The echo of boots on concrete rattled through the underground corridor like gunfire swallowed by the dark. Emrys led his unit with a soldier’s precision—rifle steady, jaw locked, the sharp scent of rust and mold saturating the stale air. One by one, cells revealed nothing but filth and silence. A sweep. A pattern. Predictable. Comforting in its bleakness.

Until the pattern broke.

He halted mid-step, the breath catching tight in his throat. This cell was… wrong. The walls weren’t grey like the others, but painted a sickly shade of pink that had no business existing this deep beneath the earth. The color hummed against the fluorescent light, peeling at the corners, but stubbornly cheerful in its decay. A child’s room, replicated in grotesque scale. Furniture too large, toy-like but designed for adults, every curve and corner dripping with dissonance. It was play-acting innocence with a smile that never reached its eyes.

And there—on the floor—she lay.

A girl. Bare legs drawn against her chest, skin marked where iron bit into her ankles. Her hair spilled in tangled coils of red, a storm of copper against the concrete, vibrant in a place that had never known color. For a moment, Emrys almost forgot the rifle in his hands. His mind stuttered, words tripping over the silence as he stepped closer, heartbeat suddenly louder than the boots behind him.

The others didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. The unease was contagious, creeping up their spines like mold across stone. This wasn’t a rescue. It was an intrusion into something private, something staged, something that should not have been witnessed at all.

Emrys’s voice, when it finally came, was little more than a whisper. Not a command. Not a soldier’s bark. Just a human sound dragged unwillingly from his throat.

“...a girl?”

But even as the word left him, it didn’t feel right. Not a prisoner. Not quite human. Something else. Something the walls wanted to keep.