Chapter 5 #2
What remained didn’t feel wrong. Just… insufficient.
He wanted to speak. To correct something. To push back.
His jaw tightened instead.
He didn’t.
There was nothing to support it.
He tried to remember the faces of the instructors, their voices, their words.
At first, only a blur: the drone of lessons, the sharpness of reprimands.
But then, foregrounded by the stories, details clawed their way back—the particular way one instructor’s cane tapped the floor, the icy precision in another’s smile.
The sudden, inexplicable fear when the midnight bell rang.
He leaned harder into the wall, grounding himself in its cold solidity, and wondered what it was they remembered that he didn’t.
And why forgetting it had ever seemed like mercy.
“Thank you,” Florence was saying. “That’s enough for today.”
Shoulders lowered by inches.
“The Institute does teach skills,” Florence said, addressing the parents. “Alchemy. Enchanting. Discipline. Precision. Innovation.”
A few parents straightened at that, relief flickering back into their expressions.
“But skill is not the purpose,” she continued. “Obedience is.”
Florence stepped away from the table and stood in the center of the room.
“They are taught never to ask questions,” she said. “Never to meet a master’s eyes unless instructed. Never to believe that what they want matters.”
The apprentices’ gazes remained fixed on the floor.
“They learn this through correction,” Florence added. “At first. Through punishment. Through isolation. Through hunger.”
A woman near the back inhaled sharply.
“The lesson is simple,” Florence said. “If you do exactly as you are told—if you let the Empire decide who you are, what you’re worth, and how you will be used—you survive.”
“But survival is not freedom. It is a leash.”
She lifted her hand, fingers curling slightly, as if grasping an invisible cord.
“A leash held by masters who decide when you eat, when you rest, and whether you are still valuable enough to keep alive.”
The room became silent. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Nobody even seemed to breathe as Florence’s words floated between them.
One of the fathers stood abruptly, knuckles white where he gripped the back of a bench. “They wouldn’t let children die,” he said, voice tight. “Not after all that investment.”
Florence looked at him steadily.
“If a child dies from a mistake, that mistake has already cost them their value. One less mouth to feed. One less resource to manage. The Empire will tell you your child will be safe,” she said. “They will tell you hunger is worse than hardship. That obedience is the price of survival.”
She gestured once, sharply, to the line behind her.
“This is what survival looks like.”
Symond’s shoulder blades pressed against the wall, each knob of his spine finding its own cold groove. His lungs caught halfway through each breath.
He didn’t remember being beaten, but fragments flickered: a raised hand, his own flinch.
He didn’t remember confinement, though sometimes walls seemed to close in on him for no reason at all.
His body knew what his mind refused. It remembered when to not cry, when to remain silent, even as part of him screamed to speak.
He knew when not to move, while another part of him strained against invisible bonds.
His body knew survival meant becoming whatever was demanded, even as something deeper insisted: this is not who I am.
The thought settled into him…
If I survived…, what did I become?
“And what choice did we have?” A man near the back demanded. “The Empire doesn’t give us enough grain to last the winter. They tax what we grow, then blame us when our houses aren’t warm enough. You tell us The Institute is a lie, but what’s the alternative?”
A murmur of agreement rippled through the room.
Florence nodded slowly, as if the man had said exactly what she’d been waiting for.
“It’s true. The Empire starves these villages just enough to keep you desperate. They restrict trade. They withhold resources. They let your roofs rot and your fields fail.”
Symond could remember a few of the years spent with his family.
The watered-down stew to make it stretch another night.
His mother pushing a bowl towards him, insisting she already ate.
Tightening his belt more everyday while the fields yielded nothing.
They had all lived like that once, but for the parents, it was still their reality.
Florence lifted one finger, counting.
“Option one,” she said. “You give your child to the Empire. They promise training. Safety. Purpose. And maybe—maybe—your child survives. Changed. Owned. Useful.”
A second finger.
“Option two. You sell your child to the Snatchers. Half of those children end up at The Institute anyway. The rest—” She paused, the rest dying on her tongue. “The rest are never seen again.”
The room quite very still.
“A third option,” Florence said quietly, lowering her hand, “is to do nothing. And let winter decide.”
No one spoke.
“The Empire calls this punishment. They call it retribution for Adruimor’s refusal to kneel during the conquest.”
Her voice hardened, just enough.
“In truth, these villages are people farms. Supply lines for bodies. Children harvested under the guise of mercy.”
Symond’s hands curled into fists. The pressure of fingernails against his palm was sharp and grounding, a necessary counterpoint to the dizzying sense of unreality at play.
People farms.
The words, spoken so easily, weighed so much. They dug into memory and imagination with equal force. He could picture the neat rows of children, tended to and pruned and culled, the harvesters indifferent to the shape or height or color of the produce.
Florence looked at the crowd, and for a moment the polish and poise dropped away. What replaced it was something harsher, almost feral in its honesty.
“The Empire taught you that obedience was the only path to survival.”
Florence gestured once, sharply, to the apprentices lined against the wall.
“They were taught the same lesson.”
Symond felt the weight of it settle into his bones.
“There is a fourth option,” she said at last. “But it isn’t safe. It isn’t easy. And the Empire would very much like you to believe it doesn’t exist.”
Heads lifted around the room, chins rising from collarbones, gazes shifting from worn boot-tips and callused palms.
Symond’s pulse hammered against his throat, his mouth going dry. What is she—
“The Hive can’t promise comfort,” she said. “We can’t promise power. But we can promise this: your children will not be forged into tools. They will not be punished for existing. And they will not be owned.”
Her gaze swept the room, searching every face.
“To survive,” Florence said, “should not mean surrendering everything that makes you human.”