The new guy appears on a Tuesday.
Except it’s not Tuesday. There are no Tuesdays in the pit. Iris just calls it that because she needs some way to mark time and “the day the new guy showed up” is as good a marker as any.
She’s doing her morning stretches when she notices him. One second the pit is just her and Devlin like it’s been for however many cycles. The next second there’s a third person crumpled in the center like someone dropped him from the sky.
“Dev,” she says quietly.
Devlin looks up from his section. Sees the guy. His face doesn’t change. “Huh.”
“Yeah.”
They both stare. The guy’s maybe thirty. Wearing a suit. Actual full suit with a tie that’s come loose. His face is pressed against the concrete. Not moving.
“Is he breathing?” Iris asks.
“Can’t tell from here.”
“Should we check?”
“Probably.”
Neither of them moves. They’ve gotten careful about approaching anything unexpected. The pit doesn’t do unexpected. The pit does routine. Same food. Same sleep. Same concrete. This is different and different feels dangerous.
The guy groans. Rolls onto his back. Opens his eyes.
Then starts screaming.
Iris and Devlin wait it out. They’ve both been through this. The initial panic. The denial. The desperate scrambling for explanations. You can’t shortcut it. People need to freak out before they can start processing.
He screams until his voice cracks. Then he’s up, running to the walls, clawing at them, trying to climb. His dress shoes slip on the smooth concrete. He falls. Gets up. Tries again.
“There’s no way up,” Devlin calls out.
The guy ignores him. Keeps trying. His hands are bleeding now. Leaving red streaks on the gray walls.
“Seriously,” Iris adds. “We’ve tried everything. The walls are too smooth.”
He finally stops. Turns to look at them. His face is a mess. Tears and snot and pure terror.
“What the fuck is this? Where am I? How did I get here?”
“We don’t know,” Iris says.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean we woke up here too. However long ago. Time’s weird here. We don’t have answers.”
“That’s not possible.”
“And yet.”
He’s hyperventilating. Iris recognizes the signs. She glances at Devlin. He nods slightly.
“Sit down,” Devlin says. His voice is calm. Almost gentle. “You’re going to pass out if you keep breathing like that.”
“I’m not sitting down. I’m getting out of here.”
“You’re not. Not today anyway. So you can either sit down and let us explain what we know, or you can keep panicking until you collapse. Your choice.”
Something in Devlin’s tone must register because the guy’s legs fold and he sits hard. Puts his head between his knees.
Iris and Devlin exchange looks. Iris walks over first. Sits down a few feet away from him. Close enough to talk. Far enough to not be threatening.
“I’m Iris. That’s Devlin. What’s your name?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Just breathes. In and out. Trying to get control.
“August,” he finally says.
“Okay, August. Here’s what we know. This is a pit. Twenty feet across, forty feet deep. Smooth concrete walls. We don’t know where it is or who put us here. Food and water appear periodically. We sleep on some kind of schedule we can’t control. Time doesn’t work normally. And there’s no obvious way out.”
“That’s insane.”
“Yep.”
“This isn’t real. I’m dreaming. Or drugged. Or—”
“We thought that too,” Devlin says. He’s moved closer now. Still keeping distance. “Spent a lot of time trying to find the logical explanation. Eventually you run out of explanations.”
August looks up. His eyes are wild. “How long have you been here?”
Iris and Devlin look at each other. Iris shrugs. “Hard to say. Weeks maybe? Months? We stopped counting.”
“Months?” His voice cracks. “You’ve been here for months and you’re just sitting there?”
“What else would we be doing?”
“Escaping! Fighting! Something!”
“We tried,” Iris says quietly. “Trust me. We tried everything. This is what’s left after trying.”
August stands up fast. Starts pacing. “No. No, there has to be something. A door. A hatch. A drainage pipe. Something.”
“There isn’t.”
“You didn’t look hard enough.”
Devlin’s jaw tightens slightly. Iris catches it. She knows that look. Devlin’s annoyed but holding it together.
“Feel free to look,” Devlin says. “We’ll be here when you’re done.”
August does look. Spends the next however long examining every inch of wall. Every spot on the floor. Looking for seams, cracks, anything. Iris and Devlin watch from their sections. They’ve seen this before. They’ve done this before. You can’t tell someone it’s pointless. They need to learn it themselves.
He finds nothing. Of course he finds nothing. There’s nothing to find.
When he finally stops, he looks devastated. Like he lost something important. Which he did. He lost hope. Iris remembers that feeling. The moment when you accept that escape isn’t happening. It’s like dying without the convenience of actually being dead.
“I don’t understand,” August says. He’s sitting in the center now. Deflated. “I was at work. In a meeting. Then I went to the bathroom and then… here.”
“Same,” Iris says. “I was at home. Getting dressed. Then pit.”
“Grocery store parking lot,” Devlin adds. “Loading bags in my car. Then this.”
“So we were all just doing normal things and ended up here?”
“Looks like it.”
August runs his hands through his hair. “This can’t be happening. I have a presentation tomorrow. My wife’s pregnant. We have a gender reveal party on Saturday. I can’t just disappear.”
Iris feels something twist in her chest. Wife. Baby. Party. Things that exist outside the pit. She’s been trying not to think about outside. It makes everything worse.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Sorry? You’re sorry?” His voice is rising again. “Sorry doesn’t help me! Sorry doesn’t get me out of here!”
“I know.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because I don’t know what else to say.”
He looks at her. Really looks at her. And something in his face shifts. The anger drains out. Leaves just exhaustion.
“How do you do it?” he asks quietly. “How do you just sit here?”
“Practice,” Devlin says.
Food appears. Three bars. Three bottles. Right in the center where August is sitting.
He scrambles back. “What the fuck?”
“Food,” Iris says. “Happens every so often. That’s how we survive.”
“It just appears? Out of nowhere?”
“Yep.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Add it to the list of impossible things.”
Iris walks over. Picks up a bar and bottle. Hands a set to Devlin. Leaves one set for August.
He stares at it like it might explode.
“You should eat,” Devlin says. “I know you don’t feel hungry. Nobody does here. But you should eat anyway.”
“I’m not eating mystery food that appears from nowhere.”
“Suit yourself. But we’ve been eating it for however long and we’re still alive. Take that for what it’s worth.”
August doesn’t touch it. Just sits there staring at the bar like it personally offended him.
Iris and Devlin eat in their sections. They’ve learned to give each other space. Found their rhythm. Two people who didn’t know each other but figured out how to coexist without stepping on each other’s toes.
August is disrupting that. Not his fault. But his presence changes the shape of things. Makes the pit feel smaller somehow.
“We should sleep in shifts,” Iris says. “With three people now.”
“Agreed,” Devlin says.
“I’m not sleeping,” August announces.
“You will eventually. We all do. Something in the air knocks us out.”
“That’s not how sleep works.”
“Nothing here is how things work.”
He glares at her but doesn’t argue. Just sits there with his arms crossed. Stubborn. Refusing to participate.
Iris settles against her wall. Closes her eyes. The sleep comes fast like it always does. Involuntary. Irresistible.
When she wakes up, Devlin’s asleep and August is still sitting in the center. But his protein bar wrapper is open. Empty. He ate.
“Couldn’t help yourself?” Iris asks.
He doesn’t look at her. “I was hungry.”
“Thought you weren’t hungry here.”
“I lied.”
She almost smiles. “Fair.”
They sit in silence for a while. Iris does her stretches. August watches her.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Keeping my body functional. Devlin does push-ups. I do yoga. We figure it’s better than atrophying.”
“You really think you’ll need functional bodies?”
“Probably not. But routine helps.”
“Helps with what?”
“Not going insane.”
He thinks about that. “I think I’m already insane.”
“You’re not. You’re just new. It gets easier.”
“Does it?”
Iris stops mid-stretch. Considers lying. “No. Not really. You just get used to it.”
“That’s not encouraging.”
“I’m not here to encourage you. I’m just telling you the truth.”
Devlin wakes up. Looks at August. Looks at Iris. “Everyone still alive?”
“Barely,” August mutters.
“That’s the spirit.”
More cycles pass. August goes through the stages. Anger. Denial. Bargaining. Depression. Sometimes all of them in the same wake period. Iris and Devlin watch it happen. Try to help when they can. Give him space when they can’t.
But having him here changes things. He asks questions they stopped asking. Why are we here? Who did this? What’s the purpose? Questions that have no answers but feel important to ask anyway.
“Maybe it’s a government experiment,” August says one cycle.
“Maybe,” Iris says.
“Or aliens.”
“Also possible.”
“Or we’re dead and this is hell.”
“Could be.”
“You don’t care which one it is?”
“Not really. The result’s the same either way.”
He looks at her like she said something offensive. “How can you not care?”
“Because caring doesn’t change anything. We’re here regardless of why.”
“But the why matters.”
“Does it?”
“Of course it does!”
Devlin interrupts from his section. “August. Let it go. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times. There’s no answer. There’s just the pit.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“You will eventually.”
“No. I won’t. I refuse.”
“Good luck with that.”
August starts doing laps. Aggressive laps. Like he’s trying to pace the frustration out of his system. Iris and Devlin watch him wear himself out.
“He’s going to be a problem,” Devlin says quietly.
“He’s just processing.”
“He’s disrupting our equilibrium.”
“We didn’t have equilibrium. We had resignation.”
Devlin looks at her. “What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know. But watching him fight makes me wonder if we gave up too fast.”
“We didn’t give up. We adapted.”
“Did we? Or did we just stop trying?”
“Iris—”
“He’s right, Dev. We’re just sitting here. We accepted this without really fighting back.”
“We fought. For weeks. You were there.”
“Were we fighting or were we just going through the motions? Doing the things we thought we should do without actually believing they’d work?”
Devlin’s quiet for a long time. “This is what I was worried about.”
“What?”
“Him showing up and making you question everything we built here.”
“What did we build? A routine? A schedule? That’s not building. That’s just surviving.”
“What else is there?”
Iris doesn’t have an answer. But August’s presence has cracked something open. Made her see how small their world became. How quickly they accepted the unacceptable.
August collapses after his laps. Breathing hard. Face red. “We need to try climbing again.”
“We tried,” Devlin says.
“We need to try harder. Boost each other. Make a human ladder.”
“The walls are too smooth.”
“So we make them rough. Use our clothes. Our shoes. Anything to get purchase.”
Iris finds herself sitting up. “That’s not a terrible idea.”
Devlin stares at her. “Are you serious?”
“We didn’t try that. Not really.”
“Because it won’t work.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know physics. I know smooth concrete. I know forty feet is too high.”
“So we fail. So what? At least we tried something new.”
Devlin’s face hardens. “Fine. Knock yourself out. I’m not wasting energy on false hope.”
He turns away. Faces his wall. Shuts them out.
Iris and August look at each other.
“Is he always like this?” August asks.
“No. He’s usually pretty reasonable. You’re making him uncomfortable.”
“Good. We should all be uncomfortable. Comfortable got you stuck here doing nothing.”
He’s not wrong. Iris knows he’s not wrong. But it still stings.
They try August’s plan. Use their shirts to create friction on the wall. Boost each other. August gets maybe twelve feet up before sliding back down. Iris gets ten. They try different configurations. Different techniques. Nothing works.
Devlin watches from his section. Doesn’t help. Doesn’t comment. Just watches them fail.
When they finally give up, sweaty and frustrated and back in the same pit they started in, August looks at Devlin.
“You could have helped.”
“Why? You proved my point for me.”
“We needed to try.”
“And now you have. And you failed. Welcome to the pit.”
August’s hands clench. Iris sees the violence coming before it happens. Steps between them.
“Don’t,” she says to August.
“He’s given up.”
“So? That’s his choice.”
“It affects all of us.”
“And beating the shit out of him accomplishes what exactly?”
August’s jaw works. But he backs down. Walks away. Does more laps.
Iris sits with Devlin. He won’t look at her.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“For what?”
“For questioning our approach. You’re right. We tried. It didn’t work.”
“But you still think I gave up too easily.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
They sit in uncomfortable silence. The easy rhythm they had is gone. August broke it just by existing. By asking questions and trying things and refusing to accept what they’d already accepted.
More cycles. August keeps trying. Keeps asking why. Keeps fighting the pit with everything he has. Iris watches him. Devlin withdraws more and more into his section.
Their small society is fracturing. Not from violence or cruelty. Just from the introduction of someone who hasn’t given up yet.
“I think I need to leave,” Devlin says one cycle.
Iris looks at him. “What?”
“Not the pit. Obviously. Just my section. Make a new one. Put more distance between us.”
“Because of August?”
“Because of all of it. This worked when it was just us. Now it doesn’t.”
“So we adapt.”
“I’m tired of adapting, Iris. I’m tired of everything.”
He moves to the far side. Sets up there. Creates his own space away from both of them.
Now there are three people in three separate sections. No community. No cooperation. Just individuals trapped in the same space.
August notices. “What happened?”
“You happened,” Iris says.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You reminded us that giving up is a choice. Devlin didn’t like that.”
“Are you saying it’s my fault?”
“I’m saying your presence changed things. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know yet.”
August sits down hard. “I just want to go home.”
“We all do.”
“My wife. God. She must be terrified. And the baby. I’m going to miss the baby.”
Iris doesn’t know what to say to that. All the loss packed into his voice. All the things he’s missing. She felt that once. Maybe still does. But she learned to not think about it. To lock it away where it can’t hurt.
August hasn’t learned that yet. Might never learn it. Some people break differently.
“Tell me about her,” Iris says.
“What?”
“Your wife. Tell me about her.”
So he does. Talks about how they met. Their first date. The proposal. The pregnancy. He talks until his voice cracks and then he keeps talking anyway.
Iris listens. Devlin probably listens too from his section even though he’s pretending not to.
And Iris realizes this is what they lost. The ability to care about things outside the pit. To hold onto the people and moments that made them human.
August hasn’t lost that yet.
Maybe that’s why he’s still fighting.
Or maybe it’s why he’ll break harder when he finally accepts this is forever.
The food appears. They eat. They sleep. They wake.
August tries new things. Iris helps sometimes. Devlin watches from his section.
And the pit remains exactly what it is.
But something’s different now.
Someone’s still fighting.
And that changes everything.
Or nothing.
Time will tell.