The gravel crunched too loud. Every step sounded like a shout in the quiet. Y/N kept her eyes on Jungkook’s back. His hood was up. His shoulders were a wall between her and the floodlights.

The smuggler, Kael, stopped at the corner of two stacked containers. He held up a hand. Fingers spread. Wait.

A truck rumbled past. Its headlights swept the mud. Y/N pressed herself flat against a container’s rusted side. The cold bit through her coat. Beside her, a woman was already hiding—stranger, dark hair, pregnant belly straining against a torn sweater. The woman’s lips moved. No sound. Praying, maybe.

Then the lights passed.

Kael waved them forward. “Quick,” he breathed. “To the next row. Don’t run. Running gets you shot.”

They moved. Five steps. Ten. The pregnant woman followed them. Y/N heard her whisper to someone behind—a man, gaunt, carrying a duffel. Husband. They were a family.

A shout came from the left. “Halt! Halt, I said!”

Y/N’s heart stopped.

She turned her head slow. Fifty meters away, a guard had a flashlight pinned on a group of three—two men and an old woman. They’d broken from cover too early. The guard raised his rifle. Not aiming yet. Just showing it.

“Please,” the old woman said. Her voice carried across the staging ground. “Please, I have grandchildren—”

The guard fired. The bullet took her in the chest mid-sentence. She crumpled. The two men scattered. One made it ten feet before another guard appeared from behind a container and clubbed him down with the rifle stock. The third—the younger one—dropped to his knees. Hands up.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t, I’ll do anything, I’ll tell you anything—”

The first guard walked up to him slow. Put the muzzle against his forehead. “You’ll tell the dirt,” he said. Then he pulled the trigger.

The sound cracked across the port like a branch breaking.

Y/N couldn’t move. Jungkook grabbed her arm. “Eyes forward,” he whispered. His voice shook. “Eyes forward, don’t look.”

She looked anyway. The bodies lay in the mud. No one came for them. The guards lit cigarettes.

Kael tugged Jungkook’s sleeve. “This way. Quick and quiet.”

They rounded a stack of blue containers. The pregnant woman and her husband were still behind them. The woman was crying now—silent tears, hand over her mouth. Her husband kept touching her back. Reassuring her. Lying to her.

Another group of refugees emerged from between two shipping crates. Five of them. A man led, then a woman carrying a child, then two teenagers, then an older man with a cane. They must have been following a different smuggler. But their smuggler was gone.

A searchlight found them.

“Stop! Stop or we fire!”

The man with the cane tried to run. He took three limping steps. A single shot dropped him. The child started screaming. The woman holding it tried to shush it—pressed its face to her chest—but the screaming didn’t stop. It got louder. High and thin and endless.

“Shut that thing up!” a guard yelled.

“I’m trying,” the woman sobbed. “Please, he’s just a baby, he doesn’t—”

The guard shot her. Then the child. The screaming stopped.

The teenagers ran. They got farther than the others—almost to the next row of containers. But the guards had rifles, and the teenagers had legs. The boy went down first. The girl made it another three seconds. Then nothing.

Y/N’s legs gave. She didn’t fall—Jungkook caught her, held her upright, his hand clamped over her mouth before she could make a sound. “Don’t,” he breathed into her ear. “Don’t you dare make a noise. Please. Please, Y/N.”

She nodded against his palm. He let go slow.

Kael was already moving. “You want to live, you follow. Now.”

They followed. Past the bodies. Past the blood that looked black under the floodlights. Past a guard who walked within two meters of them but didn’t see them because he was looking at his watch, yawning, bored.

The pregnant woman stumbled. Her husband caught her. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t do this.”

“You have to,” he said. “For the baby. You have to.”

“There’s no baby anymore,” she said. “There’s nothing. They killed it the second they see it anyway. You know that. You know what they do to pregnant women in the facilities.”

He didn’t answer. He just held her arm and kept walking.

Kael stopped at a green container. Forty feet. A wire tie on the latch. He looked at Jungkook. “This is yours. The bribe got you air holes. A bucket. Two bottles of water. No food. You make one sound inside, I don’t know you. You make two sounds, I never saw you.”

“How long?” Jungkook asked. His voice was raw.

“Three days to New Seoul. If the ship doesn’t get searched. If the guards on the dock don’t get bored and open the wrong container. If you don’t suffocate.” Kael shrugged. “Same odds as staying.”

Behind them, another voice rang out. A man’s voice, desperate, loud.

“Wait! Wait, I have money! I have more than them, I’ll give you everything, just please—”

A shot. Mid-sentence. The voice cut off like a snapped wire.

The pregnant woman’s husband looked at Kael. “How much for one more container?”

Kael didn’t even turn his head. “No more containers. No more spots. You’re on your own.”

The woman started to beg. “Please. I’m pregnant. You see that, right? You see I’m carrying. Please.”

Kael looked at her then. Really looked. For a second, something shifted in his face. Then it went flat again. “That’s why they’ll kill you faster,” he said. “Not my problem.”

He turned back to Jungkook. “The wire’s cut from the inside. It’ll look sealed. Don’t pull it until I’m gone. Then crawl in. Close the door behind you. Don’t latch it all the way—leave it cracked a finger’s width or you’ll run out of air before the first hour.”

Jungkook nodded. His hand found Y/N’s again.

The pregnant woman was still begging. Not to Kael anymore. To God, maybe. To no one. Her husband pulled her away, toward the shadows between two other containers. They disappeared.

Y/N heard her whisper one last time. “Please, please, please—” Then nothing.

Kael held out his hand. Jungkook gave him the rest of the credits. Kael pocketed them. “Wait for the shift change,” he said. “Two minutes. Then go.”

He limped away. Didn’t look back.

The floodlights swept. The guards talked and laughed somewhere in the distance. The bodies lay where they’d fallen. The sky went from black to the color of old bandages.

Jungkook turned to Y/N. “You ready?”

She looked at the green container. At the wire tie that wasn’t really sealed. At the narrow crack of darkness inside.

“No,” she said. “But let’s go anyway.”

Two minutes. Then they moved.

They reached the green container.

Jungkook’s fingers found the wire tie on the latch. It looked sealed—Kael had done his job. But when Jungkook tugged, the tie slid loose without a sound. He pulled the latch. The door creaked. Not loud. Loud enough.

Y/N slipped inside first.

Dark. Then her eyes adjusted. A thin blade of light cut through a fist-sized hole high on the left wall—drilled, intentional, rimmed with rust. That light spread just enough to show her what she’d stepped into.

People. Dozens of them.

Not scattered. Packed. Sitting on the floor, backs against the corrugated walls, knees drawn to chests. Women holding children. A girl no older than fourteen cradling an infant. Three pregnant women—bellies round and tight beneath dirty coats—huddled together near a stack of wooden crates. The crates were huge, waist-high, stamped with Cyrillic lettering. They smelled of machine oil and sawdust.

No one spoke. No one moved. But every eye turned to Y/N.

A woman with a shaved head—she looked like she’d been a soldier once, or a prisoner—raised a finger to her lips. Quiet.

Jungkook came in behind Y/N. He pulled the door almost shut. Left it cracked a finger’s width, just like Kael said. The light from outside narrowed to a yellow slit.

Then the screaming started again. Outside.

Not from the port this time. Closer. A woman’s voice, raw and breaking, right outside the container row. “No, no, no, please, I have a baby inside me, you can’t—”

A guard’s voice, bored: “That’s exactly why we can.”

The woman screamed. A long, wet sound that turned into a gurgle.

Then nothing.