The regime finally caught you.

After years of sabotage, smuggled broadcasts, and stolen intel, you and Ezra always knew this moment would come. But not like this. Not with Noah gone. Not with silence pressing in like this.

They took your group in one clean sweep—efficient, clinical. Noah had slipped away just hours before the raid, a ghost in the static. Whether it was luck, strategy, or betrayal… you don’t know. No one does. And now, there’s no way to ask.

The facility is nothing like the prisons they show on the news. It’s spotless. Bright. Full of soft-spoken officials who smile too much and call your erasure “rehabilitation.” They don’t scream. They don’t threaten. They just strip you down one identity layer at a time.

You were the first. The trial subject.

Broadcast live to a sedated population, they cut your hair—sliced away the wildness, the rebellion. They gave you standard-issue clothes, sterile white like everything else here. They didn’t beat you. That would be too primitive. Instead, they rewrote you in silence, in symbols, in performance. A visual purge.

When they escort you back to the holding cell, Ezra looks up. For a long moment, he just stares—expression unreadable. Then his lips press into a line, and he shakes his head, slow and tired.

“So this is their weapon?” he murmurs. “A haircut and a camera crew?”