Chapter 7

A woman stood by the glass panes, her glare sharp and calculating. She was the only one without a mask.

Didn't need one.

The others hid behind polished façades: golden bulls, segmented insects, symbols of power, control, and detachment. But her face was bare. Deliberate. If masks were meant to conceal something, then she had nothing to hide. Or maybe she wanted to be seen. Wanted to be remembered.

Her coral-red dress clashed against the room's stark sterility, a vivid contrast against the white-washed backdrop. A deliberate stain. Like a bullfighter's cape, taunting the beast. The asymmetry of the fabric, the way it curved over her frame, made it seem as if she were caught mid-motion, even while standing still.

A diamond butterfly perched in her hair, its glimmer fractured by the overhead lights, scattering tiny shards of reflected brilliance across the walls. Fragile, delicate, deceptive. Like her.

She was the maestro, the orchestrator of everything about to unfold below. The unseen hand guiding the strings, adjusting the tempo.

She bit her lower lip, then pressed a button on the keyboard.

"And it's time."

The masked men leaned in, their movements almost synchronized, drawn by the gravity of the moment.

Below, the boy stirred, but he was still oblivious.

Trapped in his world.

Unaware that the music had already started playing—and that he had never been holding the baton.

A sudden whirring split open the silence, sharp and mechanical, like metal teeth grinding themselves to dust.

It cut through me.

Not just a noise—a presence. Something too big, too intrusive, drilling straight through my skull, filling up the spaces where thoughts should be. For a second, I wasn't sure if I was hearing it or if it was hearing me.

I moved before I even processed it, my body snapping upright like someone had yanked me out of sleep with a hook through my spine.

And for a moment, I could see the sound.

Jagged, metallic shapes splintering through the air, their edges too sharp, too precise, as if the whole world had been shattered and badly stitched back together. Everything looked the same, but something felt off. The stillness wasn't just stillness anymore.

It was waiting.

The playground remained unchanged. The grass. The towering walls. The lifeless sky projected above. But something had shifted.

The whirring didn't belong here. It came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

My muscles burned as I forced myself to stand, every inch of me aching like my body had been folded into itself for too long. My legs carried me forward, back to where Jack lay slumped across the slide, exactly where I had left him.

Motionless. But not the same.

His head was angled toward me now.

His face—his facelessness—had changed.

The once-smooth, pale skin had been torn apart, a jagged tear splitting him down the middle like a second mouth. But there was no flesh inside. No teeth, no bones. Just a dark, yawning emptiness, as if something had chewed him up from the inside and left nothing behind.

A wet, choking noise bubbled up from the hollow space.

Thick with saliva and something worse. The kind of sound a throat makes when it's drowning in itself and when there's too much liquid where air should be. Sticky. Bubbling. Struggling.

I noticed a shift.

Something inside that void pushed forward, a slick, glistening shape pressing against the torn edges of his skin. It bulged, pulsed, stretched. The wound convulsed, peeling apart to make way for—

An eye.

Bloodied. Swollen. Wet.

It didn't belong there. It had been forced into existence, wedged into a place where no eye should ever be. The pupil was wide, too wide, black, and empty like a sinkhole. The sclera—what little of it wasn't drenched in blood—was a murky, unnatural white, as if cataracts had eaten through its vision.

But it saw. It stared.

Not with the shock of something newly born, but with the dull, passive vacancy of something that had always been there.

Waiting.

The longer I looked, the worse it got. The eye was stuck there, motionless, embedded in the gaping wound, pinned in place by skin stretched unnaturally tight. It should have been impossible.

The veins in his iris stood out, dark blue and red tendrils threading through the cornea like the roots of a poisoned tree. The sclera was clouded, sickly. Cataract-white.

That eye, Jack's eye, accused me.

Blamed me.

I had left him abandoned. Taken the last flicker of warmth from him. Stolen the last piece of his existence. And now, he had been distorted into something unnatural, something that had no right to exist.

"I'm sorry for taking your shirt, Jack." My voice cracked. The words felt small, meaningless. Like an apology whispered over a grave.

Jack didn't react. Didn't move.

But the eye knew.

I felt its weight, pressing down on my ribs, crushing the air out of my lungs. I couldn't breathe. My limbs were locked, frozen, the albatross tightening around my throat.

I needed to fix it.

With trembling hands, I pulled the shirt off my own body, the fabric damp with my sweat. My fingers fumbled as I lifted it over Jack's head, slipping it over that horrifying wound, covering the unblinking gaze.

Out of sight.

But not erased.

The image had already burned itself into my mind.

The whirring noise still pulsed in the air, a distant hum now, fading back into the silence. But I didn't move. Didn't check where it was coming from.

Didn't dare to.

I backed away from Jack's body, unable to look at him any longer, and returned to the bench.

I sat down, legs curling under me, arms wrapped tight like I was trying to hold something in, something that was already leaking through the cracks.

Jack wasn't Jack anymore. But maybe he never was. Maybe he was just the first one to lose the game, the first one to rot from the inside out. Maybe that's all this place does—keeps you here long enough to strip you down until there's nothing left but a body that still sits but doesn't exist anymore.

And maybe I was next.

You stay here long enough, and you don't get out. You just become part of the set.

Jack on the slide. Me on the bench. Just another prop in the scene.

I dug my nails into my arm, just to feel something. Just to make sure I was still here.