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without sentences, often young people, to carry out their more elaborate missions. Besides the benefit of size and agility, they were unnoticeable in the dark as opposed to the majority of its members who looked like a society of enlightened Grinch’s. Some seemed to think that it was a major factor, but Sono had grave doubts. Surely the Core would have better gadgets available than having to rely on spotting a greenish glow in the dark. Perhaps it left a trail or something, invisible to the naked eye.
    Those that truly loathed the Core, hatred filling every inch of their body, its destruction becoming their sole purpose of existence, obsessed about having everything removed from their skin, every single trace of the Core removed, like it was nothing but a pus-filled abscess. Sono hated the Core too, immensely, but to make it into an evil as large as that would be to flatter it, with a strong chance of losing himself in the process. He had plenty of friends that had disappeared that way, mentally as well as physically.
    For better or worse, Sono thought that it would be to kill off a part of himself. Had the trials suffered in prison not shaped him? Nine years was a long time, and however atrocious it had been, the glimpses of magic, though few, still lifted him today. They gave him hope, and meaning.
    The elderly often held sessions of what could be considered school inside the prison, sitting before a large gathering of kids, telling stories, teaching them the alphabet or how to count. But since the quotas set by the Core weren’t always easy to fulfill, school did not always assemble, or attendance was poor, if there was an available and willing elder at all.
    After a few years in prison, he was sent to a stone quarry, where school came in the form of unstructured talks, about everything and nothing, sometimes as a group, and sometimes one on one while the others slept around them.
    Listening to Aunt Yanda telling stories in prison was one of those magic moments he could invoke at will to bolster himself. It wasn’t so much the details anymore, they were all but dissolved, but the sensations he summoned. Back then, the pains, hungers and evils had disappeared as wonder filled him, but little of that survived today. It was more like a memory of a dream in a nightmare.
    But, each time the smell from the enormous pit on the north side of the city made it to the south side, where most of the Outsiders lived, it was difficult not to clench a fist in rage, regardless of the place one’s mind was in. Not only did the pit smell, it glowed too, and would one not know what made it glow, the greenish tint of the surrounding pollution would be somewhat becoming. It was constantly refilled with prisoners of all ages, the majority of them dead from the Core’s indifference, which exasperated the underlying heart and lung problems every Outsider suffered from.
    The Outsiders who died outside of prison were taken to a rudimentary burial ground near the pit, each one buried underneath a pile of debris. There were countless of these mounds scattered around the area adjacent to the pit. A very long time ago, before Sono’s grandpa was even born, they had attempted to bury everyone that ended up in the pit, taking them to a place nearby to be properly buried, but very soon discovered that the pit never shrunk, on the contrary, so they eventually gave it up altogether. That was how the burial grounds were born.
    A few, as Sono had witnessed, took the matter into their own hands in prison, and ended it independently. The tools utilized to accomplish it were either poorly suited for the job, or blatantly over the top, harrowing either way for everyone involved. Sometimes they threw themselves under or into powerful machines, which crushed them to a pulp in an instant, or they committed suicide by guard, attacking one of them which often ensued with a barrage of bullets fired at them. Some found sharp enough objects to slit open their wrists