11Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdMo2mrRFrf
“Why would you press the big red button that says do not press?!” Arin barked.
“Uh… it was shiny.” Lila shrugged, smiling sheepishly.
A large door on the other side of the room creaked open.
The sound that came from behind it was worse than the door itself—a long, wet dragging noise, like something heavy being pulled across stone. The smile vanished from Lila’s face.
“Tell me that’s part of the decoration,” she whispered.
Arin didn’t answer. He tightened his grip on the flashlight and stepped back until his shoulder hit mine. The room around us, which had looked abandoned only moments ago, suddenly hummed to life. Wires hidden in the walls began glowing a sickly red. The giant button Lila had pressed slowly sank into the floor as if it had completed its only purpose.
Then the first voice came.
“Welcome back, Subject Three.”
It echoed from somewhere above us, distorted and metallic. Lila’s eyes widened. “Subject… what?”
Before anyone could speak, the door swung wider.
A figure stood in the darkness beyond it.
No—not stood. It hung there crookedly, too tall and too thin, its limbs bent in the wrong places like broken doll parts stitched together. Its face was hidden behind a cracked porcelain mask, but a grin had been painted onto it in red, stretching from cheek to cheek. One hand scraped the wall as it moved, making that awful dragging sound.
Mina grabbed my arm so hard her nails dug into my skin. “Run,” she mouthed.
The figure tilted its head.
“Lila,” it said in a voice that sounded almost human. “You came back.”
Lila stumbled backward. “I’ve never been here in my life!”
The lights flickered.
And suddenly the walls around us lit up with screens—dozens of them. Dusty monitors blinked awake one by one, showing grainy footage from different rooms in the building.
No.
Not different rooms.
The same room.
This room.
On every screen, there were four children standing exactly where we were now.
One of them was Lila.
Same face. Same nervous habit of tucking her hair behind her ear. Same silver bracelet she still wore.
Only the girl on the screen looked younger, maybe seven or eight, and she was crying as men in white coats dragged her toward the very door now standing open before us.
“No…” Lila breathed. “No, that’s not me.”
But even as she said it, her voice shook with the kind of fear that comes when your own memories begin betraying you.
Arin stared at the screens. “Lila… what is this place?”
“I don’t know!” she snapped, too fast, too desperate. “I don’t know, okay?!”
The creature stepped fully into the room.
Its body jerked with each movement, as though invisible strings were pulling it forward. In the red light, I saw numbers carved into its neck.
3
The same metallic voice returned, calmer this time.
“Security breach resolved. Subject Three has been recovered. Remaining subjects must be terminated.”
The floor beneath us clicked.
Mina screamed, “MOVE!”
Panels in the ground burst open, and black mechanical arms shot upward, clawing at our ankles. We scattered. Arin grabbed Lila and pulled her away just as steel fingers snapped shut where she’d been standing. I jumped over one arm and crashed into a desk covered in papers so old they crumbled under my hands.
One page slid free.
Across the top, in faded black ink, were the words:
PROJECT ECHO – Memory Erasure Trial
Below it were four names.
Arin. Mina. Yusuf. Lila.
My blood went cold.
We hadn’t found this place by accident.
We had been here before.
And someone had made sure we forgot.
The creature lunged.
Arin shoved Lila behind him, but it wasn’t going for him. It reached straight for her, bony fingers stretching toward her face, toward the bracelet on her wrist. The moment it touched the silver chain, Lila let out a scream so sharp it didn’t sound human.
Then the memories hit.
You could see it in her eyes.
A hospital room.
Needles.
Screaming children.
That red button.
A fire alarm.
A little girl pressing it because she wanted to go home.
And a monster in a mask that had once been a person.
Lila collapsed to her knees, gasping. “I remember,” she choked out.
The creature froze.
Its head twitched.
Slowly, trembling, it lifted a hand to its porcelain mask.
And in a cracked whisper, it said, “So do I.”
It peeled the mask away.
Underneath was not a monster.
It was a boy.
Or what had once been one.
His skin was stitched and pale, his eyes hollow with years of pain, but he couldn’t have been older than us. Burned into his forehead was another number.
4
Mina covered her mouth. “There were four subjects…”
The boy—Subject Four—looked at Lila, and for a second the thing in his face wasn’t hunger or rage.
It was grief.
“They left me here,” he said. “You opened the door and escaped. I stayed behind.”
Lila was crying now. “I was just a kid…”
“So was I.”
The room shook violently. Sparks rained from the ceiling. On the monitors, a countdown appeared in flashing red.
FACILITY PURGE INITIATED – 04:59
Arin swore. “This place is going to blow.”
I grabbed the scattered papers while Mina searched for another exit. Lila rose unsteadily, staring at Subject Four like she wanted to apologize for a nightmare neither of them had chosen.
“Come with us,” she said.
He laughed—a broken, rusted sound. “You still don’t understand. This place doesn’t want us to leave.”
From the walls came more dragging sounds.
More doors were opening.
And from the darkness beyond them, more figures began to emerge.
More masks.
More numbers.
More children turned into monsters.
Arin backed toward the hallway. “We need to go. Now.”
But Lila didn’t move.
She looked at the giant red button, now hidden beneath the floor, and then at the countdown, and then at the monsters filling the room.
Finally, she whispered, “I pressed it once to escape.”
Her tear-filled eyes lifted to us.
“I think I have to press it again to end this.”
11Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡioQOzBeakA
11Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡp5WeO0FWSy
and then Add to home screen.