was quiet. Too quiet.
No chains. No pipes dripping in the corner.
Just... white.
White walls. White light. A white sheet stretched tight over a bolted metal bed.
Even the floor was clean — not pretend-clean like Grainpit's mess hall, but sterile. The kind of clean that screams something bad already happened here. Or is about to.
I sat up slowly, blinking hard. My head throbbed.
Still clothed. Still whole. Still breathing.
Suspicious.
Then I saw him.
A man, maybe mid-twenties, sat cross-legged near the back wall, picking at the edge of the mattress like he was waiting for time to snap in half. Thin. Pale. Quiet. His barcode tattoo was barely visible, faded and flaking near the collarbone of his grimy shirt.
He didn't look at me when he spoke.
"First time?"
I stayed silent.
He kept picking at the mattress.
"Relax," he added, voice dry. "They don't harvest organs here. Not unless you break something."
I didn't move. "Where… is this?"
He tilted his head slightly toward the blinking light overhead. "Breeding wing."
My mouth went dry.
I remembered hearing something back in the Pit. Scraps of conversation. Quiet whispers about preserving lineages and genetic value. About my sister. About being the last.
"They… they want me to...?"
He looked up at me finally, like I was the slowest thing he'd seen all week.
"You're probably the last of your tainted line, right?"
I blinked at him, confused. "What does that mean?"
He let out a soft laugh — not cruel, just tired. "It means you're valuable. Not as a person. As a specimen."
I didn't speak. He kept going, voice dull like he'd recited this speech a hundred times in his head.
"They say it's about blood. About sin. But really?" He glanced at the wall like it could hear him. "It's about labor. Workers die. They need more. So they turn us into livestock. Breed the useful ones. Cull the sick. Organize it all with numbers and clean walls so it doesn't feel like a horror story."
His fingers twitched where they rested on his knee.
"I asked once why they picked me for this wing. Some lab tech told me I had 'low aggression markers.'" He chuckled dryly. "Imagine that. A man locked in a cell all his life, and the one thing that makes him special is that he's calm enough to be milked like cattle."
I swallowed hard.
"They didn't even tell me what my ancestor did," he muttered, rubbing at his neck. "Just that it had something to do with a nun. Can you believe that?" His voice cracked, sarcasm dripping from every word. "Imagine being born, branded, beaten, and harvested because some ghost in your bloodline couldn't keep it in his pants around a woman of God."
He laughed, high and broken — more like a bark of pain than amusement.
"Hope it was worth it, old man," he added, looking up at the ceiling. "Because I'm down here paying for it."
" At least we aren't in the donor wing am I right?
Better to hurt all over than lose organs."
Silence settled over the room like ash.
I should've looked away. Closed my eyes. Pretended I hadn't heard him.
But I didn't.
Instead, I found myself watching him… and thinking:
If I ever make it out of here... maybe I shouldn't go alone.