Our story begins with a man whose eyes fluttered open, slow and reluctant, as though waking was a betrayal.
At first, there was nothing. No thought, no memory, no identity, only sensation. And pain.
The world returned to him not in images or sounds, but in fragments of agony. It came in waves, like the sea, but crueler, sharp and constant. Fire lived in his muscles. His veins pulsed with needles. Agony crawled beneath his skin like some buried beast, clawing, gnawing, devouring him from the inside out.
A groan slipped past his lips before he even realized he'd made a sound. It was hoarse, broken, a wounded animal's cry echoing into the dark. Raw and instinctive. His mouth tasted of blood and dust.
He was lying on something cold. So cold it leached the breath from his lungs. The floor beneath him felt like stone, slick with moisture, unforgiving.
It pressed into his ribs and spine and hips like it wanted to carve itself into him. That chill was merciless, but it also made the burning in his flesh all the more vivid, a cruel contrast, fire against ice.
Still half-blind, he blinked through a haze of tears and instinctively tried to move.
Agony answered.
He gritted his teeth, breath catching as fresh pain rippled across his chest.
His muscles resisted, shaking under their own weight, but he forced his body to obey. One trembling elbow dug into the ground, then the other. He dragged himself upright inch by inch, every motion a battle.
His head lolled forward, sweat dripping from his brow to the filthy stone below.
When he finally lifted his eyes, the world sharpened.
Bars.
Iron bars, rusted, thick, and close enough together that even a starving child couldn't squeeze through. They ran from floor to ceiling in silent formation, slicing the space before him into neat, mocking lines.
The sight shocked clarity into his bones like a jolt of lightning.
This was a cage.
Panic flared. He gasped, lungs sucking in stale air as he pushed himself into a sitting position with sudden, frantic effort. His back met the stone wall behind him with a jarring thud, and he winced, teeth clenched, as a bolt of pain arced up his spine.
The room spun briefly, blurring at the edges, but he held on, forcing his breathing to slow.
Think. Just think.
But no answers came. No flicker of familiarity. His mind was a hollow cavern, echoing with questions and empty of light. Who was he? Why was he here? What had happened?
He looked around, swallowing hard.
The cell was small and bare. The walls were made of rough-hewn stone, damp in places, the kind of old masonry that seemed to breathe mildew and decay. There was no bed, no furniture, no bucket, nothing but shadow, stone, and steel.
A single light bulb dangled overhead, its wire frayed and exposed. It flickered like a dying star, barely holding back the dark. Each pulse of light threw long, jagged shadows across the walls, shifting as if they moved of their own will.
It didn't feel like a normal prison.
There was a wrongness in the air, something cold and ancient, a silence that had weight. The cell wasn't built to contain criminals. It felt older. Deeper. More final.
He curled into himself without meaning to, drawing his knees to his chest. The motion made his uniform shift, and he felt the scrape of thread against skin.
He looked down.
A patch had been sewn onto the chest of his clothes, faded, fraying, the letters smudged by time and grime. But it was still legible.
SUBJECT 24238.
The name, or lack of one, hit harder than he expected. Not even a nickname. Not even initials. Just numbers. Like he was a specimen in some experiment. Like someone had erased his identity and replaced it with a label.
He stared at the numbers until they blurred in his vision. Until his head began to throb again. Until the truth nestled in his chest like a stone.
He was no one.
Just a subject. A blank slate trapped in a cage.
A low, rhythmic drip… drip… drip… echoed through the cell, as if water was leaking somewhere in the dark. The sound gnawed at him, maddening in its monotony. Every drop seemed to fall in time with his heartbeat.
And then the silence broke.
A shriek of sound exploded into the cell, an alarm, sudden and piercing. Mechanical and merciless. It blared without warning, stabbing into his skull like hot wire. He flinched back violently, hands flying to his ears as the sound crashed over him.
The light above him spasmed, flashing bright and dark in quick succession, casting the cell into strobing chaos. It was like lightning in a storm, but confined, artificial, suffocating.
And for a moment, he could've sworn the bars shook.
He lurched to his feet, legs buckling beneath him, muscles screaming. He barely made it to the front of the cell, grabbing the bars to steady himself. The cold of the iron bit into his skin like fangs.
Outside, there was only darkness.
The hallway beyond was a black void, made deeper by the flickering light behind him. The alarm screamed on, vibrating through the stone. Something was coming. He felt it in the marrow of his bones.
The kind of dread that didn't need logic. The kind that rose from instinct. From survival.
Subject 24238 stared into the black, heart pounding like a war drum, hands tight on the bars. The pain in his body was still there, but it faded beneath the storm in his mind.
He didn't know who he was.
But he was alive.
And something was about to test just how long that would last.