and when his series was gone, too, no one would remember them at all. Thinking about it made him feel sad and sick, like something was stuck in his throat that he couldn't swallow down.
He arrived at the final elevator block and was relieved to see that the control booth overlooking the area was empty. He made himself tip-toe up the metal stairs – there was a closet there he could hide in if anyone showed up – and log into the system using a code he'd just grabbed from a guard. He unlocked the elevator, and then (just in case) did the doors out to the loading dock and one of the snowmobile garages outside.
Just in case.
For the same reason, he got dressed now, pulling trousers on over his gym shorts and adding a thick long-sleeved shirt. He swapped his sports shoes for his calf-length combat boots, tucking his cuffs in neatly, and pulled on his hat. It would be cold outside.
On the system map, the rooms in the sub-sub basement were called Containment, and access to their data was denied to anyone with under Security 4. Prompto's heart thudded. He was doing this; he knew he could; but only so long as he didn't let himself think about what he was doing, because it terrified him right down to the marrow in his bones.
He had one Security 6, a senior lab tech visitor from Gralea, who'd been very interested in Prompto's history of chip rejection, taking tons of blood samples. Prompto would normally agonize over wasting such a high-level code, but not today. He took a steadying breath, and swiped him in.
"Good afternoon, Dr Cretqa," the speaker chirped, making Prompto's heart leap in his chest like he'd been shocked. He accessed Containment, and found it ran the same creepy surveillance system used in the dormitories. He clicked through empty rooms until he found where Ignis was, lying curled up on the floor, legs tucked up to his chest. He zoomed in and saw that Ignis was bruised but breathing, which was good, and then clicked out to checked the patrols list.
There'd only been one person down to Containment that day, just past lunchtime, and Prompto bit his lip as he clicked on the video record. He felt guilty – he didn't think it would be good at all, and Ignis wouldn't want him to watch, but he told himself he needed to know.
The cell was empty except for a hole in the corner, which Prompto guessed was the toilet. Ignis sat against the wall on the opposite side, eyes fixed on the corridor as footsteps grew nearer. He was dressed in his underwear, a white vest and gray shorts, and was probably freezing. He was shivering hard, at any rate. When he saw the man appear – Lieutenant Rhisago, who taught machinery weapons – he pressed his back to the wall instinctively, like he wanted to get away.
Prompto listened to the first few questions, fired off with sharp impatience and to which Ignis replied he didn't know in increasingly dull distress, and then started skipping forward in time.
He began watching again when the Lieutenant made Ignis kneel in front of him and put his hands on the ground, and then watched in horror as he stepped deliberately on his left hand, bearing down with his weight while Ignis cried out.
Prompto stopped the video, making himself calm down, just like during live-weapons practice. No feelings on the field. Just think about what was needed to make a clean shot, his body an extension of the weapon: breathing calm, hands and eyes steady, center of gravity low. Find the enemy's weakness and exploit it.
Nisus, the thought leapt into Prompto's head, would know which of the older series were hackers, and they'd know how to distribute information. Even if Prompto was gone, he could still make sure the Lieutenant suffered.
He arranged for the video feed to be accessible in the N series dormitories for the next two hours – hopefully long enough for someone to notice – and as a backup held his tablet up to make a manual copy. Then he started the video again.
"You're nothing but a scared little boy," Rhisago said. "Aren't you?"
Ignis gasped in a breath. "I am."
Rhisago must have pressed down harder, because Ignis screamed.
"And you know what we do to little boys here."
"Sir," Ignis said. Prompto winced at how eager to comply he sounded. "You feed them. To daemons. Sir."
Rhisago stepped back, and Prompto could see Ignis forcing himself to stay still, to not try and protect his hands. Like maybe something worse would happen if he moved, and Ignis knew it because he'd made that mistake in the past. No wonder his fingers had been all messed up in Medical, if they were always getting broken and stepped on.
"No," Rhisago drawled, sounding amused to catch Ignis out. "You know that's not true. We turn them into daemons to fight for the glory of the Empire, and when I decide you're useless I'll have you turned as well." He prodded Ignis with his boot. "What will you do then?"
"I'd be a daemon," Ignis said obediently, breath hitching.
"And who will you kill?"
Ignis caught back a scared-sounding noise in his throat. Prompto had the horrible sinking feeling that he'd fought in the beginning, but now he had to hoard his energy for survival. "The – the king. The prince."
"And?"
Another shuddering gasp. "My mother. My father. My – the baby."
The toe of the boot landed hard in Ignis' side. "And?"
For a moment, Ignis looked panicked, as if he'd forgotten the answer. But then he replied in a rush, "Everyone?" Prodded again, he gasped out, "Anyone you say, please."
"The Emperor says," Rhisago corrected. "You're a slow learner, Ignis."
There was raw terror on Ignis' face now. "I'm sorry – "
"Not sorry enough to tell me where the fucking King of Lucis is hiding." The shout echoed in the empty cell like the roar of a beast, and even Prompto cowered away, even though he knew he was safe. Ignis protested that he didn't know, he was sorry, he wished he knew, he'd say if he only knew, all while those boots kept coming down, on his hands and other places, until he went silent. At that, Rhisago stepped back, and brushed his hands briskly, as if they had been dirtied. "You'll get no food again today," he said, vicious, and turned to stalk out.
Prompto froze the image and snapped good clear shots of the barcodes on his uniform, while trying not to look at his furiously twisted face. He didn't understand how one boy could have made him so angry.
He felt as though the world he knew was like Rhisago: the superficial every-dayness peeling back to reveal a monstrous core. He wished he could disbelieve, but he kept thinking about all the MagitekTrooperz comics he'd read, with the generals in their big hats and epaulets ordering the might of daemons unleashed, and the cowardly Lucians fleeing before armored soldiers marching in perfect straight lines, axes gleaming and eyes in their masks a fearsome Imperial red.
He'd already done too much – somewhere, a tech must surely have noticed anomalous sign-ins and data usage from this terminal. Prompto still needed to get to Ignis, and to safety. With windows all around him, he found he was breathing too fast, but he still made himself do one last thing.
He had to know.