Ryan let the hologram spin, its glow painting moving shadows on every stunned face. The cold, sterile exterior of the facility shimmered above them, towering and inescapable—just like it had felt in his memories. The mountain winds in the background of the footage seemed to whistle through the room itself, as if time was collapsing around them. The board outside read "Children of W.I.N.T.E.R"
“We lived here,” Ryan began, his voice quieter now, like a whisper barely daring to disturb the truth. “High in the mountains. No parents. No birthdays. Just doctors in white coats, who fed us pills and fear. Every day they said the same thing: You are infected. If you ever leave, millions will die.”
A dry laugh escaped Sarah, the girl with auburn braids. She leaned against a wall, arms folded. “Sounds like a rejected sci-fi plot.”
Ryan’s eyes snapped to her, fierce. “Then why does it still hurt to remember?”
Before she could retort, he tapped the hologram device again. It blinked, shifted. Now it played a different scene—one from inside the facility. Dim gray halls. Children sitting silently at steel tables, eating identical meals in silence. Their wrists bore blinking cuffs, thin but tight, glowing with the dull blue of restraint.
“Day 217,” a younger Ryan said on the recording. He looked directly into the lens. “Still no cure. Ella had another seizure today. The doctors told me not to speak to her anymore. Said it’s contagious… but I don’t believe them.”
The feed glitched, static crawling across his young face, then cut to black.
Gasps followed.
“That was… you?” Alisa asked, her voice barely audible.
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. And—” he tapped again, the light flickering—“this is you.”
A girl appeared on the projection. Violet eyes. Delicate features. A haunting familiarity that drew an audible breath from Alisa.
“She called herself Ella. But she was you. I’d bet my life on it.”
Alisa took a step back, almost stumbling. She was shaking her head, but her eyes were locked on the image. “I don’t… I don’t remember…”
“Of course you don’t,” Ryan said. “They erased it. They scrubbed us clean before we were dropped into these ‘normal’ lives.”
Jason, tall and sharp-jawed, scoffed from the back. “So you’re telling us we were all prisoners in some experiment? That we escaped and got dumped here like… test rats?”
Ryan turned toward him. “No. We didn’t escape. I escaped. You’re still inside. This village—your families—it’s just another version of the cage. Softer walls. Smiling guards.”
Silence fell again. But this time, it was different. Not disbelief… unease.
“Why?” Emma whispered. “Why would they do this?”
Ryan looked at her, eyes heavy. “Because they weren’t trying to cure us. They were studying us. Testing how far you could twist a mind before it broke.”
And one by one, the others began to realize—he wasn’t trying to scare them.
He was trying to save them.
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