Darkness peeled back like burned skin.
My body twisted. Pain coursed through all my nerves. It wasn't heat anymore — it was cold. My arms and legs were immovable. My chest was pressed in, as if I were drowning.
I'm alive?
I pried my eyes open.
Fluorescent lights hummed above. A metal ceiling stained with rust. And pain — a dull, throbbing ache deep in my bones.
I reclined on a stretcher, the wheels creaking as I was rolled down a corridor.
Blurry figures went by — white jackets, helmets, glass walls full of glowing monitors and tubes.
In front of us was a door, heavy and gray. Two words in black paint over it:
Facility 9.
Outside was a corridor of smaller doors. I caught glimpses as we passed: tiny windows, more children, more beds.
They stopped in one marked Room 7, opened the door, and tossed me in like cargo.
Concrete floor. Ten iron beds fixed to the ground. Cold and bare.
Eight other children were already there. They were pale, gaunt, hardly stirring. One sobbed into her blanket. Another vomited red and simply lay there, trembling. Their eyes were dull — haunted.
Every single one of them was in pain.
So was I.
I collapsed onto the closest bed. My skin was on fire. My muscles screamed as I attempted to shift.
What have they done to me?
The door slammed shut behind me.
No voices. No responses. Only silence and the soft, throbbing hum of the walls.
Boots tramped somewhere far above. A siren wailed and faded.
Then I felt something.
Faint. Deep. Like a second heartbeat throbbing under my own.
My ears rang. My breathing slowed.
And for an instant, I did see it.
Threads.
There were subtle strands of shimmering light hovering in the air — like mist that only I could see. They disappeared when I blinked.
The air was dense. Neither hot nor cold — simply heavy, as though something invisible had closed around me.
Yet the pain continued.
Burning beneath my skin. Buried in my backbone. I hated it. I wished it would stop.
And even worse than the pain was the fear.
I remembered the doctor's face. The syringe. My parents. The war. How they sold me.
And I recalled dying.
In another world. Another life. Seventeen years old and already forgotten.
I had been granted a second chance. A family. Hope.
And now this.
This place. This pain. I closed my eyes, but sleep would not come. A mere whisper in the back of my mind. An incomplete thought that pulsed with every beat of that foreign heart within me: "I shouldn't be back here."