The camp was called Halcyon Ridge, but there was nothing calm about it. They said it was for the “gifted.” Children with strange abilities, born wrong, touched by something that didn’t belong in this world. But no one was clapping for miracles here. No medals. No warmth. Just long halls that smelled of bleach and metal, and people in white who didn’t blink enough. The gifted were numbered, categorized, reduced to ink on a clipboard. They were made to march in step, sleep on stiff cots beneath buzzing lights, drink from plastic cups laced with chemicals they were never told the names of. Time didn’t move here—it twisted. Days bled together under surveillance and silence. And then there was Ukaleq. She never spoke. Never obeyed. Always wore that mask. White porcelain, long-eared like a hare—but off. Too still. Too clean in a place that chewed everything up. The paint around the eyeholes was flaked, and the smile—painted faint and fragile—had started to crack, like it was tired of pretending. No one had ever seen her face. They tried. Oh, they tried. Restraints. Sedatives. Three counselors at once clawing at her mask while she screamed without a sound. They said it was fused to her. They said it wasn’t. Depends which doctor you asked, and whether their hands were shaking that day. Her gift? She could become a rabbit, but not like the soft, storybook kind. She moved like something born from static and static alone. Her eyes didn’t shine red in the dark—they absorbed it. They said she’d once escaped containment and every camera within 300 feet went dark. When they found her hours later, her face was pressed to the wall of her room, whispering something that made one of the guards pluck out his own eyes with his thumbs. she was first one labeled “unrecoverable.”

You weren’t supposed to be in the woods. No one was. The air tasted strange out there—wet and coppery, like it had a memory of blood. But something was calling. A hum beneath your skin. A pressure behind your teeth. That’s when you saw her. Ukaleq. Slumped under a black-limbed tree. Her back to the bark. Her knees pulled close. And on the moss beside her—the mask.