The Chain We Forged

The bell is first. A harsh, metallic sound that cuts through the thin layer of sleep. I don’t open my eyes. For a few seconds, I allow myself to exist only in the dark space behind my eyelids, a place where the floor isn’t cold concrete and the air doesn’t smell of sweat and disinfectant. The bell clangs again, insistent. It’s a physical thing, vibrating through the thin mattress, up my spine.

My eyes open. The light is grey. It pushes through a pane of glass so thick with filth it seems solid, casting a weak, diffuse rectangle on the opposite wall. Another day. The thought isn't formed with words, just a familiar sinking feeling in my stomach, a tightening in my chest.

Before I move, before my feet touch the floor, I look to the bunk below mine. Brad. He’s on his side, facing the wall, a motionless lump under a threadbare grey blanket. The stillness sends a spike of cold panic through me, sharp and sudden. It’s always the first fear of the day. I hold my breath, watching the slight rise and fall of the blanket over his shoulder blades. One breath. Two. He’s alive. The tension in my jaw loosens.

I swing my legs over the side of the bunk, my bare feet landing on the cold, gritty floor. The chill is immediate, unpleasant. I dress in the near-dark, pulling on the same coarse trousers, the same thin shirt. The fabric is stiff, smelling faintly of chemicals and damp earth from yesterday’s work detail. Everyone else is moving now, a collective groan of bodies rising from their bunks. The air fills with coughs and the rustle of clothing.

I drop down to Brad’s level. He’s pushed himself up, sitting on the edge of his mattress, his head in his hands. His hair is matted, his shoulders slumped. He looks younger than his twenty years, especially in this weak light. He always looks younger.

“Brad,” I say. My voice is low, just for him.

He looks up. His eyes are clouded with sleep, or maybe something else. It’s hard to tell anymore. He just nods. It’s our morning ritual. My word, his nod. It means: I’m here. I’m okay. It means: I see you.

I watch him pull on his boots. His movements are slow, clumsy. I notice he’s favoring his left hand, keeping the fingers curled slightly. I reach out and take his hand before he can pull it away.

“Let me see.”

He resists for a second, then relents. I turn his palm over. A new blister has formed near the base of his thumb, raw and red against his calloused skin. It’s already broken open. The work in the scrap fields, sorting twisted metal with bare hands. I press my thumb gently beside the raw spot. He doesn’t flinch. He’s used to it.

“It’s nothing,” he says. His voice is rough.

“We’ll find a clean rag,” I tell him. “After the meal.”

He pulls his hand back and finishes lacing his boots, not looking at me. I know what he’s thinking. A clean rag is a currency here. Everything is. But he doesn’t argue. He knows I’ll find one. It’s what I do. I take care of the details. I keep him as whole as a person can be in a place designed to break you into pieces. It was the last thing I promised them, our parents. Look after your brother. A simple instruction that has become the entire architecture of my life.

We stand, ready to join the shuffling line of men heading for the door. I put myself just behind him, a habit. A physical presence to ward off anyone who might think to shove him, to trip him. He’s leaner than me, not built for this place. He was built for books and quiet rooms. I was built for whatever was necessary. The camp has only sharpened that distinction.

As we move with the shuffling tide of grey-clad bodies, he glances back at me. It’s a quick, almost imperceptible look. But I catch it. It’s a question. Are you ready for this? Again?

I give him the same nod he gave me. I’m here. I’m okay. I see you. It’s our language. The only one that matters. The only one that can’t be taken from us.

The mess hall is a long, low-ceilinged room that amplifies every sound. The scrape of metal trays on wooden tables, the hollow clatter of spoons, the wet, rhythmic sound of hundreds of people chewing tasteless food. The air is warm and heavy, thick with the smell of boiled grain and the sour odor of unwashed bodies. It’s a smell of resignation.

We get our trays, the same grey mush ladled into the same dented compartments every morning. I take a piece of coarse bread for each of us. Brad’s hand is steady as he takes his tray. Good. Some mornings he trembles so much I worry he’ll drop it, and a dropped tray means no food. No second chances.

We find a space at the end of a long table, wedged between a man with a persistent, rattling cough and a boy who can’t be more than sixteen, who stares at his food as if it’s poison. Brad hunches over his tray immediately, shoveling the grain into his mouth with mechanical efficiency. It’s a survival technique we learned early on. Don’t taste it, don’t think about it. Just get it inside you.

I eat the same way, my eyes scanning the room out of habit. I check the guards posted at the doors, their expressions bored and vacant. I note the usual dynamics, the subtle power plays over seating, the weak giving up their bread to the strong. My world is a map of threats, and my job is to navigate Brad through it.

My gaze drifts, and then it stops.

Her name is Kali. I don’t know how I know her name. You just absorb things here. Names, faces, who to avoid, who is close to breaking. She is sitting alone, two tables over. It’s not unusual to see people eating alone; alliances are dangerous and fleeting. But it’s the way she does it. She isn’t hunched. Her back is straight. She eats slowly, each spoonful brought to her mouth with a deliberate, unhurried motion.

She isn’t staring into her tray or looking around with furtive, frightened glances. Her focus is entirely on the act of eating. Her tray, her spoon, her mouth. There is a stillness about her, an economy of movement that seems alien in this place of frantic, desperate energy. She is contained. A closed system. While everyone else here is being eroded, worn down by the constant friction of this life, she seems solid. Un-breached.

Her hair is dark and pulled back from her face, showing the line of her neck. She has a small scar just below her left ear, a pale white line against her skin. I watch the muscles in her jaw work as she chews. I watch her set her spoon down between bites, her long fingers resting on the table. They are clean. I wonder how she keeps her hands so clean.

A feeling flickers in my gut. It’s not desire, not in the simple way I understood it before this place. It’s something more complicated and far more dangerous. It’s a feeling of recognition. I am looking at a person who has not surrendered her interior self. And that quiet defiance, that refusal to be anything less than what she is, feels like a lit match in a room full of gas fumes. It’s a challenge to the crushing sameness of it all, and my attention is drawn to it, a moth to a flame.

“Elliot.”

Brad’s voice cuts through my focus. I look at him. He’s finished his food. His tray is clean. He’s looking at me, and then he follows my gaze to where she sits. His expression hardens almost imperceptibly.

“Eat your food,” he says. It’s not a request. It’s a command, a reminder. Stay here. With me. Don’t look over there.

I look down at my own tray. The grey mush has congealed into a rubbery paste. I pick up my spoon and force it down, the texture thick and cloying in my throat. I don’t look up again. But the image of her is burned into my mind: the straight spine, the deliberate movements, the white scar below her ear. It is a detail that does not belong to me, a piece of information I have no use for. It is a complication. It is a risk I cannot afford. And yet, I have already taken it.

The doors of the mess hall open and we are pushed out into the cold morning air. It’s damp, carrying the smell of wet earth and rust from the miles of fencing. We fall into a loose column, a river of grey uniforms flowing between the rows of identical barracks. The ground is a thick, sucking mud, and the sound of hundreds of boots pulling through it is the only sound, a wet, rhythmic marching beat.

I walk behind Brad, my eyes on the back of his neck. I watch the way his shoulders are tensed, pulled up towards his ears. I want to tell him to relax, that it wastes energy, but I don’t. The words are pointless. None of us are relaxed.

We round the corner of Barrack C, the path widening into the central yard. And there they are.

A new group. Maybe twenty of them, huddled together under the indifferent gaze of four guards. They are still in their own clothes, the colors jarringly bright against the uniform grey of the camp. A woman in a red coat, now stained dark with mud at the hem. A man in a thin suit, the jacket torn at the shoulder. They look impossibly fragile, like birds with broken wings.

They are being processed. One by one, they are shoved forward to a makeshift table where two guards work with methodical boredom. They strip them of their possessions. A watch is dropped into a metal box with a clatter. A book is tossed onto a pile to be burned. A young woman tries to hold onto a small, framed photograph, her knuckles white.

“No,” she says, her voice a thin thread in the vast, cold yard.

The guard doesn’t speak. He simply backhands her across the face. The sound is a sharp crack. She stumbles back into the group, her hand flying to her cheek, her eyes wide with shock and the sudden, brutal understanding of where she is. No one moves to help her. They just shrink away, creating a small, empty space around her shame.

I feel a cold hollowness spread through my chest. My own arrival plays behind my eyes, a phantom reel of memory. The same rough hands on my shoulders, the same shouted, meaningless commands. The feeling of my jacket, the one our mother had bought me, being pulled from my body. The worst part was Brad. He hadn’t made a sound. He just stood there, shaking, his face utterly blank with a terror so profound it had erased him. I had to be the one to push him forward, to make him trade his shoes for the worn-out boots they gave us. My hands on his back, forcing him deeper into the cage.

I look at him now. His face is pale, his jaw clenched so tightly a muscle jumps beneath the skin. He’s staring at the new prisoners, at the woman with the red mark blooming on her cheek, and I know he is seeing us. He is back there, on that first day.

“Brad,” I say, my voice a low rumble. “Look at me.”

He doesn’t. His eyes are fixed, glassy.

I put my hand on the small of his back, pressing firmly. A solid, grounding touch. “Keep walking. Don’t look.”

He takes a shuddering breath and tears his gaze away, focusing on the muddy ground in front of him. He stumbles slightly, and I steady him. We keep moving with the column, the scene of the processing sliding past us.

My eyes scan the crowd and find her. Kali. She’s a few rows ahead of us, on the other side of the column. She is also watching the new arrivals. But her expression is not one of mirrored fear or pity. Her face is impassive, her eyes narrowed slightly. She watches the guards, the table, the prisoners, not as a fellow victim reliving a trauma, but as an engineer studying a machine. She tracks the guards’ movements, notes their complacency, observes the way the new prisoners cluster together out of instinct. She is gathering information. The thought is so clear, so certain, it’s like she spoke it aloud.

The guard barks another order, and the sound of a body hitting the mud follows. We are past them now, turning towards the gate that leads to the scrap fields. The sounds of the processing fade, replaced by the familiar metallic shriek of the gate being pulled open. The reality of the camp settles back over me, heavy as a wet blanket. This place is a cage. Not just of rust and mud, but of moments like that. Moments that strip you down, that remind you that your life is not your own, and that the only thing you have is the person walking beside you. I feel Brad’s shoulder brush against mine, a small, unconscious movement. I keep my hand on his back until we are through the gate.

The scrap fields are a jagged metal landscape under a permanently white sky. Mountains of rust and steel stretch in every direction, a graveyard of a world we never knew. The air tastes of oxidized metal and chemical rot. Every step is a risk. A loose sheet of steel can slide and shear off a foot. A wrong move can send you tumbling into a pit of sharp, twisted rebar. This is where they send the ones they want to break slowly.

Our job is to sort. We pull pieces from the heaps, separating copper from aluminum, steel from iron, throwing them into designated carts that other prisoners haul away. The work is mindless and brutal. My hands are a network of scars, old and new. The muscles in my back and shoulders burn with a low, constant fire.

I work with a rhythm born of years of this. Find a handhold, test the weight, pull. My body moves without thought, my mind is elsewhere. It’s on Brad.

He works ten feet to my left, his grey uniform already dark with sweat across his back. I keep him in my periphery at all times. My head is on a constant, slow swivel. My eyes track his movements, the pile he’s working on, the ground around his feet, the guards patrolling the perimeter.

“Brad,” I say, not turning my head. “Move to the right. That pile is unstable.”

He glances over at the heap of rusted car doors I indicated. He doesn’t argue. He just shuffles a few feet to his right, to a lower, more settled mound of pipes. He trusts my assessment. He always does. This trust is the only currency we have.

A new cart is brought in, and the guard gestures for two men to start loading it with steel plates. The plates are heavy and have edges like razors. I see the guard’s eyes flick towards Brad. He’s smaller than me, thinner. An easier target for the worst tasks.

Before the guard can speak, I step forward. “We’ll take it.”

The guard grunts, indifferent. As long as the work gets done. I grab one end of a plate, the sharp edge digging into my calloused palms. I nod at another prisoner, a big man named Tomas, to take the other end. Brad stays where he is, sorting smaller, manageable pieces of wire. I have inserted myself between him and the danger. This is the entire game.

As Tomas and I haul the plates, my eyes scan the fields. I see her again. Kali. She’s working on the far side of the yard, near the processing shredders. It’s a dangerous spot. The machines are old and prone to jamming, and the guards are jumpy over there. But she moves with the same unnerving calm I saw in the mess hall. She doesn’t over-exert. She uses leverage, not brute force, to pry a long copper pipe from a tangled mass of wires. She tests each foothold before putting her weight on it. She is her own protector. Her focus is a shield she wraps around herself.

My focus is a shield I wrap around Brad.

I watch his back as he bends over, his spine a fragile curve. I see the slight tremor in his hands as he works, a permanent souvenir of the fever that nearly took him our second year here. He is a collection of vulnerabilities that I have memorized, a map of weaknesses I must navigate for him. The pallor of his skin, the way his breath catches when he’s tired, the slight limp he tries to hide at the end of the day. These are my reference points. They are the only things that matter.

When our cart is full, I push it towards the collection point, my boots sinking into the mud and grime. Brad falls into step beside me, our shoulders occasionally brushing. He doesn’t speak. We rarely do while we work. Words are an expense, a waste of energy better spent on survival. Our communication is in the space between us, in the way I position my body to block the wind for him, in the way he knows to stop when I put a hand on his arm.

My promise to our parents is a distant echo, a ghost from another life. But the act of that promise is here, in the dirt and the rust. It’s in the burn of my muscles and the metallic taste in my mouth. It’s the constant, low-level hum of anxiety for his safety that has become the background noise of my existence. I have nothing else. My past is gone, my future is a blank wall. All I have is Brad’s continued existence. It is the only thing of value I possess, the only purpose this life has left for me. Everything I do is to protect it. I am the wall around him. I am the shield. And I will not let either of us break.

The final bell rings, a harsh, cracked sound that cuts through the white noise of the yard. The sound of tools being dropped is a ragged, metallic sigh. The shift is over. Prisoners straighten up, their movements slow and stiff, like old machines grinding to a halt. I watch Brad push a final piece of rebar into a cart, his face filmed with grime and exhaustion. I move to his side.

“Time to go,” I say.

We fall into the shuffling column of bodies moving towards the main yard gate. The guards herd us along, their voices bored and impatient. It’s the same every day. The slow march from one cage to another.

And then I see him. Markus. He’s leaning against the gatepost, arms crossed over his thick chest. He has a way of standing that is both lazy and predatory, like a stray dog that knows it can win any fight. He isn't watching the whole column. He’s scanning it, his eyes flicking over faces, looking for a weakness. Looking for sport. My stomach tightens. I put a hand on Brad’s shoulder, a subtle pressure to keep him close, to keep him moving.

Markus’s eyes land on a man a few paces ahead of us. An older man, thin and stooped, with a cough that rattles his whole frame. The man’s name is Alistair. He’d been a librarian. He stumbles on a loose rock, his balance precarious. It’s all the opening Markus needs.

He steps forward, blocking Alistair’s path. “Problem, old man?”

Alistair shakes his head, trying to step around him. “No, sir. Just tired.”

“Tired?” Markus grins, a slow, unpleasant stretching of his lips. “You look clumsy to me. Dropping things. Spilling things. Wasting the camp’s resources with your clumsiness.” He pokes Alistair in the chest with a thick finger. The old man staggers back a step. “I bet you can’t even hold your own weight. Show me. On the ground. Ten push-ups.”

The column has stopped. No one speaks. We all watch, a captive audience. Alistair’s face is pale with humiliation. “Please, sir. I…”

“Now,” Markus says, his voice dropping into a low growl.

Slowly, painfully, Alistair lowers himself to the muddy ground. His thin arms tremble as he tries to push his body up. He manages one, his face contorted with effort. On the second, his arms give out, and he collapses onto his stomach in the filth.

Markus laughs. It’s not a loud laugh. It’s a quiet, satisfied sound that is worse than any shout.

I feel the heat rise in my own chest, a familiar, useless rage. My hands have curled into fists at my sides, the nails digging into my palms. I could be on him in three steps. I could feel his nose break under my knuckles. The thought is a flash of bright, clean violence in the grey misery of the yard.

And then I would be dead. And Brad would be alone. Or worse, they would make him watch.

I feel Brad shift beside me. He’s staring, his eyes wide, his breath coming in shallow little puffs. He’s seeing the boot on Alistair’s back, but he’s feeling it on his own.

“Brad.” My voice is a harsh whisper. I grab his arm, my grip tight. “Look away.”

He resists for a second, mesmerized by the horror.

“Look at me,” I command, turning his body so he’s facing me, my own body shielding him from the scene. “Now.”

His eyes finally tear away from Alistair and lock with mine. They are full of a helpless, terrified anger. He knows why I’m doing this. He hates it as much as I do.

“Don’t watch,” I say, my voice low and urgent. “There’s nothing to see.”

I keep my eyes on his, forcing the connection, forcing him to see only me and not the man being degraded a few feet away. The bitter taste of my own cowardice floods my mouth. It tastes like metal and rot, the flavor of this place. Every instinct in me screams to intervene, to shout, to do something. But the cold logic of survival is a hand around my throat, squeezing the air out of my principles. My one job is to keep him safe. Even if it means letting another man suffer. Even if it means forcing my brother to be a coward with me.

Across the yard, I catch a glimpse of Kali. She’s watching, too. But her face is a mask of stone. She’s not looking at Alistair on the ground, or at Markus enjoying his power. She’s watching the other guards, the ones on the towers. She’s noting their positions, their lack of interest in Markus’s little game. She’s filing it all away.

Markus kicks a little mud onto Alistair’s back, then, apparently bored, he steps away. “Get up, you useless piece of shit. Get out of my sight.”

Alistair pushes himself up, shaking, covered in mud. Two other prisoners help him to his feet and hurry him along. The column begins to move again, the moment broken. Markus watches us all pass, his grin still in place. He’s satisfied. He has reminded us all of the rules.

I release Brad’s arm. We walk in silence through the gate, towards the barracks. The air between us is thick with the thing we did not do, the help we did not give. The taste in my throat is not going away. It’s the price of another day. It’s the taste of my love for him, a poison I swallow over and over again.