Chapter 33
Symond
The words burned in Symond’s throat like swallowed embers, half-formed and already crumbling before he could test their shape.
He forced his way through the crowd, a shoulder here, an elbow there.
A woman in a red shawl stumbled back. Someone’s ale sloshed onto his boot.
Sweat trickled down his spine, plastered his shirt to his back.
“Watch it,” muttered a voice to his left.
Another whispered his name, or maybe he imagined it.
His lungs seemed to shrink with each breath, ribs contracting like a cage being slowly crushed.
His gaze remained fixed ahead, though the oppressive feeling of eyes was pricking against his neck, his cheeks, the back of his hands.
The rally wasn’t something happening around him anymore, just a line he’d stepped over hours ago, back when he’d decided to come, to open his mouth, to let whatever clawed its way out fill the air, even if he still didn’t know the exact form it would take.
I survived, he thought, the phrase looping tight in his mind, then splintering.
Too simple. Too clean. I only survived because I let them break me instead of fighting back.
No, that invited pity, and pity curdled in his gut like bad lager.
He rejected it, rewrote: They made me think pain was purpose.
A requirement. Better, sharper, but the words dissolved again as he stood on the platform now, the pressure building behind his ribs, squeezing his breath into short, controlled bursts.
Everything beyond that felt distant, the movement of limbs and murmur of the crowd fading to irrelevance, like echoes from another room.
Florence’s voice emerged from the crowd ahead, her words mostly lost in the sea of shuffling feet and throats being cleared.
Then one word reached him clearly—"choice"—and it hooked into him like a barb.
The rest of her sentence remained a blur, but that single word hung in the air, demanding his attention even as something deep inside him tried to retreat from it.
His boots scraped the wooden platform as he shifted weight from one leg to the other.
The vibration traveled up through his body while Florence’s tone persisted—steady, assured, each word landing with the kind of conviction that turned his stomach.
When “truth” cut through the air, something in him flinched.
The word dragged him toward memories: shadowed corners, violations that came without warning, the suffocating weight of forced silence.
He swallowed against the tightness in his throat, his breath growing shallow.
Focus on the present, he told himself. The dampness spreading across his back.
The way his fingers curled into fists without his conscious decision to make them do so.
An ambient buzz filled his ears, his thoughts pulling him inward again, to the choice knotting tighter inside him: speak or swallow it all, let the past stay buried or drag it into the light where it might finally scar over—or split him open worse.
The choice twisted sharper. Say it all—every lash and bruise, the way obedience got beaten in until pain felt like the only teacher, Thorn’s quiet smile while he watched it happen, that sick satisfaction in his eyes like he fed on the breaking.
Spill it raw, let the words tear open The Institute’s guts for anyone to see, strip away the lies about salvation and show the rot underneath, the fear that choked every breath, the nights where compliance was the only shield against worse.
But resistance seized him like a physical grip, his skin prickling when he considered surrendering what wasn’t meant to be shared: memories carved into flesh, marks that belonged behind closed doors, the humiliation that still smoldered deep inside him, coiled tight as a spring that refused to release.
Strangers didn’t get that access, didn’t deserve to poke at the wounds, turn him into some exhibit, performing the hurt like a trick to prove a point.
He recoiled from it, breath catching short, the violation of it all too close to the old helplessness, where exposure meant more pain, not less.
What belonged to him, anyway?
Did he owe this to anyone, this piece of himself carved out and offered up? The kids in The Hive, maybe, or the ones still out there, but even that felt like a theft, like giving away what he’d fought to reclaim.
“Healing doesn’t demand confession in front of a crowd,” Violette had told him. Forcing the pain into words could turn vulnerability into another kind of assault.
Back and forth it went, the loop tightening until his throat ached with it, no resolution, just the stakes sharpening clearer—silence left him isolated, hoarding the hurt like it might fester less that way, but full disclosure stripped him bare, invited judgment on wounds that were his alone to tend.
His chest tightened without warning, breath catching halfway in. Nothing around him changed, the crowd didn’t press closer, the noise didn’t spike, but his body reacted anyway, a sharp, instinctive pull of attention toward the edge of the space.
She stood just beyond the platform’s shadow, where the bodies thinned and the rally’s energy didn’t quite reach. Not listening. Not participating. Just watching.
Elora.
The recognition landed before his thoughts could catch up. His breathing went shallow, heat crawling up his spine. No one else seemed to notice her. No murmurs. No turned heads. But the pull was immediate, unavoidable, like his body had registered her presence long before his mind allowed it.
Their eyes nearly met.
Close enough to feel charged. Close enough to miss.
And in that near moment, everything shifted.
Saying everything would put him at the center—his pain laid bare, his scars turned outward, control handed over again in the name of truth. That felt wrong. Violating. Not healing.
But saying nothing felt just as false. Too close to the silence that had once let everything fester unchecked.
What he needed crystallized in that moment, clean and certain as a knife’s edge.
He didn’t want them to absolve him or understand him or even forgive him.
He wanted only to hold the right people responsible, without turning himself inside out for strangers to gawk at.
A middle path. Just enough truth to serve as a warning, just enough detail to prevent history from repeating, without surrendering the last shreds of dignity he’d managed to salvage.
He thought of The Institute’s halls, the way fear learned its routes there. How obedience crept in softly, dressed up as survival. How easy it had been to mistake endurance for strength when no one ever showed you another option.
He could say that.
He could warn them.
The words began to arrange themselves into something solid enough to hold. Enough to matter. Enough to draw a line without bleeding himself dry.
The tremor in his fingers persisted, a constant betrayal of his resolve.
Florence’s voice dipped, the cadence shifting in a way that pulled the crowd with it. He barely registered the end of her sentence, only the way the space seemed to open, waiting for something to fill it.
“—and some of those voices are standing here with us now.”
The pause stretched.
Symond felt it before he heard his name—the subtle shift of attention, the collective turn of bodies. The air tightened, expectancy pressing in from all sides.
Florence’s eyes found his, her hand extending slightly in his direction, a quiet invitation rather than a demand. Her expression carried no demand, only the calm certainty of someone following a path already agreed upon.
A wall of strangers.
Silence thick enough to choke on.
His throat constricted around nothing. He swallowed hard, then again, the sound thundering in his skull. He forced his shoulders back, grounding himself the way Violette had taught him. Feet planted. Breath slow.
This was still his choice.
Florence stepped aside.
The space was his.
He stepped to the edge of the platform, his fingers momentarily clenching into half-fists before he forced them to relax. The sea of faces stared back at him, their collective gaze like a physical pressure against his chest.
He opened his mouth.
And began to speak.
“My parents thought they were saving me when they sent me there,” he said, the words rough but audible, carrying farther than he expected. “They told them I’d be safe. Cared for.”
A ripple moved through the crowd—interest, recognition, the faint pull of belief.
He steadied himself, eyes fixed on a point just above their heads. “What they don’t tell you is where the lines are drawn. And that they’ll cross them anyway, if it suits them.”
His throat tightened. He pushed through it.
“They don’t just teach obedience, they teach sub—”
The sound was not a crack or a boom, but a concussive force that tore the world apart.
Heat slammed into him. Light flared white. The platform lurched beneath his feet as the air itself seemed to fold inward. The crowd’s murmur shattered into screams, metal screaming against stone, bodies colliding, running, falling.
Symond staggered, the sentence ripped from his mouth, his ears ringing so hard he couldn’t tell if he was shouting or not. Smoke burned his lungs. The ground rushed up—
—and everything cut to noise and heat and nothing at all.