Flint looked at Allef, who was wearing a wide grin.

“Are you joking?” he asked.

“Nope,” Allef replied.

“I mean that as an actual question. Are you just messing around or do you actually know how we can escape? Also, are those robot arms?”

“Yes, I’m serious, and yes, these are robot arms. I built them myself. Or, not these, but… don’t worry about it,” she said quietly, taking a glance at the guard who was timing their conversation. “Here, come with me. We’ll talk while we walk, it makes us harder to hear. And, if you really want to escape, there are some things I need to show you.”

Flint got up from the plasticky chair which clinged to his exposed wrists, and walked to the bookshelf to return his tablet. The guard’s eyes tracked him the whole way. When he’d rejoined Allef, who was leaning on the chair, the two walked out of the rec room and the guard followed at a distance.

“Everyone in the Domain knows that The Ray is impenetrable. That’s just a fact. Do you know what the rule of twelve is?”

Flint cocked his head. “It sounds familiar.”

“It’s a term used when building spacecraft. The number of failsafes. In aviation, there’s a rule of three. Three backups. If something goes wrong, there’s a backup, if that goes wrong, there’s another. You get the idea.”

They turned a corner and the rec room fell out of sight. A long, white corridor stretched ahead of them, the monotony only broken by black-lettered signs, doorways, and the odd person. Any groups of prisoners talking were followed by one or two stopwatch-donning guards, reminding Flint to turn around and look at his own.

“In space, you use a rule of twelve because of how much harsher space is. The Ray is so famously impenetrable because it uses the same principle in its security. Twelve backups. You escape one, and eleven more are still there to block you. That’s why nobody, in the history of the Domain, has ever broken in or out of The Ray.”

The corridors, Flint noticed, didn’t extend ahead of him in a straight line. They curved ever so slightly upwards so that the end of the corridor was always blocked by the ceiling. Flint suddenly realized the nature of the gravity holding him down and the fact that he and the entire prison were actually spinning, and was briefly overcome with a sense of vertigo. He swore, with a subliminal sense of nausea, that he could feel it spinning after this realization.

“So if it’s so impenetrable, what’s your plan?” Flint asked. “Because all you’ve done so far is make this sound harder.”

“I’m telling you this because the rule of twelve here is kind of a lie,” Allef replied. “There are in fact twelve separate failsafes preventing you from escaping at any given time. But these aren’t isolated systems. You see, this entire prison’s security relies on a few constants, and it only takes breaking one to send this place to hell. Know what they are?”

“The stamps, I’d assume,” Flint chimed.

“Exactly. The stamps are the biggest one. The stamp tells them where you are at all times. Have you noticed that they don’t ever lock the doors between rooms? When you’re working in the factory, they leave the factory doors wide open. Sometimes they don’t even guard it. That’s because they don’t even need to—if you’re out of your place, in a room you’re not supposed to be in—they deal with you. All the guards get a message and beat you up, or if you’re out of place for long enough, your stamp delivers the Juice. So, you see-”

“Wait, I’m sorry,” Flint interrupted. “The Juice?”

“Yeah, the Juice,” Allef repeated as if it was the most obvious thing in the galaxy. “The blood coagulant the stamps inject you with if you mess with them or if you aren’t where you’re supposed to be.”

“Who the hell calls it the Juice?”

“I do, obviously,” Allef replied. “As should anyone with a sense of humor.”

Flint raised his eyebrows. “Alright. Juice it is, then. Sorry to interrupt—you were saying they rely on the stamps to keep you in control?”

“Exactly. Hey, you’re getting pretty good at this. The stamps are the first few backups. They keep you in your place and subdue you if you disobey. The stamps alone make it impossible to escape. If you’re not where you’re assigned, they’ll find out, and you’re punished or you die. Simple as that.”

The end of the corridor was in sight. It was another white wall, most of the wall occupied by a large reinforced door filled with countless mechanical locks and deactivated screens. Along the edges of the largest locking mechanism was the number 9, faintly engraved.

“And the second major obstacle to escape is isolation. They’re letting me tell you my escape plan because it doesn’t matter in the end. See these numbers? That’s the sector we’re in.”

“Sector 9, then?” Flint guessed.

“Yep. See, even if you were to disable the stamps somehow, no one person would be able to escape The Ray on their own. You’d have to assemble a group. They prevent that by ensuring total social isolation. Everyone moves to a new sector every two weeks, so you’re never with the same group of people at once, and—as you can see behind us—you’re only allowed a slim amount of social time to even plan. Escape plans are shared all the time, but since there’s never a chance to develop them, all of them fall flat.”

“Then what’s your point?”

Allef turned to Flint and grabbed him by the shoulders. Her excitement seemed to visibly radiate off of her.

“There is a loophole in the system,” she said, eyes gleaming and voice deep and serious. “Just one, and the odds of getting out even through the loophole are almost zero. But it’s only possible if someone has a certain, very specific Val. That person is you. You are the one in a million—no, one in a billion—chance for us to escape. The odds of finding you might have been even lower.”

Flint was flustered by this. He, one in a billion?

“So what do I do, then?” Flint asked.

“I need you to die for me.”

They were silent for a moment. Flint was expecting to hear more.

“Huh?”

“You need to kill yourself. At a very specific place, at a very specific time, kill yourself.”

Flint remained silent, confused. Allef grabbed his sleeve and dragged him back through the corridor, walking past the stopwatch-wielding guard who began to follow at a distance.

“Your stamp has a small crease in the middle. Feel for it,” Allef told him. Flint ran a finger over the surface of his stamp and felt a small break in the otherwise flush metal.

“The stamp is designed to snap in two at that line. Doing so deactivates its connection to the Panopticon.” Seeing Flint’s confused look, Allef elaborated: “Don’t worry about the Panopticon for now. It’s the supercomputer at The Ray’s heart that tracks everyone at once. All you need to know is once you break your stamp, you can’t be tracked. You’re basically free.”

“Except for the blood coagulant. Er, Juice.”

“And that’s where your immortality comes in,” Allef said with a grin, pointing at Flint. “How does your Val work exactly?”

“When you die, your soul goes… somewhere. Call it the ‘great beyond’ if you want, but it goes somewhere outside of the physical world. My soul can’t. I’m stuck here.”

“Then you’re possessing that body?” Allef asked.

“Yeah.”

“What happens if your body dies?”

“My soul leaves and I can either stay as a ghost or find a new body.”

“Can you use the same body?”

Flint hesitated.

“It’s not something I’ve done before. I can only use bodies that are already fit to hold a soul, which usually means they’re not dead in the first place.”

Now it was Allef’s turn to hesitate, lost in thought. By now they had returned to the rec room.

“If a dead body was fit for use again, could you possess it?” Allef asked.

“Hm. It’s possible. Yeah, I think so.”

“Good. So this is gonna be a bit harder than I thought, but we should still be alright.”

They stopped walking and Allef pointed at a grey-green armchair near the corner of the rec room with a short man sitting in it, reading.

“That,” Allef started, “is the place. Right there at precise times each day, you can get away with breaking your stamp. Or, get away with half of it. In any usual situation where you break your stamp, your ‘marker’ that they see to know where you are will disappear. You’ll fall off the map, and they’ll know. But if you do it right here at the right time, nothing will be out of the ordinary at all.”

“Seriously? How?” Flint asked.

“Okay, okay.” Allef stood in front of Flint and made a circle in the air with a metallic finger. “The Ray is a spinning wheel. That’s what provides us with artificial gravity. Have you already done your M-Rail tour yet?”

“Yeah. This morning.”

“Then you’ve seen how The Ray has ‘spokes,’ right? Four spokes connecting from the center to the ring?”

“Mhm.”

“The spokes rotate independently from the actual prison, which is the spinning ring part. The supercomputer that tracks you—the Panopticon—is in the middle of those four spokes. See where I’m going yet? For the brief instant when a ‘spoke’ passes over you, the signal between you and the Panopticon is blocked, and if you break the connection just then, you won’t fall off the map. They’ll think you’re still right there up until the moment you put the stamp back together.”

Flint’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit…”

“Yep.” Allef was grinning ear-to-ear. “And then, you can go wherever you want.”

“Wait, wait, wait, hold on,” Flint said, putting his hands up. “This works? You’re sure this works?”

“This works. I’ve tried it myself.”

“You—what? But the Juice…”

“I know. I did it only one time to find my older sister they’re holding in the prison. She’s a genius. I told her everything. It almost killed me, but this loophole works. I had to force the blood coagulant out, and even then I almost died, but the prison guards found me in time. So, are you in?” Allef asked.

“Of course I’m in. I need to get out of here.”

“Great. You know the place, you know what to do. Here are the times you can do it.”

Allef pulled a slip of paper out of her sleeve and put it in Flint’s hand.

“That paper has an equation on it, and on the back a picture of my sister. Input the sector of The Ray you’re in into the equation and you can find out the exact times each day the loophole works. Use the big digital clock on the wall in the rec room. Once you split the stamp, run to the bathroom and try to force the blood coagulant out however you can. You’ll probably die if you don’t plan on getting caught like I did, but you can come back to life. Do that however you can. Don’t do it today, rec time’s almost over, but do it soon. Find my sister when you do it and tell her Allef sent you. She’ll tell you the escape plan.”

Flint looked at the equation sheet and Allef’s sister’s picture, dazed by the ocean of information that had just poured onto him.

“How… how did you figure this out?” he sputtered. “This equation, the stamps, your arms, this—how the hell did you figure this out?”

Allef looked him dead in the eyes.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

“Because I’m a damn good engineer, that’s how.”

----------------------------------------

The rest of the day passed in a blur. Flint returned to the factory, worked, didn’t see Big T, and eventually returned to his cell for bed. As he stared at the ceiling of his cell, something itched at the back of his mind.

The escape plan—that was a miracle. He felt more than ready to pull it off. What bothered him was the idea he might be making friends.

Over nearly a hundred years of immortality, Flint had only made two real friends. After the first one died—he immediately regretted dredging up that memory—he made it a point not to make friends again. Aurein was an exception—they were comrades, and Flint owed Aurein his life—but otherwise, he shunned the idea.

The pain of losing them, of knowing he could live eons without them, was too much for Flint to handle. He approached the world knowing it was transient, and had lived his immortality that way for decades. Especially against the backdrop of a galactic war, not getting too attached to people tended to help.

But thinking about Allef and Big T, faint sparks of hope in a hopeless wasteland, Flint felt conflicted. Should he shun those attachments before they grew into friendships? Should he try to live life like a mortal person even though he knew he wasn’t? Was it worth it before the day they’d walk into a battle and not come back or, by some miracle, die of old age?

Flint set this aside for the moment. In a context like this, those connections would benefit him. He had to escape, and he couldn’t without their help. If Big T was as strong as he suspected, and if Allef’s plan was right, they could be formidable allies.

----------------------------------------

At the factory the next day Flint didn’t talk to Big T. Flint was saving his hour of socialization for recreation time when he’d execute the loophole. Big T could tell he was up to something and didn’t pry.

“Hey,” Big T had said in a low voice, followed immediately by the beep of a stopwatch. “Just don’t get caught, will ya?” Big T winked. “It’s too early for a greenie like you to get a taste of Tymin’s beatings.”

Now, Flint was walking from the factory to the rec room, heart thumping with anticipation. The window to executing the loophole was about to open. Was he ready? He hoped so. Failure would result in this fleeting chance disappearing forever.

Upon entering the rec room and seeing the grey-green chair by its entrance, Flint was struck with a jolt of dread. He was about to die again. Intentionally, this time. He’d never died of a blood clot before. Flint wasn’t afraid of death or the process of dying—he’d already encountered it countless times—but the idea of dying from something new filled him with an irrational fear. Or maybe it was rational.

Out of the corner of his eye, Flint made out the curly-haired head of Allef, elsewhere in the large rec room. He walked as fast as he could to her without running, and as she saw him approach, she pretended to ignore him, pressing her face deeper into the reading tablet she held in her metal fingers.

“How the hell am I going to do this?!” Flint hissed once he reached her.

“Are you trying to make us look affiliated?” Allef hissed in return. There was the beep of a stopwatch behind them. “Get out of here!”

“No! I need to figure out how I’m supposed to bring this body back to life! How do I undo a fatal blood clot?!”

“I don’t know! I’m an engineer, not a doctor! If I could guess, though, you need to find a blood thinner.”

“What?”

“Blood thinner!” Allef hissed, enunciating each syllable. “It thins your blood! It undoes clots! They injected me with one before I died from trying out the loophole!”

“Where the hell am I supposed to find blood thinner?” Flint asked.

“I don’t know! Now get out of here before they catch onto us and we get sent to different sectors! If that happens, we’re never escaping!”

Flint stepped back, making his way to the grey-green chair where he would kill himself. He looked warily at the large digital clock on one wall of the rec room, displaying the current time in glowing blue digits. Fifty-seven more minutes of recreational time remaining. Would he be able to die, come back to life, find Allef’s sister, and return in that amount of time, all without getting caught?

Flint thought back to his time in Tymin’s epicenter research facility, at the glimpse of the Terminus’ power he had been seen. He thought back to the last of his parents’ faces he saw before he died.

“Hell yeah I can,” Flint said to himself, and sat down in the green chair with a tablet.

He spent a moment fiddling with the tablet, pulling up something he’d pretend to read. After a moment, he pulled the equation paper Allef had given him out of his sleeve and began to read it through. The complicated symbols and format immediately overwhelmed him—he was never good at math. But he knew the principles, and with great difficulty, inputted the current sector of The Ray he was in, receiving numerous times in which the Panopticon’s signal would be interrupted and he would be free to execute the loophole. The next coming time would be in 14 seconds. He hadn’t expected it to come so soon. His stomach filled with dread, and he put his index finger and thumb around the sides of the stamp. He couldn’t get a good grip—its edges were buried under the skin in his neck.

Before he knew it, seven seconds remained. What if he messed up? They’d inevitably find out he was planning an escape, and that he and Allef were plotting together. Maybe they’d give him solitary confinement and put him in a place he couldn’t escape from, even as a ghost. Maybe he’d live the rest of eternity in a small box.

He shunned those thoughts as he watched the timer tick down. Two seconds. One.

Zero.

Flint squeezed the sides of his stamp as hard as he could around its seam, feeling with a jolt that the two parts he was trying to separate were tighter than he expected. In the span of less than a second, he squeezed yet harder, and with a shockingly painful snap in his neck, felt the stamp break in two, his fingers now touching the sensitive, bare flesh in between.

He didn’t bleed, but felt a rush of pain in his neck and a sweeping sensation of vertigo. It was hard for Flint to keep a straight face. The Juice was pumping through his veins now from his neck. He felt nothing like a life-threatening blood clot yet, but that only filled him with more dread, knowing what was to come.

As casually as he could manage, Flint covered his broken stamp with a hand, pretending he was scratching or rubbing his neck. He returned the tablet to the shelf, hid the equation sheet in his sleeve again, and walked to the nearest bathroom to die.

Once in the bathroom and out of the view of guards, he rushed to the furthest stall from the entrance and closed the door. He didn’t know how loud his death would be and didn’t want to draw attention. Already, the area around his neck was beginning to swell, and moving his head became more and more painful and restrictive. He sat on the toilet seat, breathing more heavily now, every heartbeat more uncomfortable than the last.

Flint took the fact that he didn’t hear deafening alarms and the sound of guards frantically searching for him as a sign that the loophole had worked. If he had failed and disconnected his stamp at the wrong time, they would have seen him disappear, and he would probably already be caught. Only, focusing on this fact was slowly becoming harder and harder as the primal fear of death overtook him and his blood flow tightened.

Every time he died he would be filled with this same desperation, the last grasp of life trying to preserve itself. It was pointless in Flint’s case, as for him, it wasn’t the end, but the biological impulses that still remained in his immortal soul told him he had to do something to save himself. He ignored it.

A seed of pain formed in Flint’s chest which grew with every raspy breath. He tried to twist his body, hoping that letting himself breathe easier might ease the pain, but it only made his chest hurt somewhere new. He coughed before he even knew that he had to, and then coughed again, trying to cover up the noise by stuffing his face in his elbow. After several more involuntary coughs, he looked at the sleeve on his arm to see a spatter of blood.

Flint, at first, didn’t even notice that his skin was turning a darker purple color. He did once he grabbed his chest in agony and saw that his fingers were fat, purple, and swollen. He imagined he looked horrible right about now.

More coughs came on, followed by a dull aching sensation over his whole body. Now he was really dying. After several more bloody bouts of coughing, he marveled at and despised the shocking potency of the blood clotting poison the stamp had injected him with. As the pain increased further and his energy began to drop, he let himself sprawl face-up on the lid of the toilet, tunnel vision blurring the overhead light. Only two minutes later, a final breath escaped his body and he went still.

For a brief moment, there was nothing. No sight, but it wasn’t black. No sound, but it wasn’t quiet. Then, Flint found himself once again suspended in the dark nothingness that was the veil between life and death, watching the countless souls in his galaxy float into the great beyond above as he plunged back into reality.

His ghost stood in front of his now-dead body in the bathroom stall. A flood of sights and sounds returned to his consciousness. As soon as he processed everything around him once more, Flint winced at the sight of his corpse. Wow, he did look bad. Tymin’s final defense measure against escape was a brutal sight to see. As he examined his swollen, purple-tinted body, he tried to catalog in his mind where that death fell among the others he’d experienced. That death was more painful than he thought. Definitely worse than bleeding out, he mused. Bleeding out was comparatively easy. Was it as bad as dying from burn injuries? No. So at least it could have been worse.

Flint turned his focus back to the escape plan, trying to shake off the mental aftermath of the immense pain he had just experienced. If he were to revive this body, he had to thin its blood. That was possible, provided he had a blood thinner. The infirmary was a few doors down to the left of the rec room, but it was restricted, only guards and admins able to get inside.

Or ghosts.

Flint phased through the stall door, making sure nobody outside the stall would notice or touch his body, and then phased through the bathroom wall. If he went far enough in this direction, he would supposedly reach this sector’s infirmary. Finding a blood thinner should be easy—the trick was stealing it without getting noticed and bringing it back. While as a ghost, Flint could phase through most objects, but he was still visible to any normal person.

Phasing through objects, especially walls like the one he was in right now, was an interesting process. Flint’s body as a ghost only consisted of the bare minimum matter necessary to register his form and soul. That matter was so thin and spread apart that it could pass between the bonds of solid objects if he wished, allowing him to move through walls like the one he was phasing through now. However, dense enough objects, like the specially-designed cuffs he had been given before he received his stamp, could bind even his ghost form.

Flint moved slowly through the thin space between the walls, passing around thick metal reinforcing beams before emerging into another sterile, brightly-lit room. Surprised that he had already reached his destination, Flint hid back within the wall, letting only a ghostly eye phase into the new room.

It was the infirmary. Medicine bottles lined the walls on long, deep shelves, one of which his eye seemed to be atop of. Several prisoners occupied the numerous white beds, some groaning and some still, and guards and doctors alike roved the room.

One doctor strode towards a medicine bottle near Flint’s eye. He quickly hid within the wall again. There were so many medicines to choose from—which one was the blood thinner?

Flint put his eye back into the infirmary and scanned the names on the bottles. Most of the labels were facing into the room, and he couldn’t see them without emerging entirely into the infirmary to see the other side. The names he could make out made no sense to him—he wasn’t a doctor.

He tried looking at the side effects on each bottle instead. Maybe something that thinned blood as a side effect would unclot the blood in his corpse.

But after reading the side effects of only two bottles, he realized that many side effects were too numerous to scan at a reasonable pace. He didn’t have all day to look for a single line of text—if his body was left alone for too long, it could decay, and it would never be fit to hold a soul again. Flint had to fix it, and fast.

Then, he had an idea. The perfect way to find out exactly where the blood thinner was kept—he’d simply get the doctors to point it out.

Flint descended back into the area between the rooms of The Ray, phasing through trusses and beams, going around until he reached another side of the infirmary. When he put his eye back into the room, he saw he was right next to the beds where the prisoners were kept. Perfect.

He looked between the prisoners for one who was awake. There was a young, teal-haired man in the bed immediately to Flint’s left who was fiddling with the cast on his leg.

Flint looked at the ghostly gun by his side. It was a part of his spirit, always with his soul. Even in death it fired.

Destroying a stamp—or splitting it in two, like Flint had—resulted in the stamp’s owner being flooded with the Juice. He would use this to his advantage.

Flint pulled out one of the guns at his hip and aimed it at the prisoner with the injured leg. He adjusted the aim until it pointed at only the prisoner’s stamp.

The one exception to Flint’s ghostly form being almost unable to affect the physical world were his guns. Their bullets, while ethereal, always fired with deadly force.

Sorry in advance, Flint thought, and pulled the trigger.

With a shriek-like bang, Flint’s ghostly pistol fired, the translucent blue bullet skimming the injured man’s neck so that it tore apart only his stamp and the surrounding skin. Many things happened at once—a simultaneous jump from everyone in the room, a yell of pain and surprise from the injured prisoner, and the scrambling of guards and doctors alike to the source of the noise. Flint hid back into the wall and waited, only his eye in the room again.

The injured prisoner was panicking, grabbing his bloody neck and the mangled parts of his stamp still embedded in his skin. The blood thickener was already in his system, and he frantically called over the doctors for help.

“First aid!” A doctor shouted to another. “And blood thinner! The poison’s already in his bloodstream!”

Flint watched patiently as one doctor grabbed a first aid medical case and another sprinted over to a shelf with several syringes. She grabbed a syringe and injected it into the panicking prisoner.

“This will thin your blood. Don’t worry, you’re going to be fine,” she said.

Flint phased fully back into the wall and moved around the outside of the room until he was near the shelf of blood thinners the doctor had just taken from. He phased back into the infirmary and, while the attention was still on the prisoner who was wondering how he’d hit his head hard enough to break his stamp, stole a syringe. He carried it into the air and moved it carefully into a vent, grates barely wide enough to fit it through.

After a long, agonizing process of carrying the syringe through a labyrinth of dusty vents, some portions barely wide enough to fit the syringe, he reached the bathroom where his corpse lay. It was still fresh, purple, and swollen from the clogged blood vessels that had made it uninhabitable. It was time to change that.

Flint, unsure of what else to do, injected the blood thinner directly into an arm, into the most visible, most swollen blood vessel he could see. Now he had to circulate the antidote and get the heart moving again. He performed CPR, trying his hardest not to phase through the body as he did so. It was awkward, trying to revive his own body. In theory, if the body became habitable again, his soul would slip right inside it and he would be fine. But after a minute passed with no results, then two, then five, then ten, his hope was beginning to fade. Frustration and anger growing, he stopped CPR and, with a shout of rage, slapped his corpse on the cheek with all his might.

“Wake UP!”

Flint barely even noticed the moment he had possessed the body again—it happened so quickly. One moment, his ghost had just slapped the body, and the next, he was the body again, overwhelmed with pain and exhaustion. He coughed up blood, trying to aim his spurts of blood into the toilet, and then touched his stinging cheek with a bloody finger. He took a dozen rapid, agonized breaths, slowing down with each rise and fall of his chest, until the panic subsided and a dull pain in his body, especially in his cheek, remained.

There was a knock on the stall door.

“You okay in there?” asked a concerned voice.

This close to the floor, Flint could see the work shoes of another prisoner in the neighboring stall. He burned with embarrassment, hoping the involuntary sounds he’d made during his revival hadn’t attracted suspicion. He wiped all the blood off his body that he could, threw the syringe into the toilet, and flushed.

“Uh, yep,” Flint replied to the voice. “Think I ate something funny.”

Flint looked at himself in the mirror as he washed his hands. His skin seemed to be lightly bruised all over, a large, obvious bruise discoloring his cheek. He first winced at the sight, then suppressed a chuckle as he washed his blood off his hands.

“Why are you hitting yourself?” he said under his breath.