Days slipped by, each one carrying a weight of its own. No two felt the same, yet they blurred together in a rhythm that only the passage of time could weave.
Seraphyne made use of every spare moment, her patience steady, her voice carrying that calm firmness that demanded both attention and trust. She didn't drown us in memorization; instead, she guided us toward understanding, making sure what we learned could take root, not just vanish with the next sunrise.
She opened our world in pieces. Nature came first – the cycles of growth and decay, the hidden wisdom of trees, the quiet languages of rivers. Then came fragments of science, offered not like rigid lessons but like secrets she wanted us to hold.
She spoke of animals; those of the land with their sturdy steps, those of the sea with their endless grace, and even strange creatures from far-off places none of us had seen, only imagined.
Her lessons felt less like school and more like doors being unlocked one by one.
When it came to reading, she didn't rush us into new words. Instead, she worked patiently on the rhythm of speech, the weight of each syllable, and the way letters met the tongue.
I remember the thrill the first time I traced the numbers etched on the pocket of my uniform and realized I could read them. It was a small victory, but it felt immense, as though the cloth itself had revealed a secret only to me. Writing followed close behind, no longer the tangled struggle it once was.
For the others, it was easier. School wasn't foreign to them; they had walked through classrooms before, had seen chalk boards and ink-stained desks.
For me, every step was new, every success a fragile triumph. That difference sat quietly between us, but I carried it like a badge.
Seraphyne was impressed, sometimes even startled by how quickly we absorbed her lessons. Our minds worked faster than she expected, sharp for our age, almost unnervingly so. Yet the more she observed us, the more unease settled behind her composed expression.
Intelligence was one thing, but there was something else gnawing at her, something she could no longer dismiss.
Every day we walked into her presence changed, as if pieces of us had been rearranged in the night. If she had left us yesterday laughing, voices tumbling over each other in play, faces alight with the joy of learning, by the next morning those same faces would be pale, stiff, and unreadable. Our smiles were gone as though they had never belonged to us.
And then there was me. I knew the weight of her eyes lingering longer on me than the others. Where their sternness unsettled her, my condition alarmed her. I carried exhaustion like a shadow I couldn't shake. My body dragged itself to her lessons, my eyelids heavy, my thoughts drifting somewhere between waking and a fog I couldn't name – half-there, half-absent.
When I managed to grasp something; an idea, a phrase, or perhaps a pattern, it sparked alive in me with startling clarity. But by the next day, that brightness dimmed, slipping from memory like water through open fingers.
The number of children kept thinning, like pages torn out of a book. One by one they disappeared, and after two days new faces would arrive to take their place. The cycle felt endless, and mechanical.
None of the replacements were girls only boys, all of them unbearably young, their features still soft with childhood. And yet, the experiments forced on them carved something unnatural into their appearances, as though time itself had been twisted. They looked older than they should, their boyish innocence scraped away to make room for something hollow.
I stood out among them. By nature, I had inherited my father's height, tall for my age. To an outsider, my build might have suggested I was ten, maybe even twelve.
No one looking at me would have guessed the truth that beneath the stature, the voice not yet cracked, the half-formed expressions, I was only five years old. Five, and the youngest soul trapped in this place that pretended to shape us, but only stripped us down.
Seraphyne noticed, of course. She noticed everything. But closeness was a line she dared not cross. Her position here was fragile, bound by rules and permissions. To extend a hand, and to treat us like children instead of subjects, would risk everything.
And so she kept a careful distance – watchful, but restrained. Her compassion lingered at the edges, caught between what her heart wanted and what her work allowed.
She stood before us that day, her voice carrying words that slipped in and out of my grasp. I remember the cadence more than the meaning, the way her sentences rolled like a soft current.
If memory serves, she must have been explaining something simple, something foundational – "There are only three units in every form, and the basics of life are quite simple but should never be taken for granted." Perhaps it was science, perhaps philosophy. To me, it blurred together, but I still recall the quiet conviction in her tone.
Her eyes lingered on us differently than her words did; full of questions she dared not ask aloud. She searched our faces as though she could piece together what was happening beneath our skin. But the long-sleeved uniforms we wore gave nothing away.
The fabric hid the marks, the lines, and the traces of what had been carved into our bodies. Maybe that was the very reason we were dressed like this, not for modesty or formality, but to cover the truths the facility didn't want seen.
Even so, Seraphyne never surrendered to the silence or the distance. Day after day, she fought in the only way she could: by bringing light into a place that seemed built for shadows.
She tried to cheer us up, weaving stories with gentle smiles, slipping us sweet words as though they were treasures, and even presenting small gifts, each one different from the last. It wasn't much, but in this place where everything was stripped down to survival, those gestures felt like warmth we weren't supposed to have.
What troubled Seraphyne most wasn't just our changing moods or the pale shadows that clung to us – it was me. Even in the middle of her lessons, when her voice was steady and her hands moved gracefully across a board or a book, the doctors would appear at the door and call for me. No explanation, no hesitation.
I would rise, every gaze following me, and vanish with them into the corridors that smelled of steel and medicine.
Sometimes I wouldn't return until the next morning, and when I did, my body carried the weight of something unspeakable. My eyelids hung heavy, too tired to lift without effort, my limbs sluggish as though someone had wrung me dry.
Other times, I returned the same day, but so drained that it felt as if the world around me were only half real, as though I walked through it underwater.
Her eyes followed me more than the others. Concern, suspicion, curiosity – whatever it was, it was constant. She stared as though I carried answers locked inside me that she could not reach. And that attention did not go unnoticed.
Some of the children began to bristle under it, unsettled by the way she always singled me out with her gaze.
It wasn't that I looked worse than they did. In truth, I looked almost normal – more normal, even, than most of them. Outwardly, I blended better. Yet it was me the doctors always chose, me she couldn't stop watching. And that imbalance made me feel at once invisible among them, and unbearably exposed.
There were children in far worse shape than I was; Ragged skin, hollowed cheeks, eyes like old storms. But Seraphyne's stare always seemed to find me and linger longer. It was as if, beneath the more ordinary shell I wore, there was something denser, something that tugged at her attention in a way she couldn't explain.
Her gaze traced me the way a cartographer studies a strange mark on a map: curious, careful, and a little afraid of what the mark might mean.
Sometimes our eyes met across the room. For a heartbeat the world narrowed to that single locked space between us – an exchange that felt like a wordless question and a silent answer.
Then, as if embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment, she would look away so quickly it left the back of my neck prickling. Those swift, furtive glances carried more than concern; they carried an urgency that the other children noticed and resented.
Whispers began to coil through the group like smoke. Small things changed: heads turned when I passed, smiles thinned into tight lines, and hands that had once reached for the same toy now clenched at the seams of sleeves.
Their anger wasn't loud at first – a shove left in a corridor, a muttered comment under breath, but it accumulated until the air itself felt charged. The more Seraphyne watched me, the more their suspicion hardened into something close to hostility.
I felt it in the classroom: the sudden silence when I stood, the way eyes tracked my steps as if I were the cause of every loss. It made me small in a room where I should have been merely the youngest, not the target.
For Seraphyne, the scrutiny became a private burden she tried to carry alone; for the children, it became a grievance that needed an object. For me, it turned every lesson into a gauntlet.
None of us were prepared for the weight of that change. What started as a look had grown teeth, and the problem it birthed was larger than either of us knew how to handle