I ended the call, hurled the phone onto the bed, and slammed my fist into the wall with everything I had. A dull pain seared across my knuckles. It was that pain that helped me steady my breathing.
"Why can't you just be normal, like your sister?"
I sank heavily onto the edge of the mattress. The dorm room still felt foreign, even though I'd been living here for two weeks. Bare walls, the smell of ingrained dust, the creak of floorboards beyond the door.
Two weeks ago, my father had stood at the oak table, staring at the letter bearing the crest of Verona National as though it were a death sentence.
"You'll go there only if you stop carrying my name," he said, pressing his hands heavily against the tabletop, looming over me. "Walk out that door—and you have no money, no home, no family. Let's see how long you last."
He thought the ultimatum would break me. He didn't understand that those words had finally convinced me I was right.
A sharp crack overhead ripped me out of the memory. I blinked. The massive oak study dissolved, and I was back in the dim room in Verona.
I was shaking. My fingers trembled finely—whether from the memories or from the sticky, inexplicable anxiety that had suddenly clenched everything inside me. The room I still hadn't gotten used to over these past days didn't just feel unfamiliar anymore. It felt hostile.
Above, the light bulb crackled again softly. The yellowish light flickered once, twice. Then it began strobing at a frantic speed, turning the shadows cast by the wardrobe and chair into jerky, broken silhouettes. The air seemed to thicken; a faint smell of ozone hit my nostrils. I rubbed my tired eyes hard.
"Don't care," I muttered into the emptiness. "I'll deal with the bulb tomorrow."
Right now I wanted only one thing—to shut down. I stripped off my clothes, climbed onto the mattress, and pulled the thin blanket up to my chin. Emotional exhaustion crashed down like a heavy, muffled weight, forcing my eyelids shut. Darkness began pulling me into a thick drowsiness. And right at the very edge of sleep, when consciousness had nearly switched off, from somewhere beyond the walls—or straight from inside my head?—came an indistinct, many-voiced whisper.
When I came to, I couldn't understand where I was at first.
I was lying on something hard and damp. This was definitely not my dorm bed. From below seeped a deep, penetrating cold—the kind that comes from stone or metal left in dampness for a long time.
I didn't open my eyes. I just lay there, trying to gather my thoughts, but I couldn't: my head buzzed as though it had been squeezed in a steel band.
And the smell.
A thick, all-permeating smell of salt. Not a light sea breeze, but a heavy, concentrated reek—as if I'd been placed inside a salt therapy chamber. Mixed with the salt was something else—rust, rotting wood, and some nauseating, unfamiliar stench.
I opened my eyes.
Darkness. Not absolute—somewhere off to the side, a faint ray of dim light filtered through. It was enough to make out the contours of the space. A low ceiling hung less than a meter above me. Curved beams ran parallel to one another. The planks between them had darkened with age, and in places had rotted clean through. Through the holes, another layer of planks was visible above. Or below? I couldn't tell which way was up and which was down.
My body reacted before my mind did. I jerked upright—and immediately cracked the top of my skull against a beam. Pain lanced through my head, white spots swarmed across my vision. I hissed, grabbed my head, and froze, doubled over. My fingers found wet wood covered in something slimy, like moss or mold.
"Where am I...?"
My voice sounded muffled. The walls swallowed it, not returning even an echo.
I lowered my hand to whatever I was sitting on. Wet wood. A puddle squelched under my fingers. The realization shot through me: I was barefoot, wearing nothing but boxers and the thin t-shirt I'd gone to sleep in. The fabric was soaked through with ice-cold moisture and clung disgustingly to my skin. Violent shivers began wracking my body.
A basement?
My brain frantically clawed for rational explanations. The dorm building was old. Maybe the floor had collapsed? Maybe I'd been sleepwalking and fallen somewhere? Or someone had decided to play a spectacularly sadistic prank?
I crawled on all fours toward the only source of light—a dim strip seeping through a crack. My knees burned from the cold of the filthy water. The space was so cramped it felt as though I'd been locked inside a massive wooden crate.
Reaching the crack, I pressed my face against it.
Outside, nothing was visible. Or rather, the view was blocked by a solid wall: uneven, rusted metal with brownish streaks, barely half a meter from my face.
I pulled back and wrapped my arms around my shoulders. Panic was creeping in. I needed to get out of here. Didn't matter where—just get to open space.
Looking around once more, I spotted a breach in the ceiling. Its edges were rough, broken. Pulling myself up by my arms—the muscles immediately cramped with agonizing cold—I squeezed through the opening and tumbled onto the level above.
It was slightly more spacious here. I could stand at full height, though I still had to duck my head. Light came in through a gaping hole in the wall to the right.
I took a step and nearly fell. The floor sloped at an unnatural angle—about fifteen degrees. To keep my balance, I had to shift my weight onto my right leg. Bracing one hand against the wall, I slowly made my way toward the breach. Freezing wind blasted straight into my face, stripping what little warmth remained from my trembling body.
When I reached it, I gripped the jagged edge of the broken planks and looked out.
And that's when my brain simply refused to function.
I had expected to see anything. Anything but this.
Ships.
They were stacked on top of one another, compressed into an impossible, insane mountain. The massive rusted wall of a steel freighter, with the bow of a wooden dinghy crushed permanently into its hull. Skeletal masts jutting out at absurd angles. Tiers of decks, mangled funnels, dangling nets, and torn metal rose high above, merging into a solid canopy that completely blocked out the sky.
The dim light seeped from up there—from the gaps between vessels jammed together directly overhead.
I exhaled shakily, feeling my knees weaken.
Only now, looking at the curve of the wall I was holding onto, did I understand. That's why the floor was tilted. It wasn't a floor. And it wasn't a building.
This entire time, I had been inside an old wooden ship.
I slowly lowered my gaze. The structure of crushed ships extended not only upward but downward too. There, some thirty meters below me, at the bottom, black, motionless water gleamed.
In its depths, shadows glided. Silhouettes. I watched them swim soundlessly around the wreckage, and some of them—slowly, clumsily—began crawling out of the water onto solid surfaces.
Which was even more terrifying.
The sight began to crush me. The scale, the absurdity, the silhouettes below—it was all too much; my brain refused to digest the scene. But the cold wouldn't let me stand still. It was tangible, comprehensible, and killing me right now.
I staggered back from the breach, pulled off my t-shirt, and wrung it out. Murky, brackish water streamed from the fabric. Then—my boxers. I pulled everything back on. Wet, but no longer ice-cold. My teeth were still chattering, but at least my skin had stopped burning.
I needed shelter. I needed warmth. I needed to move.
I looked around. To the left—a dead end: the ship's crumpled planking butted against the rusted hull of another vessel. To the right, about five meters away—a passage. Rectangular, with peeling white paint on the frame. The door—or what was left of it—hung from a single hinge. It was a piece of something modern, God knows what. But it looked intact.
The problem was that between me and that passage gaped a hole. The deck of the wooden ship I stood on ended in a ragged edge. Beyond it was bare metal hull—smooth, wet, dropping away at an angle. The distance—about a meter and a half.
A meter and a half. I needed to jump, grab hold, and haul myself over to the other side. Barefoot. With wet hands. Over a dark abyss.
As I gauged the distance, the wooden floor beneath my feet seemed to grow more slippery, and the angle of the tilt seemed to steepen. But the worst mistake was looking down.
In the gap between the warped hulls yawned a void. Thirty meters below, that same black water lapped. And there, at the edge of a mangled barge, movement flickered again. Something pale, unnaturally long, surfaced and hauled itself onto the rusted metal with a wet, sucking sound.
Nausea hit me. My toes clenched convulsively against the slimy wood.
I drew a deep, shaking breath. The frozen air seared my lungs. Exhale. Two quick steps along the tilted deck—my left foot nearly sliding on some slime—and I pushed off the edge with everything I had.
A second of freezing weightlessness. My stomach lurched into my throat.
I slammed into the edge of the opening. My bare feet skidded on the wet rust, finding no purchase. My hands clawed at the flaking paint on the doorframe, tearing the skin off my palms, but my body weight dragged me backward, toward the abyss. With a strangled cry, I wrenched myself forward, heaved over the threshold, and crashed onto the steel deck with a bang. My shoulder exploded with dull pain from hitting a pipe. The echo of the fall rang through the ship's guts like a strike on a massive bell.
I lay sprawled on the ribbed floor, motionless. Breath whistled out of my lungs.
A couple of minutes later, the cold of the metal brought me back to my senses. I propped myself up on my arms and looked around.
A corridor. Narrow, low, with pipes running along the ceiling and linoleum bubbling up from moisture. The walls—painted, once white, now covered in brownish stains. Two doors on the right. One on the left, standing wide open. At the far end of the corridor, a staircase with handrails was visible.
I got to my feet. My soles burned from the cold, every step sent pain shooting up my legs. First, I looked through the open door on the left.
It was a tiny cabin, built for two, with a bunk bed bolted into the wall. The space here tilted too, but at a different angle, which had caused a flimsy locker to tear loose from its mounts and half-block the entrance.
I squeezed past it toward the bunks. The smell inside was so thick and vile I nearly recoiled: the reek of wet, rotting fabric, rust, and dust that had been stagnating for decades. Almost no light reached in here—only dim gray reflections from the corridor picked out the shapes of objects.
The mattresses had turned into shapeless, slimy black clumps of mold. When I touched one, I yanked my hand back instantly—my fingers were coated in a greasy, stinking sludge. I wiped my palm in disgust on my already filthy, wet boxers.
No blankets. No pillows. Everything had rotted.
My eyes darted to the locker. It lay with its door facing up, jammed shut by the impact. My fingers slid over its cold surface. I grabbed the edge and pulled, but the metal didn't budge. My numb hands slipped treacherously, leaving fresh streaks of scraped skin on the rust.
"Come on..." I hissed through chattering teeth.
I braced my knee against the frame, gripped the edge with both hands, and hauled, throwing my full weight into it. The locker gave a drawn-out screech. Something inside cracked—a hinge or a latch—and the door shifted by a hand's width. Shoving my fingers into the gap, I pried it further. The hinge snapped for good.
My hands found something smooth and hard. A plastic canteen? Empty. I tossed it aside. Reaching further in was more frightening—no telling what might have nested in there over the years. But the cold proved stronger than squeamishness.
Fabric. Stiff, dense, but... dry.
I seized it with both hands and dragged it into the dim light. It was a piece of canvas or work cloth, reeking of machine oil and dust, but to me at that moment, nothing in the world was more beautiful. I immediately wrapped it around myself. The fabric was rigid as a board, but the important thing was—it blocked the bone-deep, piercing draft. Wrapping it tighter, I just stood still for a few seconds and breathed. The shivering didn't stop, but it became finer and more bearable.
Once I'd recovered slightly, I reached back into the locker. Now that my hands were marginally more responsive, my fingers explored every corner. At the bottom, beneath a layer of crumbling rust, I found one more item: a short, hefty cylinder with a knurled grip. A flashlight.
I clicked the button. Nothing. Clicked again. Silence.
I unscrewed the back cap and shook two batteries onto my palm. The casings were swollen and coated in a whitish crust. Dead. I clenched the useless device and nearly hurled it at the wall, but instead shoved it into a makeshift pocket—a fold of fabric at my stomach.
There was nothing else here, and I decided to move on.
In the corridor, two doors on the right awaited me. The first was locked solid. I pressed the handle, leaned my shoulder into it—useless. The second yielded. Behind it was a bathroom: a cracked toilet and a sink torn from the wall lying on the floor. The mirror above it—clouded, streaked with brown stains. I glanced at it reflexively and immediately looked away. I didn't want to see my reflection.
That left the staircase. The steps went up one flight, ending at a square hatch. Light seeped through its cracks—noticeably brighter than down here. The stairs also went down. Down there, it was dark. And from down there—from below—came a sound.
I froze, stopped breathing.
A rhythmic, wet thudding. As if something was climbing the iron steps very slowly. A step. A long pause. A heavy, slapping sound.
I bolted upward as quietly and quickly as I could. The steps were wet, my bare soles sliding on the metal ridges. On the last one, my feet went out from under me, and my knee smashed into the sharp edge. Pain sliced to the bone, but I didn't stop. I shoved the hatch with both hands. It moved stiffly, the hinges turning with a thin, drawn-out squeal that made my jaw clench. Pushing the cover open, I hauled myself over the rim and immediately spun around.
The sound from below had stopped. Simply vanished—as though whatever had been climbing had frozen upon hearing me.
That sudden silence was even more terrifying.
I slammed the hatch shut. The clang echoed through the hollow space. There was no latch. Nothing nearby to wedge it reliably. Looking around, I found a broken piece of pipe as long as my forearm and jammed it through the cover's bracket. Flimsy, but it was all I could do.
Getting to my feet, I finally looked around.
A deck. Open space—the first since waking up. A rusted platform, roughly ten by fifteen meters, surrounded by stumps of broken railings. To the left, the hull dropped off: the cut was rough, uneven, as though a giant hand had snapped off a chunk of the ship and tossed it aside. That edge pressed against the bow of a wooden sailing ship, driven into my vessel so tightly that not even a palm could fit between them. To the right and slightly above, the hull of something steel and enormous loomed, lined with a row of round, riveted portholes.
But all of that was just background. What mattered was everything around it.
I saw the full extent of the space. When I'd peered out of the breach in the wooden hull, I'd only seen a fragment. A wall of rusted metal. Masts. Now I stood higher, and the entire picture unfolded before me.
Ships stretched in every direction—without end, without edge, without horizon. They were heaped upon one another like bones in a mass grave. Rusted hulks, steel warships with gun turrets, listing fishing boats, the skeletal remains of vessels so ancient their wood had blackened and turned to stone. They lay on their sides, upside down, bows to the sky, sterns in the water. Masts jutting from the chaos made the scene even more deranged.
High above me—fifty meters, maybe more—the hulls of the largest vessels converged, forming an impenetrable vault. Through the gaps between them seeped a diffuse gray light, devoid of any direction. It was impossible to tell whether it was day or night outside, morning or evening. Or whether an "outside" even existed.
Below, far beneath me, between keels and hulls, black water glistened. And something was swimming in it.
For several minutes I simply stared at the sight, forgetting that something might climb up from below. In that moment, I didn't care. The wind lashed my face, forcing tears from my eyes. Or maybe it wasn't the wind. I didn't know. I stood there, and inside me something slowly grew—something for which no words existed.
My knees buckled. I sank onto the rusted deck. The fabric I was wrapped in had stiffened and scraped roughly against my neck. Cold found my hands and feet again. I wanted to say something, but the words stuck in my throat. My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached at the roots. My brain refused to process the information or find logic in this place, but my body didn't care. It simply wanted to live.
A sharp, shooting pain in my right leg tore me from the stupor—an icy cramp seized my calf. I hissed, grabbed my leg, and began furiously kneading the petrified muscle through the stiff canvas.
The pain worked like a slap. The numbness fell away.
I understood: if I stayed sitting here on this wind-blasted deck, I would simply die of hypothermia. No monsters from below would be needed. Bracing my hands against the freezing metal, I forced myself to stand. And the wind immediately tried to claw its way under my covering.