The dungeon was cold and wet. It smelled of mouldy death. The prisoners, covered in rotting sores and thinner than street mutts, watched the doctor as he passed their cells, but like always they said not a word, shivering and pleading with only their misbegotten eyes. From the end of the hall, the screaming echoed. The dinner bells, the grand welcome, the trumpet to Christopher’s personal hell. Every day they rang, yet for the first time in a week - what already felt like a month - they sounded different. He was louder.

  Yesterday Christopher warned him to take his beatings quietly. The doctor had hoped the boy - Alek - would listen. A fool's dream. He screamed so loud that Christopher wondered if the guards had ungagged him, but that was insane; it risked the entire purpose of putting the boy - his name is Alek - in that cell in the first place.

  However, when the prisoner screamed his favourite curse, one that Christopher knew very well, the doctor wondered again if the boy was gagged after all.

  His name is Alek.

  It made no difference what Christopher thought of the prisoner.

  He is a boy, but he has a name.

  It didn’t matter.

  It did.

  From the top of his lungs came his four favourite phrase. ‘I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!’

  The scream pierced through the dank air and Christopher was now certain the - Boy, Alek, Prisoner - wasn’t wearing a gag. It defeated the whole purpose, it risked too much. What if he bit his tongue off right then and there? What if Christopher didn’t make it in time and he bled out in that cell escaping to the eternal sulphur pit of Hell? What idiot would ever ungag him? The answer was clear enough: whoever was yelling back at him.

  ‘YOU’D KILL ME? I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU TRY!’ screamed another fool, right back at him fool.

  There was a thudding whack and a faint snap underneath. Alek cried out and the sullen wraiths that listen from behind bars all winced, huddling closer together. Christopher's boots clicked on the stone as the thuds, taunts and screams grew louder until he finally saw which idiot was in there with the boy - Alek!

  ‘Shut up!’ Christopher said to himself, pulling at his grey hair with both hands. It felt like physically wrestling with his mind. He wished it would just please shut up, the alcohol wasn’t kicking in fast enough. The flask sat empty in his pocket, the taste still fresh and ugly in his mouth. He would get another bottle as soon as he was done, begging his mind to please just let him work in peace.

  If you will send him to damnation, at least say his name and look him in the eyes as you do it. You owe him that much.

  He looked up into the cell. As expected the prisoner, THE BOY, wore no gag, instead he continued to scream, being beaten senseless by a girl who looked like she belonged in her own cell behind equally thick bars. The boy - ALEK DAMN YOU - was unchained. The shackles that released a purple glow, blocking the use of magic, lay in curled heaps on the dirty stone. She stood above him. Her boots pinned his wrists to the ground and she stooped over his face, her black hair hanging past her face as she screamed down and he screamed up.

  ‘SUBMIT.’

  He did not, so she punched his face.

  He spat blood and a broken tooth.

  ‘FUCK YOU!’

  The doctor didn’t see what happened next, it was too quick, but he heard the thud and saw the aftermath of her forehead slamming squarely into his. Alek finally fell silent. She breathed in rapid snorts, her muscles were pulsing up her tanned arms and then she turned giving Christopher the first look at her face. It was plagued with insanity. The hair fell in tangled streaks over her bloodshot eyes, two deep scars ran down her cheek and a thin trickle of blood dripped from her lips. Her blood? Or did she bite him? The doctor thought both options were equally plausible.

  Christopher felt goose-bumps climb up his arms. Those hungry eyes were staring at him now, sizing up the next meal.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked. Not a jailer. Where are the Crimson Clergy? How did this wild animal get in here?

  Her face slowly softened as if coming back to reality, one that is civilised. She still looked mangy, but human at least. Is The Boy not human? Is that why he does not deserve a name? Christopher pushed the nagging voice in his mind away.

  ‘I’m the guard,’ she said.

  Christopher mustered up some courage, probably from the liquor which was finally kicking in, and stepped into the cell with two violent animals, neither of them in chains. He held out his hand and smiled.

  ‘I’m Christopher, the doctor. Does “the guard” have a name?’

  She looked at his hand and made no move to shake it. ‘Elizabeth.’ She turned back to the unconscious prisoner - ALEK - and left Christopher standing there with his hand still out, looking like an idiot. She grabbed the shackles and moved to slap them back on.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘could you leave them off for a second?’

  She gave him a look hard to distinguish between disgust and confusion, raising her top lip and furrowing her eyebrows.

  ‘It’s his wrists and ankles,’ the doctor explained.

  She looked down with a curious expression like a caveman seeing fire. His body was beaten like every morning, but his wrist were red raw and the cuts were days deep, a green tinge starting to creep in.

  ‘I can never heal below the shackles.’ He pointed to the purple gemhearts. ‘They steal my lifespan before the blessing can reach his wounds. If you could leave the shackles off while I heal his wrists and ankles I would appreciate that.’

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  To his surprise, she paused and Christopher knelt down healing one spot at a time as she would follow him around replacing the chains after he finished. The doctor noticed something else as he worked: the boy - the boy, the boy, the boy - was in the best shape he had ever seen him in. The beating had sounded louder than ever, but the wounds didn’t appear too deep. It was unlike the way the red guards would pummel the same spot like a boxer training on a punching bag. He also seemed to have more colour than normal, if that was possible. An open can of prison slop lay on the floor.

  ‘You fed him?’

  She grunted to affirm. ‘Keep moving old man.’

  He did. Healing the boy’s - What am I scared of? - second wrist, Christopher lifted his body up and Elizabeth slapped the final shackle back on, stringing him across the cell.

  ‘Why?’ Christopher asked. The question would leave his mind no easier than the insistent nagging that the dirty prisoner was a human with a name.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘I mean why any of this? Why unshackle him, why feed him, why go to the effort? You didn’t have to. Are you planning to free him?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘I wanted to see what all the fuss was about,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be a fair fight if I didn’t feed him, or if I left him unshackled.’

  ‘You mean to tell me you weren’t torturing him, but having a duel?’ Christopher almost laughed. ‘Why would a guard need a fair fight against a prisoner?’

  ‘How am I supposed to know how to guard him if I don’t know how strong he is?’

  Christopher felt like the truth was simpler, she, like the last guards, just wanted something to take their anger out on. But maybe this was different; after all she did unshackle the B-

  Coward.

  Elizabeth wiped the blood trickle from her lips. Her injuries were lighter than his, but her lip was clearly busted and there was a purple bruise deepening on her cheek.

  ‘Let me heal you too,’ Christopher said.

  She stepped back. ‘I’m fine.’ She moved to cover her injuries, but it only highlighted them. She put one hand over the other and the doctor saw two broken fingers, sticking out in the wrong direction.

  ‘Well then, don’t unshackle him tomorrow.’

  ‘I won’t let others tell me what to do, including you Doctor.’

  ‘We don’t want to risk him escaping.’

  ‘I will decide how I live my life.’

  He sighed. His work would be cut out for him tomorrow as well.

  ‘If you are going to fight him again, then you really should let me heal you. I am going to heal him next,’ Christopher said, gesturing to the boy strung by four chains. ‘It won’t be a fair fight if you can’t use both hands.’

  She stared at him and for his life Christopher could not determine what that blank face was thinking, but then she wiped away a thinner trickle of blood. She’s tired. Christopher realised and he didn’t know how he only just saw it. She looked exhausted. There were terribly deep bags under her eyes. Her lids kept fluttering and would occasionally snap open and hold for a longer period before drifting back into their dance.

  ‘I’m just doing my job,’ he said. ‘I promise you will feel better and I won’t charge.’

  Slowly, she nodded. ‘Alright then, but make it quick.’

  Elizabeth slouched down in a corner outside the cell and the doctor got to work. The lip was easy work, but he found several small fractures in her jaw, forearm and shins - some of which were much older than twenty-four hours. As he worked, she slipped closer and closer to sleep, but every time it seemed like she would knock, she fought her way back up. Whatever it took, pinching herself, biting a finger, slapping her face.

  ‘Are you the only guard?’

  ‘No one else can be trusted.’

  There were several of the Crimson Clergy under the cathedral as always, but they seemed to be giving a wide berth to the boy’s cell. Alek’s tomb.

  ‘Still, you can’t stay awake forever.’

  ‘I won’t need to-’ he voice started to grow flimsy. It wasn’t her fault, Christopher while healing her started to put her to sleep. He could do it instantly, but this way was gentler. ‘Someone…’ She yawned. ‘My master is coming back soon and then…’ Her eyes closed and Christopher thought it was over, but with one final gasp the eyes opened again. ‘We will take him to Carandiru and then I’ll be a holy-knight.’ Her eyes closed again and Christopher was satisfied they would stay closed for eight hours, but a voice, so weak, so quiet kept going. ‘And then I can finally save Luis.’ And then in an entirely different voice, tender like a mothers, ‘Wait for me Luis.’

  Now with Elizabeth snoring he returned to where he really didn’t want to be.

  Why am I so scared?

  In the silence of the damp cell, Christopher knew why.

  I didn’t put him in there.

  I didn’t beat him black and blue, day after day.

  The doctor was complicit in his torture.

  I was just doing my job.

  And he knew what his job was. Keep him alive at detriment to his own life.

  The boy - no I’m done. - Alek had committed no crime. Even by the Church’s own account, Alek had walked under the angel. That was it, he walked under a floating stone sculpture.

  I may not have hit the boy named Alek, but I heal him day after day so he can be beaten again. And I run, the liquor my running shoes.

  The doctor didn’t have a choice, he had his orders.

  But Elizabeth proved that was no excuse. In just one day she broke the rules and while she beat him, she did it fairly, she did it her own way.

  So when the doctor got on his knees to heal the boy this time he looked up into Alek’s face. Not for injuries, but he saw a human. A child so dirty and thin. He looked physically fourteen, but if the adventurers could be believed he was only eleven.

  To die so young and be given a second chance, only to have that chance snatched away for walking under a pebble.

  ‘I cannot free you,’ Christopher said, ‘but I will treat you kinder and I will look into your face as I heal you, not as a patient or prisoner, but as the human you are.’

  In the end nothing changed.

  When the doctor rose in front of Alek’s unconscious body, now healed, he still felt hollow and guilty, but at least for once he was confronting it, not running.

  Tomorrow I will bring a bucket and wash cloth. The least I can do is clean him.

  Christopher turned to leave, but like Elizabeth, Alek mumbled in his sleep. The words were so eerily similar to Elizabeth’s fatigued murmurs that it sent a shock through Christopher’s body.

  ‘Wait for me Charlotte.’ He said, his shackled hands groping at the air. ‘I’m coming.’