Her field of vision was forcibly pressed low.
What met her eyes was no longer the sky spread out beneath her, nor a churning sea of clouds.
It was a railing eaten through with dark red rust, its base crusted with black grime that no amount of cleaning had ever removed.
Cold.
A cold that froze the marrow until it turned brittle.
The walls were a glaring, sickly white. There were no windows. The single fluorescent light on the ceiling, its connection loose, let out a short crackle of static every so often, like the gasp of a dying man.
The smell of disinfectant was so strong it nearly stung her nostrils, laced with a faint stench of blood that refused to fade.
Sirin didn't know why she was in this place.
Her memories of the "Herrscher of the Void," of Destruction, of the throne, were all gone.
She couldn't even remember exactly how old she was.
Ten, maybe.
She looked down.
Her wrists were thin as two dry twigs that could snap at any moment, covered in dense needle marks and bruises of every shade.
A striped patient gown, stained with someone's dried blood, hung loosely from her body like a ridiculous burlap sack.
In this hell called the Babylon Laboratory, she was only a number. Only a test subject.
Cold and despair wrapped tightly around her, and she couldn't breathe.
From the far end of the long corridor came the sound of leather shoes on hard floor tiles.
"Clack. Clack. Clack."
Unhurried, yet each step landed like a sledgehammer on her already fragile nerves.
It was the sound she dreaded most, every single day.
Because it meant the "monsters" in white lab coats were coming again.
It meant being roughly dragged out of her corner. It meant a cold, thick needle piercing veins that had only just scabbed over. It meant the agony of Honkai energy serum forced into her body, until it felt like all the blood in her veins was on fire.
Sirin squeezed herself into the crack of the corner with everything she had, as if she could crush herself small enough to fit into that scrap of shadow.
Her arms locked around her knees and she buried her face in them. Her teeth chattered, the upper and lower rows knocking together with a faint, broken rattle.
She survived on a single serving of nutrient solution a day, cold, heavy with the taste of rust and the bitter tang of chemical reagents, swallowing it only to keep breathing.
In those black nights when the pain left her writhing on the floor, she had cried out for "Mama" until her throat went hoarse, until she coughed up threads of blood.
And no one had ever answered.
No rescue.
No light.
Only an endless winter.
The heavy iron door let out a grating screech.
It opened.
The footsteps stopped outside her cell.
She didn't look up.
Conditioned terror took over every one of her senses.
She tucked her head in deeper, her whole body drawn taut as a bow pulled to its limit.
She waited for a rough hand to seize her hair and drag her out.
One second.
Two seconds.
The pain she expected never came.
The air shifted.
Someone had crouched down in front of her.
A hand came down.
Warmth touched her. Gently, it settled on top of her tangled, lusterless purple hair.
There was no shout of "Get up," no rough yanking.
In this icehouse of a cell, the warmth of that hand felt unreal.
Trembling, she lifted her head.
Through the messy strands hanging over her eyes, she saw that flash of white she had seen in nightmares countless times.
It was a young man in a low-ranking researcher's white lab coat.
Her pupils contracted. Terror made her want to scramble backward, but her back was already pressed hard against the wall.
But then her gaze met his calm, gentle eyes.
And her heart skipped a beat, with no warning at all.
She could have sworn that her brain, ruined by the serums, held no memory of this man whatsoever.
In this hell, every "white lab coat" had eyes of nothing but indifference and disgust.
But this one was different.
As those eyes rested on her.
A sourness welled up from the very depths of her soul and shattered all her defenses in an instant.
Her eyes filled with hot liquid within a single second.
It felt like wandering for ages through endless wind and snow, nearly frozen to death, and suddenly falling into a warm embrace.
A grievance that made no sense.
She wanted to cry, and she didn't know why.
The young man crouched before her.
Pinned to his chest was a nameplate marking him as a vital-signs recorder.
[Su Yu]
Following the fixed daily routine, he took a glass tube of murky gray nutrient solution from his cart.
She knew the taste of that stuff all too well. It was like chewing rusty metal mixed with moldy mud.
She closed her eyes in despair, her cracked lips parting slightly, ready to endure this daily torment like a scrap of rag.
But the metal probe never pushed into her mouth.
The young man tilted his head slightly, and his gaze seemed to drift, casually, over the blinking red surveillance camera in the upper right corner of the cell.
Then, using his own body and the cart as cover, he positioned himself exactly in the camera's blind spot.
He reached out and, with the back of his hand, gently wiped away the dirt, or maybe blood, smeared on her cheek.
Then, like a conjuror, he had something between his thumb and forefinger.
Before Sirin could react, a small solid piece with its clear wrapper already peeled off was pressed between her dry, peeling lips.
A rich sweetness of white peach burst across her tongue.
For a little girl whose taste buds were ruined daily by chemicals and the taste of blood, who in this cage could hardly hope for a full stomach.
That sweetness was too fierce.
So intense that her taste buds simply quit for a moment, and her mind went blank and dizzy.
It was the first flavor she had tasted in this place that wasn't pain.
She even forgot to chew. She just held the candy in her mouth, dazed, feeling the thin, sweet juice slide down her throat.
The young man looked at her.
He raised a single finger and laid it lightly against his lips.
On that ordinary low-ranking researcher's face, a faintly mischievous smile suddenly bloomed.
He winked his left eye at her and whispered, at a volume only the two of them could hear.
"Shh."
"This is a secret just between us."
"Finish it, and it won't hurt so much today."
Sirin stared at that smile.
The white-peach candy slowly melted in her mouth, wrapped in saliva.
Even swallowing became painstakingly careful.
She didn't dare bite down on it. She only licked it, bit by bit, with the tip of her tongue.
She was terrified that one careless move would make that life-saving sweetness vanish forever.
In this laboratory, with no difference between day and night, time stretched out unbearably long.
But in the days that followed.
That irregular rhythm of footsteps became the only thing she looked forward to in this hell.
That big brother.
It was the name she had secretly given him in her heart.
He was so gentle.
He always started by gripping the metal probe tight in his palm.
Only when he had warmed it a little above body temperature would he press it, through the thin fabric of her patient gown, softly against her chest.
After every blood draw, once he had withdrawn the needle, he carefully wiped away the blood with a cotton swab.
Then, out of sight of the cameras, he would quickly stick an adhesive bandage over the needle mark, one he'd fished out of his pocket, with a goofy little smiley face drawn on it in ballpoint pen.
Sometimes, when there were no other guards patrolling the corridor.
After rounds, he would lean against the wall outside, beyond the cold, rusted iron bars, and tell her about the outside world in that soothing voice of his.
He told her.
The sky outside was blue, not this oppressive, sickly white.
He said there was a place called an amusement park, with a Ferris wheel that turned very, very high, and balloons in every color.
He also said there were lots of fun things called "games," with no needles and no pain, where you could just move your fingers and make the people inside go on adventures.
She didn't understand those complicated words.
But she remembered the amusement park, and she remembered the joy called games.
In that moment, it felt as though the terrifying Honkai energy serums really didn't hurt as much anymore.
She began to grow "greedy."
She no longer curled up in the corner every day with her eyes shut, wishing to die quickly.
She began to prick up her ears and tell apart every set of footsteps in the corridor.
Every day she began to hope that when the heavy iron door swung open, it would be the young man with the gentle smile who walked in.
But what came with that hope was a fear deeper than death.
She was afraid of being found out.
She had been in this hell long enough to know how cruel those researchers up high could be.
She was afraid the cameras would catch the smiley-face bandage.
Afraid someone would smell the lingering peach on her breath.
And she was even more afraid.
If those bad people found out, would this angel of a big brother be thrown into that terrible reactor too?
Would he be tortured until he was nothing but a bloody mess?
She was afraid that this faint glimmer of light, so hard won, would draw punishment down on him because of her.
Afraid that she herself would be tossed back into that Abyss where there wasn't even candy.
That fear of gaining and losing coiled around her neck like an invisible rope, pulling tighter and tighter.
————————
Dreams have their own rules.
This corridor, built from resentment and malice, was like a sleeping beast.
When it sensed that its core prey, called "Sirin," had begun to drift from her scripted track of despair and was getting better.
The malice launched a frenzied counterattack.
That afternoon, she hid in the shadows by the cell door. She happened to overhear two senior researchers talking outside.
"Her data has stabilized."
"Good. The director has already approved it. Tomorrow at nine in the morning, send her straight to Reactor No. 0 for the highest-intensity lethal stress test. Get the body bag ready, and the next batch of test subjects too. The survival rate for this one is estimated at no more than point one."
The footsteps gradually moved away.
Sirin's body, pressed against the wall, slid down the cold plaster an inch at a time until she sat on the floor.
That night, deep in the dark.
The pale fluorescent lights were off, and only the dim red flicker of the emergency lamps remained in the corridor.
Sirin crammed her entire body under the moldy, hard-plank bed.
It was the only place she could find that felt even slightly safe.
She hugged her knees tight and clamped her mouth down hard on her thin arm.
Her teeth broke the skin and the taste of blood spread over her tongue, but she didn't dare make the slightest sound.
The corridor was colder tonight than it had ever been.
She couldn't cry out loud.
In this place, tears were not only useless, they brought the staff's irritation and the electric shocks that followed.
She could only bite down on herself with everything she had, her body curled into a trembling knot in the dim light.
Tomorrow.
Once tomorrow passed, she would never taste that dizzyingly sweet white-peach candy again.
She would never feel that stethoscope, warmed by body heat, again.
And she would never see that gentle big brother again, the one who would sit outside the bars and quietly tell her about amusement parks and sunshine.
Despair, thick as pitch, swallowed her inch by inch.
Past her head. Until she couldn't breathe.
Midnight.
In this laboratory, like a gigantic steel coffin, it was so quiet that the only sound was the howl of wind in the ventilation ducts.
At the far end of the corridor, the electronic clock ticked over to 00:00.
The sturdy electronic lock on the cell door gave a barely audible chirp.
"Click."
It was tiny, but in the dead silence of the night it was magnified without limit.
Sirin shuddered under the bed.
She abruptly released her teeth from her arm, and her terror-filled eyes locked on the thread of faint light seeping in through the crack of the door.
The heavy iron door was shoved open without hesitation.
There was no blinding beam from a patrolling guard's flashlight.
No impatient curses from a senior researcher.
A figure strode in.
Moonlight, thin and bleak, slanted in from the corridor, and by it Sirin made out the newcomer from the shadows beneath the bed.
It was Su Yu.
He wasn't wearing the white lab coat. He had changed into a black tactical suit, made for fast evasion and close-quarters fighting.
In his hand, held upside down, was a submachine gun he had taken from an outer-perimeter sentry post.
Moonlight pierced the narrow, wire-meshed window high on the wall and cut diagonally across the cold floor of the cell.
The man crossed the floor in a few strides.
He dropped to one knee before the rusted iron bed frame.
His high-ankled tactical boots landed on the tiles with a dull thud.
His gaze pierced the shadows beneath the bed and locked onto the little girl curled in a ball, shaking all over.
Moonlight fell across half his face.
Su Yu tossed the gun casually onto the floor, where it landed with a muffled clunk.
Then he crossed that invisible line and reached out a hand toward the girl hidden in the deepest darkness.
"Sorry. I made you wait."
In this icy hell that seemed ready to devour every last bit of light, Su Yu's voice sounded clearer and steadier than it ever had.
"I made you wait."
He gazed into those purple eyes, which had stopped trembling in shock.
"I told you I'd take you to the biggest amusement park."
"Now." Su Yu's fingers curled slightly. "Take my hand."
"I'm taking you out of here."
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