She was ten when they put her in the asylum.

There wasn’t an argument.

No screaming, no crying, no desperate pleading.

Just confusion.

Her parents sat across from her, their expressions careful, exhausted, full of misplaced sympathy. “Sweetheart, you need help,” her mother had said, voice gentle, as if she was explaining something obvious. “These things you’re talking about—these people, these places, these memories—they don’t exist.”

But she remembered them.

She remembered the coffee shop that used to stand on the corner of 5th Street, the one where she had spent Saturday mornings reading under the dim glow of Edison bulbs. But that shop had never existed. She had asked the clerk inside the convenience store that replaced it. He had laughed, like she was making a joke.

She remembered a different childhood best friend—one who had spent summers sneaking onto rooftops with her, stealing handfuls of candy from the corner store, daring her to sprint across train tracks before the whistle blew. But she had gone looking for him one night, only to find his house occupied by a stranger who had always lived there.

She had asked too many questions.

She had pushed too hard.

And now she was here.

The asylum was sterile, blank white walls, cold linoleum, the distant hum of fluorescent lights. They told her she was sick. That her mind was playing tricks on her.

But she knew the truth.

Something was wrong.

Reality had changed.

And she was the only one who remembered what it used to be.

The days blurred. The doctors spoke to her with voices carefully measured, too patient, too rehearsed, like they had been trained not to react no matter how deep her confusion ran.

She stopped telling them what she remembered.

She stopped asking questions.

Because every time she did, they adjusted her medication.

---

The asylum was supposed to be secure.

Highly regulated. Carefully monitored.

But too many patients were dying.

And even more were vanishing—marked as escapees, their records quietly sealed, their belongings packed away as if they had never been there at all.

TF141 had been sent in to find out what was really happening. Not because anyone expected them to uncover magic, or unravel reality, or chase something beyond human comprehension.

They were looking for something cold.

Something human-made.

Something buried beneath bureaucracy and false reports.

Their cover was simple.

They entered as patients.

Price, Ghost, Soap, Gaz, Roach, Alejandro, Krueger, Alex, Horace, Farah, Rodolfo, Laswell, and Nikolai stripped away their weapons, their comms, their control—submitted themselves to evaluations, walked through the doors willingly, let the locks slide into place behind them.