Without even realizing when the pit that had opened in the ground closed again, my nervous system burst into flames. My blood was practically electrified. I don't know how long I stayed where I fell, lying there like that.
There was only one thing I knew: what death leaves behind.
The smell of blood was the only thing death left behind. I was in shock. Maybe, like someone burning with fever, I was babbling things whose meaning I didn't even know. I must have screamed a few times too, but no one came to me.
The group was nowhere to be seen.
The only thing I could hear was the voice of my own being.
Thinking there might be something new on the mission screen, I tried to return. Every single second, pain stabbed into my abdomen, inviting me into a dreadful game beyond all the anxieties I knew or didn't know. Depression… When I was already seeing the world in black and white, were the places they called treatment nothing but death hospitals? Were these open morgues?
I walked back toward the starting point without encountering anyone along the way. I was practically dragging myself. I began to wait for my name to appear on the main screen. The name flickering in the lower corner of the hologram was displayed in red. As my heart pounded rapidly, I read the following message:
[Mission not completed]
As my name flickered there, in the lower corner of the blacklist whose fate I could not foresee, that brief moment when the ground hatch had opened flashed before my eyes. If I didn't complete this mission… I remembered the things the woman had been trying to say. The smell of blood. Who knows how much she still had to tell me?
Clenching my jaw, I looked at the other names on the screen. I shivered at these names that felt completely unfamiliar to me. Along with the cold pressing beneath my skin, I felt the need to wrap my arms around myself.
At that very moment, the tiny fragment of black sky above closed. I could see the walls rising upward at a slanted angle, the dome thinning as it ascended. All that remained was a final opening resembling the hole of a prison. The glimmer of hope I saw through that last opening was gradually fading. What would happen now? The only question I could think of neither clung to the past nor looked toward the future. All I knew were my destructive instincts. As I struggled to control them, I examined the screen more carefully.
I had to find the group and manage to get acquainted with them. But I drifted into thought. Wouldn't they chase me away again? I looked to my right and left, above and below me. The only thing I saw was the silence left over from my own loneliness. Exhausted, weary, and freezing, I kept walking. My legs struggled to carry me. As I wandered like a sleepwalker with my eyes half-open, I heard a sound like shutters being pulled down. My steps stopped. I was very close to the starting point… Just as I had surrendered myself once again to my imaginary world, the doors of the wall hut—one I had exited and could never return from—opened. I held my breath with the pain in my stomach.
Had someone arrived? Here? Someone new?
My mind couldn't properly evaluate any possibility.
When the darkness gave way to a dim yellow light, I realized the artificial lights had come on. What fell to the ground like a heavy mass was not an object—it was a human being. He was sprawled on the floor like a worthless rug. I recoiled. I screamed once more. Footsteps echoed behind me again.
I fixed my eyes on the body lying on the ground.
It belonged to a man, perhaps middle-aged. A bandage sat on the upper left corner of his forehead. Drops of blood were visible between his nose and lips. The upper part of his sweater was torn. The only sound was his breathing, just enough to confirm his existence.
At that moment, someone from the group—someone whose identity I didn't know—lifted me off the ground and shoved me roughly into a corner. The group leader looked at the man who had fallen, and as his brows hovered high, he continued to make it clear that he was thinking something deeply.
"What happened to him?" I said as I stumbled to my feet.
No one answered.
As long as they didn't speak, the silence here would bind us even more tightly.
Who was the man lying unconscious on the ground? Why had he been locked in here and thrown away like that?
I tried to approach the group again, but this time I was denied by a single look from a blonde woman who suddenly turned toward me. At a moment when I least expected her to speak, she said through her yellowed teeth, "Stay back!"
I froze at the stranger's reaction. I was stunned. "But why?" I shouted, furrowing my brows. "Why won't you give me a single answer?" My nerves were so shattered that I began to cry out loud. "Do I mean that little to you? Isn't this cruelty? And to someone you don't even know… to me…"
For a moment, I thought I saw a tiny flicker of emotion in the woman's honey-colored eyes.
But she only continued to keep her distance and looked at me with an empty expression. "This is a place for lunatics…"
Her eyes narrowed even more. I didn't know whether she was doing it to see me better.
"And you… if you're not crazy, why are you here?" she asked. No one paid any attention to my dissociated state. The silence was about to drive me insane. "This setup isn't for lunatics!" I screamed with a burning sensation in my throat. "This place is meant to heal patients. To give them back the smile they forgot."
The woman suddenly clamped her hand over my mouth, sealing my lips. I felt every bone in her fingers. "Shut up!"
She was threatening. It was as if she were hanging onto me with nothing but a survival instinct.
With trembling hands, I pried her grip away from my lips. "Let go of me!" My breathing became irregular. "This is a place of treatment… We were supposed to heal here… That's what they said… Didn't they tell you the same thing?"
The group leader, who had focused on our loud exchange, lifted his knees, leaving the unconscious man on the ground just as he was. "There's only one thing I'm curious about. How will you contribute to us?"
For a moment, I thought he wasn't talking to me. His voice was hoarse. Then everything changed when I realized his gaze was fixed on me.
"Pardon?"
The woman stopped bothering with me and took on an annoyed air. At that moment, the group leader stepped closer to me. "I'm asking…" He allowed me time to process. "What use will you be to our group?" He scanned me from head to toe. "What are you willing to sacrifice for us to accept you among us?" His eyes dropped to the ground as he took a few disgusted steps away from the unconscious man. "If you want to join us, we need to know that…"
"You… who are you?" I asked, my lips trembling. The words barely escaped my mouth.
"We were just human beings…" he said, as the other members of the group stepped back.
I no longer understood anything at all.
"And now…" I said in a low voice. "What are you now?"
With an indifferent expression on his face, the group leader said, "We are…" He paused. "Animals. We just want to live. We breathe, eat and drink water, and we hunt…"