Eve stayed in Caruso’s blinkshadow during the walk back to the anima station. It was the equivalent of someone pointing a loaded crossbow at your head—it made for a stressful walk. Caruso didn't ask why they were returning. The atmosphere was too tense for such questions. Caruso wasn’t quite sure where he stood: Eve was convinced he was some sort of evil beast that should be put down, Pango thought he was just a clueless kid that needed rescuing, and Webber believed he was still the same person back when they were gathering shrooms for Bozi.

He wanted to assume Webber was right, that he was still the same Caruso as before. He longed to slip back into that role, back to where his problems were small trifling matters, and back to that effortless friendship they shared. But he didn’t feel the same as he did back then. Too much had happened. He had killed an Urchin back at the compound. It shocked him how little that had bothered him. He’d barely even thought about it. How could killing someone have such little impact on him? And same with his work at the anima station. He’d just gone along with it as if it were a perfectly normal thing. Should he have questioned it? Should he have refused to take part? Should he have freed all the prisoners and animals?

But that didn’t seem right either. He trusted Ferris, and he trusted the Foresters. Besides, all the prisoners had been murderers and rapists from the Jamalan dungeons. If they were dead men anyway, what was wrong with using their lives to serve the Foresters?

When they arrived back at the station, Caruso opened his walls through his room to the study room. Webber stayed back as a lookout since he couldn’t enter Zone 4 without a slimekey.

Eve gave the cluttered room a quick look, disgust plain on her face. She stood by the dividing wall and stared expectantly at Caruso.

'Open it.'

'I can't. Mang never gave me that wall.'

Eve looked like she didn't believe him.

'It's true... Why would I bother lying when you can just blink through anyway?'

Eve still looked like she didn't believe him, which Caruso found annoying. But it didn't matter. Pango began clawing his way through the wall.

Caruso had never noticed the man’s claws before. They were long, sharp, and deadly looking. Everything about Pango's appearance should've been terrifying. The anima stood a good head taller than Caruso, and must've been at least five times as heavy. He had a bulky frame shrouded in tightly knit scales. The scales extended all the way down his thick tail that hovered above the ground. But despite his menacing figure, and despite watching him shred through Mang's old wall, for some reason there was nothing scary about Pango. He came across as relaxed and soft spoken—bordering on shy—and had nothing but kindness behind his eyes. When Pango made it through to the experiment room, Caruso turned back to stay with Webber.

‘No you don’t,’ Eve said. ‘Come and see exactly what you were involved with.’

Caruso followed her through the gap. The room felt different without Mang. Quieter. Larger. Darker. And this time, no one was there to sweep away the stench of death. He didn’t remember it smelling this bad yesterday. Had he grown familiar to it?

'Pango, thread him in place,' Eve instructed. 'Give him a good view.'

Pango approached Caruso, 'It's for your own good, kid.' Then led him to the centre of the room before binding him to the ground. Caruso was surprised that Pango was also a threader. But recalled seeing Mang's foot snag on something before she was killed.

Eve and Pango made for the back row of prisoner cells and worked in tandem to open them. One by one the cell walls were clawed open and Eve would carefully remove whatever lay inside: sometimes it was a dead body, other times a terrified prisoner who cowered at the sight of Pango—yet the big man never failed to set them at ease. The room was dark, yet the prisoners squinted at the light. How long had they been locked away for? None of them looked healthy. Caruso was shocked at how thin they all were, how haunted their faces were, how some begged for food and water. Did Mang not bother to feed them?

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Eve and Pango carefully guided the prisoners to one side of the room and gave them whatever comfort they could. Some prisoners cried. One grabbed onto Eve’s leg and kissed her feet, thanking her over and over. Most just ambled over, staring at the ground with expressionless faces. A few prisoners stayed in their cells, they weren't dead, or injured, but didn't seem interested in moving. They were like that first prisoner Caruso saw, the one that had given up on life. Eve was patient and didn’t force them to come out. Perhaps they never would.

Was there always this many cells? Caruso had never really looked. Never bothered to count. He did now. Sixty four. He thought he counted wrong. But there was sixty four. They were narrower than he recalled, stacked two high in places, and another row of them lined the right hand wall.

Eve and Pango started finding failed animas in the cells. Bodies that had been forced into brutal transformations. There were a lot of prisoners with shroommoth disfigurements. Human bodies with a moth’s pink hair and horrible large eye holes puckered bloodily onto each side of their face. Mutilated bodies that looked to have been hacked to pieces and clumsily jammed back together again. Some had their torso’s twisted into an insect-like thorax, yet with human ribs jutting through the skin. Some of these creations were still holding onto life. One gave a vicious inhuman squeal, it’s legs and arms had been replaced by the thin limbs of a moths. And as the anima tried to scuttle away, its limbs bent and snapped until they just flailed uselessly at nothing. It's squeal grew higher pitched until Eve ended it's misery.

There was no helping them. They were all terrified, confused, and suffering miserably with no hope to survive. One by one, Eve put them down with a clean blink strike through the head. Caruso knew they hadn’t been alive long. No more than a day. How many prisoners did he and Mang go through, yesterday, trying to determine the range of the animashroom? How many lives paid for that useless bit of knowledge?

Caruso wasn’t sure how long it took for all the cages to be opened. He didn’t know what to think. It was horrifying. But he’d always known it was horrifying, didn’t he? From the first day he knew exactly what this place was. It was just easier to deal with when he had been in the other room. And as soon as Mang had closed the dividing wall, he didn’t need to think about it, he just needed to put his head down and do his job.

He tried not to blame himself. He’d done nothing wrong. He tried holding on to the reasons why he had come here, the reasons Ferris had given him, the reasons Niko had told him. He tried to hold on. But none of the justifications seemed as solid anymore. They seemed empty and hollow excuses.

Pango looked exhausted by the time he’d finished the last cage. He ignored Caruso as he wandered to the middle of the room where the two tables sat. He looked sadly at them, then with a deep roar he bought both his fists down upon the experiment table, splintering it. He hit it again and again until it snapped in two. With another roar he flipped over the table with all the instruments laid carefully on its surface, sending them clattering to the sod floor. Caruso didn't know Pango much, but he didn't seem the type from which outbursts of violence came easily.

Eve was talking to some of the more able prisoners—the ones who hadn’t lost their minds to their fate. She asked each one where they were from. Caruso thought they were from the Jamalan dungeons. But nearly every one talked about a camp in Zone 3, one full of civilians who picked drugshrooms—the civ camps. Why weren’t they from the dungeons? They were supposed to all be murderers and rapists from the Jamalan dungeons. That’s what he’d been told. Ferris had said not to feel bad about the prisoners because they were all dead men. The prisoners must be lying.

But Caruso knew they weren’t lying. Little details began eating at him. When Caruso questioned Mang about the prisoner with his little white dog, she told him he had been a civilian. Why hadn’t Caruso asked about the others? Mang had said more than once about how she never ran out of prisoners, how she can always order more. Why didn’t Caruso ever stop to question how many prisoners Jamala could realistically hold? Why didn't he wonder about the sheer volume of human experiments Mang had done? Of course they couldn't all be prisoners.

More than once he tried to turn away. When Eve saw this she came and ripped his Forester disc from his neck and threw it into the growing pile of dead bodies. She said if he turned away again, she would kill him. Why were they subjecting him to this? What lesson were they trying to teach him? He’d done nothing wrong. This was all just a misunderstanding. Surely they didn’t think Caruso was capable of causing this kind of suffering on his own?

Pango clawed open the wall to the outside and began dragging the dead bodies towards the ever smoldering bonfire. He freed all the animals, which all scattered into the forest. One stoat had a heavy limp, Pango threaded a splint along its leg and placed it atop his shoulder where the stoat remained happily.

One of the freed men looked at Caruso, smiled, and bowed his head in thanks. Caruso just looked down at the sod floor. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t fair. He’d just been doing his part for the Foresters. He’d done nothing wrong. Caruso kept reminding himself of that fact. Because it was true. It had to true. Because if it weren’t true it would open something up inside, something deep and dark and inescapable. He didn’t want to go there, couldn’t even glance at that space within himself. He stayed away from it. He’d done nothing wrong.