When I finally came to, my eyes felt glued shut, like someone had smeared molasses over my lids. I forced them, pushed, but they wouldn't budge. My hands obeyed nothing. My limbs were useless weights. The world was a flat, distant thing above me.
Cold. Hard. I realized I was lying on a table — a table slick with dark, sticky stains. The smell hit next: iron and rot and something called wrong that lived under skin. I couldn't move. I could only listen.
Two voices drifted in from somewhere far away. One was Haruki — too bright, too young. The other… my stomach dropped when recognition punched through the fog. Mr. Tomodachi.
Breathing became work. Each inhale demanded more time, more effort, as if the air itself had grown thick. Panic threaded through me and then clamped down hard: I remembered the lecture. The tiny dose of anesthesia that left a patient conscious but paralyzed. I'd learned the mechanics in class like it was a cold fact on a slide. I never expected to audition for it.
I'll suffocate. I'll die from hypoxia. The realization landed like a brick.
Footsteps came closer. They sounded too casual for where I was. The voices stopped above me.
"Hello, Natsuo," Mr. Tomodachi said, the syllables soft and measured.
"Who is it? Let me out!" I tried to scream. My throat worked. No sound followed.
Mr. Tomodachi's voice went on, gentle and clinical, like a teacher starting an explanation. "You must wonder why you're here."
I tasted bile. Haruki giggled in that small, delighted way he'd shown when he'd spoken about blood. I felt a hand — or at least the idea of one — move near my chest.
"You helped Haruki the other day," Tomodachi continued. "He told me. The opportunity presented itself." He gave a snicker that chewed at my ears. "You're the bottom of bottoms. If you vanished, would anyone look for you? No."
My body trembled with rage that couldn't travel to my fists. He turned what I'd thought were lectures into a verdict.
"You remember what I told you in class," he said, like reading bullet points off a slideshow. "A small, precise dose — the patient feels everything, but cannot fight back. Death will come, but slowly. Pain will be exquisite."
I then felt a shape of intent in the room: not an experiment, not even a lesson. A performance. A ritual.
"Son," he said to Haruki, "it's time. Your first human subject."
Haruki answered with the same flat, thrilled note he'd used when offering tea. "Okay, Dad."
I begged in my head. I begged out loud — or tried to. The sounds that came were thin, useless threads of noise. Metal clinked. A tray. The sterile, cold ring of surgical tools aligning themselves like a choir.
Haruki counted, voice bright and far away. "Three… two…"
"Please—" I tried. The voice came out as nothing.
"One…" The room narrowed to the point of the needle again.
The first incision seared through me like lightning. I felt everything. The tool—sharp and precise—didn't just cut; it announced itself in thousand little electric bolts of agony. My chest became a map of pain. My voice shredded into something animal and then even that faded.
They laughed. The sound crawled under my skin.
"Good job, son," Tomodachi crooned. "Take your time."
"This is so cool," Haruki said, as if describing a hobby.
I screamed until there was nothing left to say. My air thinned. The world grew slow and thin, like I was watching everything through melted glass. My last coherent thought — loud and stupid and small — was an old complaint: Why do bad things always happen to me?
Then my world shifted.
Weight vanished. Sound turned to a distant bell: DING.
I was underwater.
Cold wrapped me. Black water pressed in on all sides. I couldn't tell if I was sinking or the ocean was climbing. Panic that had once been in my chest now lived in my limbs. I clawed for the surface and the surface slid away.
Something sticky latched onto my leg — a black-red goo that clung like a curse. It tugged me down, slow and patient. I kicked. I pulled. The goo tightened like a leash.
I'm pathetic. I always quit when things get hard. No wonder she— The thought came like a lash. My mother's face flashed, thin with disappointment. Shame flared hot and then colder, and with it, a stubborn, stupid little defiance.
I swore at myself. Not out loud — air didn't cooperate — but in a way that mattered. I'm not quitting now.
I moved. Slowly, then faster. Every stroke burned. My lungs screamed. The welt of pressure in my chest was a drum. I found a patch of light — maybe the surface, maybe hope — and swam toward it on pure spite.
My head broke the water. I sucked air like a drowning man discovering oxygen for the first time. Light stabbed my eyes. My lungs filled and filled and everything hurt and then — nothing. Blank.
The world went to white noise and then shut off.