Chapter 4: The Roaring Light

Time had ceased its flow. Around me, it had solidified, compressed into a dense, suffocating sediment by the relentless grind of Gamma Team’s existence. What might once have been measured in months, perhaps even years, dissolved into a single, permanent ache radiating from my shoulders—a deep, bone-deep soreness etched by the unforgiving traces. The raw, burning chafe of the harness, a brutal companion on countless damp, freezing mornings, had yielded to warmer air, thick with the scent of turned earth and decay. Yet this shift brought no relief. It only thickened the atmosphere, pressing down like a sodden blanket, amplifying the metallic tang of fear and the greasy reek of machinery that permeated the Hollow.

The true measure of this stagnation lay not in the forgotten turn of seasons, but in the grim, accelerating rhythm of the intake vans. They arrived with the dreadful regularity of a failing heart, each beat weaker, each disgorgement larger. They vomited their cargo into the Hollow’s ever-hungry maw—fresh faces, untethered souls radiating a palpable, almost viscous terror. It clung to the air, a raw, unfiltered dread you could taste on the back of your tongue.

I remembered a time when the vans came infrequently, unloading only a handful at a time—a manageable trickle of despair swallowed by the vast grey silence. Now, the intake barn loomed larger, its recent, crude expansion a stark monument to our accelerating doom. Where once there were five, maybe six hollow-eyed figures stumbling out, now the vans spilled forth ten, twelve, sometimes more.

Ten new fonts of fear, ten more bodies destined for the traces and harness, ten more lives compacted into the sediment of endless, meaningless toil. The sheer volume amplified the terror, transforming intake from a grim ritual into a deafening flood of human raw material, swallowed whole by the expanded maw. Time wasn’t passing; it was accumulating, layer upon crushing layer, like the compacted filth beneath our ceaseless, grinding tread.

My existence felt less like living and more like sinking—deeper, inexorably deeper, into the suffocating swamp of the Hollow’s living machinery. The rhythmic groan of the generators was the gurgle of its bowels, and the metallic shriek of stressed components was its pained scream. The constant thrumming vibration rising from the very stone beneath my worn hoof boots was its diseased pulse. These weren’t just sounds drifting over the tall walls separating Gamma sector from the wider estate; they were the atmosphere inside me. They were the sludge filling my lungs with every breath of warm, oil-tainted air, coating my thoughts until even fear felt sluggish, trapped in amber.

I was nothing more than Bria. Gamma Workhorse. Unit 7—a fixture as permanent and unremarkable as the rust-streaked bolts holding the sagging intake barn together. Predictable in my movements, my exhaustion, my silent, head-down endurance. Utterly invisible. That invisibility—seamless blending into the greased cogs and the sea of weary, defeated faces, was my greatest, most horrifying achievement. It wasn’t passive fading; it was a cage meticulously welded shut from the inside, bar by psychic bar.

For a working pony girl like Bria, it was camouflage. A shell painstakingly sculpted over months that felt like geological epochs, carved not from stone but from sheer, desperate will and the calcified residue of constant dread. Lyra—still me—was the spark of defiance, the memory of sunlight on real grass, the girl who remembered the salt tang of sea air and the taste of unchecked laughter. I was the prisoner entombed within that shell.

Every stifled curse bitten back until my tongue bled, every blank stare fixed on the middle distance until my eyes burned, every obedient, muscle-rending strain against the traces was another shovelful of dirt packed down over her, another rivet driven into the prison walls. Survival in the Hollow demanded the slow, agonizing murder of the self.

To be Bria was to bury Lyra alive, brick by psychic brick, praying against crushing despair that the grave was shallow enough, the shell strong enough, to hold her breath just long enough—long enough to find a single, fragile crack in this meticulously constructed hell and claw her way out.

The relentless rotation of handlers and overseers became the grim metronome of our existence, underscoring the Hollow’s indifference. Sorrell’s chilling intimacy felt like a fever dream from another, impossibly distant lifetime. The Gamma Sector now answered to apathy made flesh. First came Madam Vanya: flint-chip eyes that registered only tonnage, never souls; a voice like gravel dragged over broken concrete; her presence a cold pressure solely calibrated to quotas.

Her shadow, handler Crag, was less a man and more a muzzled automaton—a hulking silhouette whose vacant eyes saw only obstacles to be shouldered aside, his movements heavy with a dull, brute-force purpose. Without warning or ceremony, they vanished. One hauling day, they were simply ... gone—erased.

Handler Reed was younger, quicker on his feet, a nervous energy buzzing beneath the surface. The leather muzzle beneath his dead eyes was the same, the casual cruelty unchanged. Overseeing him was Mistress Helga, wiry and pinch-faced, her bark a shriller, more brittle echo of Vanya’s granite command, her focus on output just as absolute. Weeks bled into weeks under their watchful apathy. Reed and Helga vanished too, as abruptly as their predecessors. Silas and Petra appeared. Later came Jax and Lorna.

Names blurred into insignificance, faces drawn from Timber, Stone, Grounds crews—supervisors as interchangeable and worn as the cogs in the intake barn’s rusting machinery. The indifference remained, a constant. The crushing routine remained, a wheel grinding us down.

Within that suffocating predictability, within the blind spot carved by their complacent, rotating ignorance, Lyra buried deep beneath Bria’s numb shell mapped the prison with the desperate, laser-focused precision of a condemned woman charting her only possible escape route. The rhythm of their rotation was the key, the fatal flaw in their indifferent armor.

Manure runs to the West Orchard compost pits? Always Silas and Petra’s shift. Silas, thick-necked and perpetually wheezing like a broken bellows, would inevitably shamble to the lee of the old tool shed. There, he’d hack phlegm like wet gravel onto the weeds, his entire attention consumed by the acrid curl of smoke from his hand-rolled cigarette. Petra, restless energy crackling off her, paced the loading zone, but her gaze, sharp as flint for shirkers near the wagons, rarely probed the dense, thorn-choked thicket of brambles that clawed at the sagging chain-link fence beyond the compost heaps.

Oiling tack on Reed’s watch? The shed door invariably stood ajar, a sliver of grey light and freedom mocking us. Reed, easily distracted by noise or movement, would often drift toward the perpetual commotion of the Timber crew nearby, their shouts and the crash of lumber drowning out the soft creak of leather in our hands. His back, turned for crucial, precious minutes, became an open doorway in our minds.

Garden duty under Helga’s pinched scrutiny? Her obsession was geometric perfection—rows ruler-straight, plants equidistant, weeds annihilated. While we knelt, backs screaming, fingers clawing at stubborn roots near the perimeter ditch, Helga would stand ramrod straight at the field’s head, meticulously surveying her sterile kingdom through narrowed eyes, her rigid back a shield turned pointedly towards the outer darkness for minutes on end.

The Loading Gate’s persistent, unguarded gap was a constant, siren-song temptation. The West Orchard fence became our crucible, our fragile hope. During Silas and Petra’s manure runs, Nelda and I perfected a silent, desperate ballet—a deliberate stumble, a dropped shovel clattering like a gunshot on the packed earth. Silas’s irritated grunt, head snapping toward the noise, was the signal. In the stolen heartbeat of his distraction, I’d drive the thick handle of my rake deep into the snarled brambles near the V-shaped depression in the fence line we’d identified. Probing, feeling—soft. Not packed earth, but decades of leaf litter and rotted orchard mulch, thick and yielding beneath the wire.