Reverse Lullaby

The wallpaper in the makeshift shelter peeled off into faded medical records. Elvira squatted in the storage room, counting cans, and heard a rustling sound behind her—the boy named Noah was scribbling in the cracks of the floor with crayons. The red wax traces twisted into the shape of the scar from the appendectomy Lila had when she was six.

"Kid," she flicked the crayon out of his hand, "learn a healthy hobby."

The boy tilted his head and gave a fake Lila smile. "We are playing the hospital game. I am the sister Lila who is being cut open."

Suddenly, there was a sound of glass breaking in the kitchen. When Elvira rushed over, the twin girls were squatting in the jam on the floor, using the fragments to spell out the bloody numbers **7A** and **7B**.

*(At three in the morning, Lila, who was on night watch, saw the children painting on the wall of the entertainment room. They took turns biting their fingertips and drawing an inverted pentagram array with blood. Each star tip was adorned with a baby's footprint.)*

Elvira pressed the children on the dining chairs to bandage their fingers. The youngest girl suddenly twitched, and her pupils dilated into the foggy gray color when Lila was frightened: "The medicine is so bitter... Can you change it to rainbow candy?"

"Speak human language." Elvira pinched her chin.

"On August 17, 1999," the girl recited mechanically, "Lila Evans had her third electroshock treatment and refused to take the orange pill."

Lila knocked over the first aid kit. The gauze roll rolled across the floor and unrolled to reveal the doctor's instructions spelled out in old blood: **Increased doses may relieve symptoms of sister attachment**

"They're not children," she dug her nails into the cracks of the table. "They're memories created by Selina."

Noah licked his lollipop and interrupted: "What's the character for 载 in carrier?"

The monitor screen flashed with snowflakes. Elvira stared at the playback screen: the children gathered in a circle like puppets, drawing a cross-section of the lactating uterus on the wall with their nosebleeds. The location of the fallopian tubes was marked with laboratory coordinates.

"Seventh night ritual." Lila wrapped herself in the blanket. "Last week they used jam to replicate your gunshot scar."

Elvira hit the pause button. There was a blurry white shadow at the edge of the screen—the outline of the Lucas statue was projected on the curtains.

"Hallucination?" Lila asked.

"I hope so." Elvira flicked on her lighter, the flame reflecting the fresh cracks on her ring. "That bastard loves to play tricks."

Noah's dream talk suddenly exploded over the loudspeaker: "...the bottom of the lava pool is so cold..."

When Elvira kicked open the door of the chapel, the moonlight was pouring on the fingertips of Lucas's stone statue. The ring of magma solidified dripped hot beads, etching on the floor:

**Save Me**

**DO NOT BRING CHILDREN**

"The dead should be quiet." She kicked at the statue's base. A crack burst open, revealing a half-melted dog tag chain with Selina's baby bracelet on the end.

Noah's scream tore through the night sky. Elvira rushed back to the dormitory and saw him floating under the ceiling, his eyes rolling back as he continued to write the contract array on the wall with blood. The other children held hands and hummed a nursery rhyme with a twist:

**Brother Stone doesn't speak

Waiting for my sister to dig him up

Lila tried to pick up Noah, but her arms were twisted and she was put in a sacrificial position.

Elvira fired at the center of the pact formation. Steam smelling of breast milk gushed out of the bullet holes, and the children all collapsed. Noah fell into her arms, with a glowing scar from the IV tube appearing on the back of his neck.

"Locate." Lila ripped open his collar. "They're transporting..."

The entire blood array suddenly shrank into an umbilical-cord-shaped laser beam, piercing through the roof and pointing directly to the north. Elvira looked out the window along the trajectory—the dormant volcano fifty miles away was waking up, and the outline of Selina's childhood secret base was vaguely emerging on the mountainside.

Noah chuckled in her arms: "Bad dog needs a new collar."

Elvira pried open his mouth and found a microcircuit board engraved on his tongue.

---

**Postscript: Weaning pains**

The next morning, Lila found a message made of oatmeal in the kitchen:

**Game Phase 2**

**Hide your childhood**

Elvira melted Lucas's dog tag chain into a tracker. When the screen cursor jumped to the volcano coordinates, the magma at the broken finger of the stone statue suddenly overflowed and condensed into two letters in the air:

**NO**

Always flashes three times and then fades away.