Youri did not stop there. Now that he had started, it seemed as though he could not stop. As he spoke, the ship around them faded away, and they were both back in that white place again.
Sixteen years earlier, at Altex, the vents hissed faintly overhead, and the sterile hum of Altex's machines bled into the silence of the night. The cold glow of the artificial lights stretched long shadows across the white walls until the room felt like a cage made of glass. In the middle of it a little girl sat curled on her bed with her gray hair spilling over her small shoulders and a thin blanket wrapped tightly around her.
"Hey. Leonora."
The whisper came from the ceiling. She flinched and looked up with wide eyes. "Thirty-six? Is that you?"
A thin, wiry boy dropped out of the air vent and landed with a soft thud. His arms were spindly, his hospital uniform stained faintly with antiseptic and with something darker. He looked like a ghost trying very hard to look human.
"Wow! How did you even get in there?" she whispered, half excited and half terrified.
"I fit inside the vents," the boy said, keeping his voice low, as though the walls themselves might be listening. "They go all the way from my room to yours. This way I can visit without anyone seeing me."
Her face lit up like a spark in the cold. "That's so cool! So when do we start?" She leaned toward him, hungry for something — anything — that was not needles and white rooms.
"Don't worry." He crouched beside her bed and pulled out a bent pen and a creased scrap of paper, the only contraband of hope he had managed to smuggle through the vents. "Give me a sheet."
She handed him a crumpled page with trembling fingers, and he began to write the letters out one at a time. Her eyes shone as if every line of ink were a key turning in a lock. The sterile, lifeless room became a small universe of words and whispers. Day after day the lessons went on. Letters became words, words became sentences, and sentences became stories. Her laughter, hesitant at first, began to echo softly down the corridors like sunlight creeping through cracks in steel. She was so happy. She could finally read.
He would always remember what she said to him on the day she read her first page all by herself, her voice trembling with something he did not have a name for. "Thirty-six, you made my biggest wish come true. I'm so glad you snuck into my room that day. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart."
He had blushed and looked away. She had laughed, warm and soft, like a caged bird remembering how to sing.
But the warmth did not last. The next day, they took him to the chamber room — cold metal tables, straps that bit into his wrists, needles sliding under his skin to take samples of his flesh and pump strange drugs into his veins. He drifted in and out of blackness for three days, until even the pain had dulled to a throb. When they finally brought him back, he could not see out of one eye. His whole body felt as though it had been hollowed out.
But he wanted to see her. He needed to. So he crawled back through the vents with every movement tearing at his wounds until he reached her room.
"Thirty-six, you're back!" she gasped, and her face lit up even as she noticed his swollen, darkened eye. "What happened to your eye?"
He forced a smirk. "I tripped. It's nothing."
She frowned at him. "You should be more careful, Thirty-six." Her voice was soft but scolding, a thread of kindness in a world built to crush it.
"Look," he said, pushing the pain aside and holding out a thick, battered book. "I brought you a new one."
Her eyes went wide with delight. "Caspia! It's huge!"
"Yeah." He tried to smile. "There's a girl in it who's just like you. I think you'll like her."
"Thank you, Thirty-six. I'm going to love it."
The days blurred together after that, their lessons and stories a fragile rebellion against the cold corridors of Altex. Then one day Malden, the head doctor, appeared at the boy's bedside with his white coat glowing under the lights and a voice as calm as a scalpel before it cuts.
"EH36, it's time for the next phase. We're going to replace another body's cells with yours. You should be proud. You're going to save a little girl's life."
He knew at once who Malden meant. They took them both to the operating room, where the air smelled of disinfectant and ozone, and the lights burned overhead like suns. She lay asleep on the next table, pale as paper, and they began the procedure — his healthy cells for her dying ones, his pain for her future. He had survived that place for two years without a reason, but in that moment he had one, and he was glad. He was glad he could do one last thing for her: give her a life outside of that hell.
He never really understood how he survived what came after. His body became an experiment, a battlefield of cells and metal. Child after child came through Altex. They took his cells again and again, and somehow his body kept repairing itself, a freak of science. The pain never stopped, a thousand cuts beneath his skin every single day, but the worst part was not the agony. The worst part was knowing he would never see her again.
So he killed everything inside himself — hope and love, good and evil, all of it. He begged Malden to turn him into a machine so that he would never have to feel anything again, and Malden failed, but the boy still became what he was meant to become: a monster built out of the scraps of a child who had once taught a little girl to read.
On the ship, Youri finally looked at her again, and his voice cracked like dry glass. "So, dear Leonora, I became who I am because of you. It isn't your fault. My destiny was always to become the monster you see in front of you. But for that little bit of time we had together…" For the first time, his eyes softened. "I felt truly human again."
Leonora's legs gave way. She sank to the floor with tears bursting from her eyes and streaming down her cheeks like a river. "Thirty-six," she whispered, and her voice broke under the weight of all those years. "It's really you. I can't believe it. I searched for you everywhere, and no one would tell me anything. Then one day a box of books came to my door — your books — with a note inside. You sent that to me, didn't you? I thought you were dead." Her sobs tore through the silence of the cabin.
"You idiot," she cried again, harder this time, and it was not an insult. It was a plea, trembling with grief and guilt and the ghost of a lost childhood