The meal, if it could even be called that, was a grayish slop served in chipped bowls, handed out without a word by two guards who looked just as eager to be done with it as the prisoners were to eat.
Atlas was no longer kept chained at all times. His first victory had, in a way, unlocked a few small privileges new arrivals never got. Eating alongside the other gladiators who'd won their fights, for one. Atlas had grown used, these past few days, to this strange hour when they were allowed to sit together in the communal hall, split into groups of four or five, close enough to talk but never quite close enough to reach one another.
It was, he'd quickly realized, the one moment when the Rohar turned, for a handful of minutes, into something almost human. All of them bound together by savagery, by the shared trauma of the arena, in a way nothing else here ever could.
"You hear the same thing I did, or am I losing it?" an older man said, bald, a scar cutting across his left eyebrow that looked like it had been there for years. He was talking to the man beside him, a younger one, his face still streaked with grime from a fight he'd clearly only just barely walked away from.
"Hear what?" the younger man answered, not particularly interested, more focused on the bottom of his bowl.
"Some unknown fighter beat an arena champion," the old man said. "Out East. Edge of Odyssey."
"What, another legend?" the younger man said, his interest suddenly, genuinely caught.
"Not a legend. A fact." The old man leaned in, dropping his voice a notch, as though the information itself called for a little caution. "Word is a fighter took down the champion out there. A real one. The kind whose name alone clears out the betting pool before the fight even starts."
The word was enough to silence, for a moment, the hall's usual murmur.
Atlas, who'd only been half listening up to this point, felt his mind sharpen on its own, almost against his will. He kept eating, outwardly indifferent, but every word spoken around him was carving itself into the back of his skull.
"Who was the champion?" a woman asked from a little further down, her thin arms covered in old scars that spoke of more arenas than just this one.
"Nobody knows. Or rather, everybody's got a different name for you." The old man shrugged. "Always the same with anything coming out of the East. By the time a story's passed through enough mouths to reach us, it doesn't look much like whatever actually happened out there."
"Then how do you know it's even true?" the young man pressed, finally looking up.
"I don't." The old man flashed a toothless grin, almost amused by his own honesty. "But I like believing it. Feels good sometimes, thinking there's still something worth toppling out there, in some arena none of us will ever see."
"And what difference does that make for us, exactly?" another man cut in, younger still, his left arm wrapped entirely in bandages. "One less champion out East doesn't fill our bowls in here."
"It changes that it reminds us of something." The scarred woman's voice turned sharp. "Nobody, in any arena in this world, stays invincible for as long as they think they will."
"And get this, they're saying the unknown fighter might be one of the Awakened," the old man added, something lighting up behind his eyes. "Which means even us, plain old pit fighters, might be able to awaken too."
A heavy silence followed. Atlas noticed, without much surprise, that no one argued the point, and that more than one gaze, briefly, drifted toward the corner of the hall where Hercules sat eating alone, as always, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was being watched.
"You." The bandaged young man turned suddenly toward Atlas, a curiosity in his eyes he hadn't shown before. "What do you think, new blood? You look the type to think more than you talk."
Atlas, caught off guard that anyone would address him directly, took his time before answering. He'd never actually stopped to think about it before now.
"I think," he said finally, his voice even, "that every champion eventually wears thin and falls, to someone with nothing left to lose and everything left to prove. That's just the logical wheel of things turning."
No one answered right away. The old man lowered his eyes to his bowl. The scarred woman's mouth twisted into a bitter little smile, neither a compliment nor a criticism, just the silent recognition of a truth none of them had ever had the nerve to put quite so plainly.
In the distance, a bell rang, marking the end of the meal. The guards began moving between the groups, barking sharp, impatient orders, and one by one, the prisoners rose to fall back into the lines that would lead each of them back to their own cell, their own darkness, until tomorrow.
Atlas rose with the rest of them, the rumor from the East still turning over in his mind, less for what it claimed than for what it revealed: that even here, at the bottom of a world that no longer believed in much of anything, people still needed stories about giants who eventually fell. A Goliath worth felling.
On the walk back, escorted with little real conviction by a guard who seemed far more interested in his own dinner than in keeping watch, Atlas turned the old man's words over in his mind. Even us. We could awaken too.
And me? The question landed with an unsettling clarity.
It should add up, he thought, but I still don't understand the mechanics of any of it. He had this strange impression that for some people, Emma, maybe, or himself, the awakening had triggered almost automatically, without effort, against their will, even. And yet, clearly, it didn't include everyone. The toothless old man eating a few feet away from him was living proof of that. He hadn't become an Awakened, despite everything he must have lived through.
He thought back to what Isaac had said, that morning. The canvas. That idea that believing in your own existence was enough to earn the right to be a full part of it. That it all came down, in the end, to will pressed against that stretched canvas. So maybe that was the condition for awakening. Will itself.
Something clicked into place in his mind, clean and cold, like a coin finally settling on the right side.
His dreams. Or what he'd taken for dreams, these night, in the forest of blue trees.
Rebel against Existence.
It made sense, suddenly, lined up against what Isaac had said. To awaken, maybe what you needed was a will dense enough to truly rebel against your own existence. Against passivity. Against resignation. Against everything that pushes a being to simply endure the world instead of demanding their place in it.
The concepts stayed frustratingly blurry, and even his own condition remained a puzzle he couldn't fully solve. And then there was the fact that his situation was fundamentally different from theirs, anyway. More than a century had passed between the moment he'd fallen asleep on that university bench and the moment he'd opened his eyes again. He didn't really belong to this era, any more than a misplaced object belongs to the drawer it happens to end up shoved into. He didn't even know, with any certainty, whether he was already fully awakened, or only becoming so, in pieces, by accident. The fact that he couldn't read himself, couldn't diagnose his own condition the way he could diagnose any other logical problem, irritated him more than he wanted to admit.
I'll have to get Isaac to confirm all this.
That was when they stepped into the main cellblock hall, and Atlas stopped dead, his guard nearly walking straight into his back.
A small group had just arrived through the opposite entrance. Four new prisoners, dragged in without ceremony by two guards Atlas didn't recognize, their faces still frozen in a cold kind of shock. One of them, a young man barely out of his teens, was crying without a sound, his eyes wide and fixed on the cell bars as though he still refused to believe any of it. Another, older, kept a stubborn silence, his jaw clenched tight around a terror he was failing, badly, to dress up as dignity.
Atlas watched them pass without a flicker of emotion disturbing the flat surface of his own face.
He felt no pity, no real compassion. Only that same cold curiosity that never quite left him anymore. He wondered where they'd come from, how they'd ended up here, whether they'd been sold like he had, or captured, dragged through a world that had left them no other option at all.
His own guard finally shoved him toward his cell, without a word, and the door closed behind him with a familiar groan.
Atlas sat down on his cot and closed his eyes. In the dark, he could still hear, somewhere down the row, the muffled crying of the young man who'd just been locked away three cells down.
The sound didn't bother him for long. He was asleep before he even had time to be annoyed by it.
...
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