I thought I would die in fire. Something quick. Cinematic. A final cut. Instead, I rot in a cube. The air tastes recycled and faintly sweet, like a mask after a long day. The light above never changes. The hum never stops. Sleep arrives in scraps, and when it leaves the room has not moved. They did not chain me. Mercy, on paper. If I try to run, there is nowhere to go. Condensation beads on the floor plates and gathers at the seams. When I press my palm to the metal, my skin sticks and peels with a soft kiss.

  The stump grows. Not a stump anymore. Silver ivy threads from my elbow. It creeps forward in quiet pulses and remembers a hand, knuckle by knuckle. When I sleep, it gains a joint. Yesterday I tried to cut it off. I snapped the feeding tray along a ridge and tested the edge on my thigh. It scratched. The steel in my blood sealed the cut before the pain arrived. I laughed, then choked on it, then stopped because the sound made the room smaller.

  The wall ripples after a meal that tasted like chalk and old air. I do not trust the slit of a clock anymore. Hunger does not keep time here. Heat haze sharpens into a reflection, and I saw eyes in it. My sister steps out of the metal. School uniform. Socks still damp from a rain that never fell in this room. She looks younger than the day the sirens began.

  “You left us,” she says.

  Her voice carries an echo. Three voices share one mouth and do not agree on where to place the breath.

  “You… you are not real,” I say. “I’m not falling for this.”

  “Neither were we,” she answers. “Not enough to save.”

  I push back until spine meets wall. I try to find mistakes in her. Hair length. The bow. The way her shoes creak. Two more figures unfold from the wall. My mother and the younger version of me. The boy looks new. Without the dirt, with innocent eyes. My hair was short, and I wore stylish clothes. Those were simpler times.

  “I told you to stay underground,” I say. “I told you to wait for the all-clear, to get underground with the others. What else could I have done? Did you want your only son to die with you? Weren’t you happy I wasn’t wasting away anymore, that I chose to live and escape?”

  “You told us you would come back when the air was safe,” my mother replies. Her face is calm. “You never came back.”

  Nuxx speaks through them. He sounds like a principal who prides himself on never raising his voice.

  “You had options,” he says. “You could’ve gone back for your mother and sister. Taken them with you. But they’d have been inconvenient baggage for you, right?”

  “My option,” I say. “Was sneaking onto The Island. I clung to the carriage until my shoulders tore. The assassins did not look down. I was willing to gamble my life on those odds.”

  “Good detail,” he says. “The Island rewards that kind of persistence. So, you ended up fixated on the dead assassin’s phone, while your family were left in rubble. So tidy.”

  The walls tremble. My sister took a step. When her palm touches my cheek, every nerve misfires. I taste electricity. I see a door I never opened and a hallway I walked away from. Tokyo is gone now. Now, I was clinging to the techno shinkansen, counting the neon lights, and praying the Island would stop moving long enough to accept a stowaway. I told myself the shinkansen would take me to a place where guilt could be paid off in success. The train did what trains do. It arrived. I tried and failed again, living on the streets. Her hand falls. The pain lingers, then drains into a tremor that runs through my jaw.

  Nuxx softens, almost kind. “You’re grieving the loss of your family,” he says. “Whilst trying to outrun the guilt. Don’t lie to me, Arata, because I already know everything. I know what you are. You’re not telling me the truth.”

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  The tendrils rise without ceremony. Cords slide from the floor and settle around my ribs, my waist, my throat. They pulse with my heartbeat.

  “Confess,” he says. “It is efficient.”

  “What do you want,” I ask.

  “Tell them what you told yourself,” he says. “Tell them the clean version.”

  “I ran away,” I say. “I’m a selfish, horrible, pathetic bastard.”

  “And you want a prize for honesty,” he says. “Say the rest.”

  “But, I would do it again,” I say. The words find a narrow path through my teeth. “I wanted to live, for once.”

  Nuxx exhales, pleased. “See,” he says. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Let’s go a little deeper. Do you remember the platform,” Nuxx points ahead, as the walls etch the picture. “The way the air smelled like hot rubber and vinegar. The ticket clerk who would not look up. The photograph a woman pressed into your hand because you looked like someone who could carry a face farther than she could. It fell between cars when the doors shuddered. You watched it go.”

  I know the platform. I know the woman. I know how her mouth formed the name of someone who never arrived. I know how my arms shook under the carriage until skin tore and the pain turned simple. The Island rose out of the sea, and I pretended the salt on my lips belonged to the ocean. I held the assassin’s phone tight in my hand, still slick with his blood from Tokyo.

  “You survived like a rat,” Nuxx says. “And your persistence led you here. Was it all worth it?”

  The tendrils tighten. My left shoulder slips and kicks pain up my neck. The steel hand opens like a flower; I can no longer control it. I wished it would transform into a shotgun, so I could blow my head off.

  “Ask your mother to forgive you,” he says. “Mean it. See what happens.”

  My mother looks at her hands. The hands are wrong. The nails too even. The veins too polite. The cube knows how to draw a person and not how to remember her ache. She lifts her chin and waits for me to speak.

  “I am sorry,” I say. “I am sorry I ran away. I hated myself for being a failure and resented you for always crying. But I know… I’m not the son you deserve.”

  “Do you want forgiveness,” Nuxx asks.

  “I can’t bear this,” I say. “I need to know if you’re still alive, that I haven’t lost the chance to make amends. I want to sit and drink miso soup with you both again. I want things to be as they were before the bombs dropped. I want to become the kind of man who would have stayed.”

  “You are not,” he says. “You never were.”

  I said nothing, I didn’t meet their eye. I knew he’d be smiling widely, pleased with himself.

  The cube rewarded honesty. The boy fades first. My sister follows, her uniform peeling into dust that spirals toward the ceiling. My mother lingers. Her mouth moves without sound. Her eyes are kind in a way that should not be possible here. Nuxx watches me watch her, then he removes her too.

  A voice leaks into the cube like warm water through a crack. Bǎo. Far away. Thin as a scratch on glass. The words wobble through interference and still find shape. Those words bore hope. I thought I was in a personal hell. Where was I? Was I in the association this whole time? How did Bǎo find me?

  “Piggy,” she shouted. “Bǎo’s safe, the CCP will get off with all charges! Just hang in there, don’t listen to Nuxx! You’re still you!”

  I freeze. I whisper, “Bǎo?” No reply. Only the pulse of red light. Maybe I built the voice myself. Maybe it is another trick of the mind, telling me what I wanted to hear. That Bǎo, my only friend, was doing okay. I realize that I’ve missed her so much.

  The steel fingers flex once, independent of me. A spark jumps from the palm to the floor, leaving a small black ring. The smell is electric, burnt hair and iron. I taste it. Then a deeper rumble moves through the walls. Not mechanical. Heavy. I hear a clang of metal.

  “Oh, she came to save you,” he says. “No… this isn’t good! Perhaps, in my arrogance, I miscalculated… Honestly, I thought everyone forgot about you! It seems you are loved after all.”

  For a second, I think I see her: pale armour, glassy eyes, the tilt of a head that once looked at me like I was more than function. “Stay still,” the voice says again. “Bǎo’s getting it open! Get your suitcase ready, piggy!”

  The only smile I’ve had in months radiates across my face. Nuxx laughs quietly, a laugh he couldn’t contain through his gloved hand. “I can’t believe she’s found you,” he says. “This is making me tear up.”

  The voice turns urgent, almost panicked. “Arata! Look at me!”

  I do. The face beyond the glass flickers. Bǎo, but wrong. Her expression empty, her mouth moving a second behind the sound. For an instant her eyes flash silver, then completely black. Her lips twist into a smile, and her body breaks into nanites which scatter across the walls like spiders.

  Nuxx’s whisper presses against my ear. “Every rescue is just another form of capture.”

  The floor gives way. Light pours in from everywhere, searing and cold. I fall toward it, reaching for the shape that was once Bǎo. A false reality. Another whip lashes my back, tearing the skin.

  I wished for death; a mercy that wouldn’t be granted. Not until I had broken completely, when my mind would slip completely into darkness.

  Everything went white.

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