Her mind replayed the image of the woman—The way her fingers brushing against Maya's cheek. The way she had whispered, "You are mine."
For the first time, she understood something she had never allowed herself
to understand.
She was afraid of her.
Not the fear she had felt in the arena, facing the dogs. Not the fear she had felt when the Code Instructor had told her she had failed.
This was deeper. This was a fear that had been buried so deep inside her.
And now, in the darkness of the Correction Room, with nothing but her own thoughts for company, she could no longer hide from the truth.
Maya's voice, when it came, was barely a whisper,
"I was so afraid of her. I never let myself know. I never let myself feel it. Because if I felt it... if I let myself feel it..."
Maya lay on the cold floor, her body trembling, her tears falling silently onto the concrete. Her mind was racing, replaying the memories she had tried so hard to bury.
~~
'I was afraid of her. I was so afraid of her. I never let myself know. Because if I felt it I wouldn't have survived. '
A sound escaped Mahi—a raw, anguished cry that seemed to tear its way out of her very soul.
"She was just a baby and she had no one. No one to hold her. She had to bury her own fear just to stay alive. "
Mahim stood motionless.
"How does a child do that? How does a four-year-old learn to bury her own fear so deeply that she forgets it exists?"
A single tear escaped from beneath his closed lids, tracing a slow path down his cheek.
"I couldn't save her. I couldn't protect her. I couldn't be there for her. What kind of father am I?"
Farhan had turned away from the screen.
He was leaning against the wall, his hand pressed against his mouth, his shoulders shaking violently.
"How do you forget that you're afraid?
How do you forget that someone hurt you so badly that you were terrified of them?"
His voice grew quieter, more hollow.
"You don't forget, sister. You bury it so deep that you can't feel it anymore, because if you feel it... You won't survive."
Silence.
Then—Fahim spoke, his voice was quiet,
"...This is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."
Farhan turned toward him, "PTSD?"
Fahim nodded slowly.
"More specifically, this appears to be severe childhood trauma with dissociative defenses.
Most people think trauma is simply remembering something terrible."
He looked at Maya's image.
"It isn't. It changes the architecture of the brain."
Mahi stared at him, "What do you mean?"
Fahim folded his arms.
"When a child experiences overwhelming terror repeatedly— especially during the earliest years of development—the brain stops functioning normally.
It stops asking, 'What happened?' It starts asking, 'How do I survive the next minute?'"
Mahim's voice was strained, "So, she forgot?"
Fahim slowly shook his head.
"No. She remembered but she remembered in the only way her brain would allow."
Faha frowned, "I don't understand."
"That process is called dissociation. When Maya said...
'I never let myself know I was afraid.'
That wasn't poetry. That was a neurological survival mechanism."
Mahi covered her mouth, "Oh God..."
Fahim continued.
"A four-year-old cannot fight an adult. So the brain creates another solution. It buries the fear.
It allows the child to continue functioning. Because acknowledging it would have destroyed her ability to survive."
He stepped closer to the projection.
"The Correction Room wasn't trying to punish her. It was trying to reactivate her deepest traumatic memories.
The chemical agent, the sensory deprivation. The hallucinations.They all worked together."
Fahish clenched his fists, "Those monsters..."
Fahim's expression remained grim,
"This is what makes it particularly disturbing. When the brain is placed under overwhelming stress...
...it retrieves the memories with the highest survival priority."
Rahi let out a slow breath.
"I told you to stop. But no one believed me. You all thought that MAYA'S past was beautiful. It wasn't."
He remained in his chair, his eyes were fixed on the projection— on Maya's small, broken form.
"She said she didn't even know she was afraid. That's the Worst part, isn't it? "
~~
Maya had lost track of time. Minutes had blurred into hours, hours had blurred into an endless, suffocating eternity.
The gas had long since faded from the air but its effects lingered in her mind, twisting her perception, warping her reality.
She had stopped screaming hours ago.
Her throat was raw, her voice hoarse from the desperate cries that had torn through her in the early hours.
Now, she simply sat in the corner of the room, her back pressed against the cold concrete wall, her knees drawn to her chest, her arms wrapped tightly around her body.
Her eyes were open but she wasn't seeing the room. She was seeing the faces.
They came and went, drifting through the darkness like ghosts. The woman with the dolls. The Code Instructor.
They whispered to her, their voices overlapping, blending into a chorus that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
'You failed.
You have always been nothing.
They will never come for you.'
Maya pressed her hands against her ears, trying to block out the sound but the whispers only grew louder, more insistent, more relentless.
She closed her eyes trying to escape. But behind her eyelids, the faces were waiting
for her.
The woman's pale face with that terrible smile.
"You are mine. You have always been mine."
Maya pressed her forehead against her knees, trying to make herself smaller, trying to disappear into the darkness.
But there was no escape.
At some point, the whispers began to fade.
The faces dissolved into the darkness, their voices fading into silence. The hallucinations receded, like a tide pulling back from the shore.
Slowly, painfully, she pushed herself upright. Her legs were weak, trembling beneath her. But she forced herself to stand, her back pressed against the cold concrete wall.
[THUMP]
The lock disengaged.
Maya's heart seized in her chest. Her eyes darted toward the door, her muscles coiling
for flight.
The door slid open with a low, mournful groan. Light flooded into the room, harsh and blinding. Maya winced, raising her hand to shield her eyes.
The sudden brightness was overwhelming after hours of suffocating darkness. A figure stood in the doorway.
An attendant. He looked into the room, his eyes scanning the darkness. For a moment, he seemed to search for something—
a body, a struggle, a sign of life.
And then his gaze settled on her.
In the corner of the room, pressed against the cold concrete wall, stood a small, trembling figure. Her face was pale, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen.
Her uniform was torn, her hands scraped and bloody.
The attendant's expression did not change. He simply stared at her for a long moment,
his cold eyes fixed on her trembling form.
Then he said, his voice flat and emotionless:
"Subject 17 A. Your time in the Correction Room is complete."
Maya did not respond.
The attendant stepped aside, gesturing toward the corridor beyond, "Follow me."
Maya did not move for a long moment. Her legs felt like they were made of stone, too heavy to lift.
Painfully, she took a step forward, the sensation grounding her, reminding her
that she was still alive.
She walked toward the door, her eyes fixed on the light beyond. She stepped out of the Correction Room.
The corridor was bright, the air was cool and clean, carrying the faint scent of antiseptic. The walls were the same cold grey concrete, the floors the same polished surface.
But to Maya, it felt like freedom.
The attendant did not look at her as she emerged.
He simply turned and began walking down the corridor, his footsteps echoing against the walls.
Maya followed. She walked with her head lowered, her arms wrapped around her body.
Her bare feet scraped against the floor,leaving faint smears of blood from the cuts on her soles.
The attendant led her through the familiar corridors. He stopped in front of a door—the same heavy steel door, the same reinforced surface.
He pressed his palm against the access panel. ACCESS GRANTED.
The lock disengaged. The door slid open.
The attendant gestured inside. "Your quarters."
Maya stepped through the doorway...She walked to the corner of the room and lowered herself onto the cold floor.
Her back pressed against the wall, her knees drawn to her chest, her arms wrapped around her body.
For the first hour, she did not move, her eyes fixed on the wall in front of her. Her breathing was shallow, rapid—
The breathing of someone who was still trapped in a nightmare, still waiting for the next blow, still bracing for the next wave of terror.
Her mind was not in the room.
It was still in the Correction Room. She could still feel the cold concrete beneath her. She could still hear the whispers— the voices of the woman with the dolls, the faceless figures that had haunted her in the darkness.
She pressed her hands against her ears, trying to block out the sound but the whispers only grew more insistent, more relentless.
Her body folding in on itself like a wounded animal, trembling, waiting for the fear to pass.
It did not pass.
~~
No one spoke.
The silence that settled over the room was heavier than grief itself, pressing against every breath, every soul that stood before
the screen.
On the projection, Maya sat exactly where they had left her.
Curled into the corner of the small concrete room. She did not move, not even once.
For what felt like an eternity, the only sound
in the living room was the quiet hum of the Memory Extractor.
Then the projection shifted, [NEXT DAY]
The meal tray sat untouched in the corner of her room.
The bread had hardened, the soup had gone cold.The glass of water sat perfectly still, its surface undisturbed— as though time itself had stopped inside the tiny room.
The soup had formed a thin, cold skin across its surface. Maya hadn't eaten, hadn't slept.
She remained in the same corner, staring at nothing, her red-rimmed eyes fixed on an invisible point beyond the wall.
Her body trembled continuously, just a faint, relentless trembling that never seemed to end.
It was the trembling of a child whose body no longer understood what safety felt like.
The projection lingered on her for several agonizing seconds.
Mahi's knees finally gave way. She collapsed onto the floor, unable to look away from the image of her daughter.
"They opened the door .... but she never left. They didn't just punish her, they taught her that nowhere is safe."
Farhan wiped furiously at his eyes but the tears refused to stop.
"Look at her...She's waiting for something to hurt her again."
Fahim watched the projection with an expression that had grown colder with
every passing second.
"When the human brain remains in survival mode for too long, it doesn't immediately recognize that the danger has ended.
Her body is still responding as though
the Correction Room never ended."
~~
[EVENING ]
Maya had not moved from her corner. She sat in the same position, her trembling had not stopped. She had not eaten, had not slept, had not spoken.
It had become a constant— a low, persistent vibration that seemed to emanate from somewhere deep inside her bones.
---
[SECOND DAY]
The room was silent.
It was the silence of a place where sound had been drained away, leaving only the hollow echo of a child's breathing.
Maya sat in the corner.
She had stopped counting the minutes. She had stopped counting the hours. She had stopped counting everything.
There was only the silence.
And then— [Tap... Tap...Tap]
The sound was soft. Almost imperceptible. But in the suffocating stillness of the room,
it was loud enough to make her flinch.
Footsteps, someone was walking down the corridor.
Her body tensed. Her muscles coiled, ready to flee, ready to fight, ready to do whatever was necessary to survive.
But she could not move, her body had become a prison of its own making, heavy and unresponsive.
The footsteps grew closer. They stopped outside her door.
Maya's breath caught in her throat. Her heart began to pounding against her ribs like a trapped bird. She pressed herself deeper into the corner.
"Not again," she thought. "Please, not again."
A moment of silence. Then—
[Knock...Knock...Knock]
Maya did not respond . Her voice had abandoned her, lost somewhere in the darkness of the Correction Room.
Maya waited for the door to open, for the attendant to step inside, for the nightmare
to begin again.
But the door did not open.
Instead, a voice—hesitant, barely above a whisper: "Seventeen."
Maya's heart seized in her chest. She recognized that voice.
It was the girl with the cropped black hair. Subject 0002. The one who had watched her with those calculating eyes.
"Are you awake?"
Subject 0002 paused. She seemed to be waiting, listening, trying to sense whether the girl on the other side of the door was still alive.
Then she spoke again, her voice softer now, carrying a weight that Maya had not expected:
"I know what it's like. The first time."
A pause.
"I was in the Correction Room for three days. I thought I would die in there. I thought I would never see the light again."
Her words hung in the air, fragile and raw. Maya felt something shift inside her—a faint flicker of recognition, of understanding.
This girl had been through it too. She knew what it was like to be broken open in the darkness.
Subject 0002 continued, her voice barely a whisper, "But I did and so will you."
She waited.
Maya said nothing. The silence stretched between them, heavy and unbroken.
Then Subject 0002 spoke again, her voice quieter now, "You're not broken. You're just... changed. It's different."
Maya felt the words settle inside her, like stones dropped into still water.
She did not know if she believed them. She did not know if she could believe anything anymore.
Subject 0002 did not wait for a response. She seemed to understand that Maya was not ready to speak, that she might never be ready to speak.
She simply said, "I'll be back."
Then she turned and walked away.
[Tap...Tap...Tap]
The sound of her footsteps faded into the distance, growing softer and softer until they disappeared entirely.
The silence returned.
Maya sat in her corner, she did not move but something in her chest— something cold and dark— had begun to shift.
Maya moved for the first time in two days.
It was a small movement— barely a twitch,
a subtle shift of her weight but it was a movement.
She had been sitting in the same position for so long that her muscles had stiffened, her joints had locked, her body had become a prison of its own making.
She flexed her fingers. Her hands were aching—the cuts had scabbed over, the bruises had faded to a sickly yellow.
She looked at them for a long moment, her eyes tracing the lines of healing skin.
She thought about Subject 0002's words.
What am I becoming?
She did not have an answer but for the first time in two days,she was asking the question.
She looked down at her hands.The dried blood had cracked across her knuckles.
Beneath it, fresh skin was beginning to form.
She couldn't decide which frightened her more— that she was healing or that she had already begun to accept this place.
Then, slowly Maya stood up.
It took her several attempts. Her legs were weak, trembling, barely able to support her weight. She pressed her hand against the cold concrete wall, steadying herself, her breath coming in shallow gasps.
She took a step forward.
Her bare foot pressed against the cold floor. It was a small step— barely a few inches. But it
was a step.
She took another.
She walked across the room, her legs shaking beneath her. She reached the corner where the untouched meal tray sat.
The bread was moldy, the water was murky.
She did not care, she reached down and picked up the bread. It was hard, dry—
She broke off a piece and placed it in her mouth. It scraped against her throat, dry and rough but she did not stop.
She ate. She ate because she had to because her body demanded it.
Because somewhere, buried beneath the exhaustion and the pain and the hollow emptiness— there was still a voice that whispered:
Survive.
She finished the bread. She drank the water. She felt something stir inside her— a faint flicker of warmth, of life.
She walked back to her corner. She sat down, her back pressed against the concrete wall, her knees drawn to her chest.
But her trembling had stopped.