Darkness peeled back like burned skin.
His body twisted. Pain coursed through all his nerves. It wasn't heat anymore — it was cold. His arms and legs were immovable. His chest was pressed in, as if he were drowning.
He's alive?
He pried his eyes open.
Fluorescent lights hummed above. A metal ceiling stained with rust. And pain — a dull, throbbing ache deep in his bones.
He reclined on a stretcher, the wheels creaking as he was rolled down a corridor.
Blurry figures went by — white jackets, helmets, glass walls full of glowing monitors and tubes.
In front of them was a door, heavy and gray. Two words in black paint over it:
Facility 9.
Outside was a corridor of smaller doors. He caught glimpses as they passed: tiny windows, more children, more beds.
They stopped in one marked Room 7, opened the door, and tossed him 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 he.
He collapsed onto the closest bed. His skin was on fire. His muscles screamed as he attempted to shift.
What had they done to him?
The door slammed shut behind him.
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 he felt something.
Faint. Deep. Like a second heartbeat throbbing under his own.
His ears rang. His breathing slowed.
And for an instant, he did see it.
Threads.
There were subtle strands of shimmering light hovering in the air — like mist that only he could see. They disappeared when he blinked.
The air was dense. Neither hot nor cold — simply heavy, as though something invisible had closed around him.
Yet the pain continued.
Burning beneath his skin. Buried in his backbone. He hated it. He wished it would stop.
And even worse than the pain was the fear.
He remembered the doctor's face. The syringe. His parents. The war. How they sold him.
And he recalled dying.
In another world. Another life. Seventeen years old and already forgotten.
He had been granted a second chance. A family. Hope.
And now this.
This place. This pain. He closed his eyes, but sleep would not come. A mere whisper in the back of his mind. An incomplete thought that pulsed with every beat of that foreign heart within him:
"He shouldn't be back here."