Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Sold
The apartment smelled like mildew and old takeout. It always did.
The walls were peeling in the corners where the moisture crept in from the never-fixed leak in the bathroom. The kitchen light flickered every few seconds, casting the cramped room in a stuttering orange glow. There were dishes in the sink that hadn't been washed in two weeks. Mail was piled on the table — none of it good news. Bills, eviction warnings, a final notice from the electric company with a red stamp that screamed DELINQUENT.
Suzuki Iruma's mother sat on the edge of the couch, her knee bouncing rapidly. She was thin, with dark circles under her eyes and a jaw that was perpetually clenched. Her fingers drummed against her thigh in a rhythmless, anxious pattern. Across from her, Iruma's father leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed, staring at the phone on the table between them like it was a grenade he was afraid to pick up.
"They'll be here in an hour," his father said. His voice was flat, like he was reading the weather.
His mother's drumming stopped. She pressed her hands flat against her thighs. "And you're sure about this?"
"You saw the money they offered. We could pay off everything. Start fresh somewhere."
"Start fresh?" She let out a short, hollow laugh. "Without —" She stopped herself and pressed her lips together.
There was a long, heavy silence.
In the corner of the room, sitting on a faded blanket on the floor, was a small boy with messy blue hair and round, watchful eyes. He was two years old, though he was small for his age — thin and quiet in a way that most toddlers never were. He had a stuffed rabbit that was missing one ear and most of its stuffing. He held it against his chest with both hands, his tiny fingers curled into the worn fabric. He was watching his parents. He didn't understand the words, not really, but the weight in the room pressed down on him like a physical thing. His lip trembled slightly, but he didn't cry. He had already learned, in his short, bewildered life, that crying didn't make things better. It just made the apartment feel smaller.
"Suzuki," his father said, not looking at him.
The boy's head tilted up.
"Come here."
The boy looked at his mother. She was staring at the floor. Her eyes were red, but she wasn't crying. She wouldn't look at him.
He stood up on unsteady legs, the rabbit dangling from one hand, and walked over to his father. His father picked him up — not roughly, but not gently either. The kind of grip you'd use to move a box from one room to another. Functional. Distant.
"We're going on a trip," his father said.
The boy looked up at him with wide, trusting eyes. "Trip?"
"Yeah. A trip."
His mother stood up abruptly and walked to the bathroom. The door closed. The lock clicked.
The car ride was long. The boy didn't know how long — time meant nothing to a two-year-old — but the sky went from overcast gray to dark navy, and the buildings outside the window turned from cramped apartment blocks to open highway to, eventually, nothing at all. Just dark water and dark sky, blurring together until he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
His father drove in silence. The radio was off. The only sounds were the engine, the road, and the occasional distant horn from a ship somewhere out on the water.
The boy fell asleep somewhere around the third hour, the rabbit pressed against his face.
When he woke up, the car was parked at the edge of a concrete pier. Beyond the pier, barely visible in the moonlight, was a boat. Not a fishing boat, not a ferry — something sleek and purposeful, with dark windows and no visible markings. A man in a black jacket stood at the pier's edge, hands in his pockets, watching their car approach. He had the look of someone who had been waiting a long time and didn't mind waiting a little longer.
His father got out of the car. The boy watched through the window as his father and the man in the black jacket spoke. He couldn't hear what they were saying — the windows were up — but he could see the man's mouth move in quick, clipped sentences. He could see his father's hands — steady, deliberate. He could see the moment a thick envelope changed hands.
The man in the black jacket looked past his father, through the car window, at the boy in the backseat. His eyes were dark and unreadable. He tilted his head slightly, like he was examining something he'd purchased at a market.
He gave a single nod.
His father walked back to the car, opened the back door, and unbuckled the boy from his seat. The boy looked up at him, clutching the rabbit. "Daddy?"
His father didn't answer. He picked the boy up and carried him toward the pier. The man in the black jacket was already walking toward the boat. No one looked back.
It wasn't until the boat began to move — until the pier shrank and the dark water swallowed everything behind them — that the boy realized his father wasn't coming too.
He turned in the arms of the man in the black jacket, reaching back toward the shore, toward the silhouette that was his father walking back to the car. "Daddy?" His voice was small, swallowed by the wind and the water.
The silhouette got smaller.
"Daddy!"
The silhouette got smaller.
"DADDY!"
The silhouette disappeared.
The boy's hands fell to his sides. The rabbit slipped from his fingers and tumbled into the dark water below. He watched it sink — the worn gray fabric, the missing ear, the one button eye — swallowed by the black sea in an instant.
The boy was two years old, and he had been sold.
The boat cut through the ocean for what felt like forever. The boy didn't cry again. Not when the engine rumbled beneath his feet. Not when the salt wind stung his eyes. Not when the man in the black jacket set him down on a bench inside the cabin and walked away without a word.
He sat there, very still, his hands empty. His fingers kept reaching for the rabbit that wasn't there, curling around nothing. He stared at the floor. The cabin was clean and sterile — white walls, metal fixtures, a single overhead light that buzzed faintly. It smelled like disinfectant.
There were two other men on the boat. They wore the same black jackets, and they didn't speak to the boy or to each other. They stood by the windows, scanning the water with binoculars. Professionals. The boy didn't know the word, but his instincts — buried deep in his gut, already sharper than they had any right to be at two — registered them as dangerous. He made himself small on the bench. He was quiet. He was invisible. And he didn't even know he was doing it.
Hours passed. The sky lightened from black to gray to pale gold on the horizon. And then, rising from the ocean like a forgotten secret, the island appeared.
It wasn't large — maybe a few kilometers across. It was covered in dense, dark-green vegetation that clung to steep cliffs and rocky slopes. There were no other boats in sight. No lights on the shore. No signs of life at all, except for a narrow concrete path carved into the cliffside, leading up from a small dock to somewhere beyond the tree line.
The boat pulled up to the dock. One of the men hoisted the boy into his arms and carried him off the boat, up the path, through the trees. The boy watched the boat shrink behind them, watched the ocean disappear behind the canopy, and felt something settle in his chest — a cold, heavy thing that he was too young to name.
Abandonment.
The laboratory sat in the heart of the island, half-hidden by the jungle, half-carved into the mountain itself. From the outside, it looked almost mundane — a cluster of three rectangular concrete buildings with flat roofs and tinted windows, connected by covered walkways. The kind of place you might pass on a remote industrial site without a second glance. There were no signs, no logos, no identifying marks. The buildings were gray and featureless, like the island itself wanted nothing to do with them.
But when the man in the black jacket swiped a keycard at the main entrance and the heavy door hissed open, the world inside became something else entirely.
The entrance hall was clinical — white floors, white walls, fluorescent lights humming overhead. There was a reception desk that was never staffed. Security cameras in every corner, their red lights blinking in slow, patient rhythms. The air was cold and smelled of antiseptic and something faintly metallic, like old blood that had been cleaned away but never quite forgotten.
The man set the boy down. The boy's bare feet touched the cold tile, and he shivered.
Two more people emerged from a side door. A woman in a white coat, her hair pulled back tightly, clipboard in hand. And beside her, a man — tall, thin, with wire-rimmed glasses and a calm, clinical expression that didn't quite reach his eyes. His coat was slightly different from the others — darker, with a pin on the lapel that the boy didn't recognize. He carried himself differently too. Not like the people in black jackets, who moved with the efficient detachment of hired muscle. This man moved with purpose. With authority.
The woman in the white coat crouched down to the boy's level. She looked at him the way a mechanic looks at a car that's just been wheeled into the shop — not unkindly, but with the cool, professional distance of someone assessing a job.
"Suzuki Iruma," she said, reading from her clipboard. "Two years old. No known medical conditions. No significant trauma history noted — though I imagine that'll change." She straightened up, checked something on her clipboard, and looked at the man with the glasses. "All in order, Dr. Kuroda."
Dr. Kuroda adjusted his glasses and looked down at the boy. The boy looked up at him. For a long moment, neither of them moved. The doctor's expression was unreadable — clinical, measuring, evaluating. But somewhere deep behind those glasses, in the cold geometry of his gaze, there was a flicker of something that might have been satisfaction.
"Welcome, Iruma-kun," Dr. Kuroda said, his voice smooth and measured, like a teacher greeting a new student. He almost smiled. Almost. "You're going to help us with something very important."
The boy didn't understand the words. But he understood the tone — and it wasn't the tone you use with a child. It was the tone you use with a specimen.
Iruma was two years old, and this was his new home.
The days that followed were a blur of corridors and rooms and faces. The laboratory was enormous — far larger than it appeared from the outside, extending deep into the mountain in a network of levels and wings that the boy couldn't begin to map. The first level looked exactly like what one might expect of a research facility: offices, meeting rooms, storage units, a break room with a vending machine and a coffee maker that was always on. People in white coats walked the halls with clipboards and tablets, nodding to each other, speaking in low voices about data and schedules and the latest results from Phase Three. The boy was brought here on the first day, given a simple medical gown that was too big for him, and led through a standard intake procedure: height, weight, blood sample, dental record, a full-body scan that hummed and buzzed and made the tile vibrate beneath his feet.
"Healthy," the woman with the clipboard noted. "Remarkably healthy, actually. Good baseline."
"Good baseline," Dr. Kuroda repeated, from the doorway. The boy looked up at him. The doctor was watching the numbers on the screen with the quiet interest of a collector appraising a new piece.
It wasn't until his third night that the boy saw the deeper levels.
Dr. Kuroda led him personally. They went down — down a stairwell that the boy hadn't noticed before, hidden behind an unmarked door that required two keycards and a numeric code. The stairs were metal and echoed with each step. The fluorescent lights here were dimmer, casting the walls in a sickly yellow-green. The air grew colder. The smell of antiseptic gave way to something else — something organic and faintly sweet, like flowers left in water too long.
The stairwell opened onto a long corridor. At the end of the corridor was a door — heavy, reinforced, with a small window at eye level. Dr. Kuroda didn't open it. He simply positioned the boy in front of the window and let him look.
The room beyond was enormous — easily the size of a school gymnasium, but with a ceiling that stretched up several stories into the rock. And it was filled with machines.
Not the small, clinical machines of the upper floors. These were massive — towering columns of glass and steel, each one connected to a network of pipes and tubes and cables that snaked across the floor and up the walls like the circulatory system of some enormous, sleeping creature. Machines that hummed and pulsed with a low, rhythmic throb, like heartbeats. Rows of them, stretching back into the shadows, far past the reach of the dim overhead lights.
And between the machines — on steel shelves, in refrigerated cases, in locked glass cabinets — were vials. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They lined the walls from floor to ceiling, filled with liquids of every color imaginable: amber and violet and deep arterial red and a shimmering silver that seemed to move on its own. Each vial was labeled with a code — "S-003," "F-012," "W-007" — and a date. The boy couldn't read, but he could see that some of the dates were years old.
"This is where the real work happens," Dr. Kuroda said, standing behind the boy. His voice was almost gentle — the kind of gentle you use when you're explaining something to a child that you know will terrify them, and you want to soften the blow without ever considering not striking it. "Down here, we study things that the world above doesn't know exist. Things that most people couldn't even imagine." He placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. It was light and clinical, like a specimen being positioned under a microscope. "And you, Iruma-kun — you're going to be a part of it."
The boy stared through the glass. The machines throbbed. The vials shimmered. The air hummed with a low, electric tension, like the whole room was holding its breath.
He didn't understand any of it. But somewhere deep in the marrow of his bones, in the part of him that had already learned to keep quiet and stay small — he knew, with a certainty that no two-year-old should ever carry, that this place was going to hurt him.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
That night, the boy was placed in a small room. White walls, white floor, a single cot with a thin blanket. No window. A camera in the corner with a small red light. The door locked from the outside.
He sat on the cot, his knees pulled to his chest, his empty hands clutching the thin blanket. The room was quiet. The facility hummed around him — a low, distant vibration that he could feel more than hear, like the building itself was breathing.
He didn't cry. He'd learned that lesson already. Crying didn't bring anyone back.
He closed his eyes and thought of the rabbit — the worn gray fur, the missing ear, the button eye that looked at him with quiet, steady understanding. The one thing in the world that was his.
Gone now. At the bottom of the sea.
He held the blanket tighter.
Outside the door, footsteps passed. A voice spoke into a walkie-talkie. A door opened and closed somewhere down the hall.
"Suzuki Iruma," a voice said from the other side of the door, clipped and businesslike. "Subject 017. Intake complete. Schedule begins tomorrow, 0600."
There was a pause.
And then, from somewhere deep inside the facility — from a room the boy hadn't seen yet, a room at the very heart of this place, behind doors that were locked and bolted and hidden away from everything and everyone — a sound.
It was faint, barely audible through the walls. A low, mournful sound, like something alive and in pain. It might have been a voice. It might have been a machine.
The boy's eyes opened.
He listened.
The sound came again — longer this time, rising and falling like a breath, like a song with no words.
The boy pulled the blanket over his head, curled into a ball, and tried to sleep. But he didn't forget the sound. Not tonight. Not ever.
This was Suzuki Iruma's first night in the laboratory, in the heart of the island, in the middle of the sea, in the dark.
He was two years old.
He was Subject 017.