Inside the container, a child started to whimper. A mother clamped her hand over its mouth. The sound muffled to a hum. The mother’s eyes were wide and dry. She’d run out of tears miles ago.

The bald woman shifted. She had a wooden plank—broken off one of the crates—clutched in her fist. Not a weapon. A security blanket. She whispered to Y/N, voice like gravel: “Get down. Sit. Don’t touch the door.”

Y/N lowered herself between a young girl with a bloody bandage on her arm and a man who couldn’t have been older than twenty, missing three fingers on his left hand. He stared at the wall. Didn’t blink.

Jungkook sat beside her. His thigh pressed against hers. He was shaking. So was she.

The light from the hole fell in a dusty beam. It lit the face of a pregnant woman in the corner—maybe eight months along. She was knitting. A tiny sweater. Blue yarn. Her hands moved steady, automatic, like she’d done it a thousand times. Like she wasn’t sitting in a metal box waiting to either drown or suffocate or get shot.

Someone coughed. A dry, careful cough. Smothered into an elbow.

The container swayed slightly. Footsteps on the roof. A guard walking past. Everyone froze. Even the infant in the fourteen-year-old’s arms stopped breathing. The footsteps paused. A radio crackled. Indistinct chatter. Then the footsteps moved on.

The bald woman exhaled. Soft. “Count to sixty,” she whispered. “Then we breathe again.”

They counted. Not out loud. In their heads. Y/N counted with them. One, two, three…

At forty, the truck engine started. The one that would haul them to the port. The container lurched. Metal groaned. The wooden crates shifted an inch.

A child whispered, “Mama, I’m scared.”

The mother didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She was crying. Silent tears, same as the pregnant woman outside had cried. Same as Y/N was crying now.

Jungkook took her hand. Squeezed once. Hard.

The truck began to move.

The truck lurched forward. The container swayed like a cradle.

Y/N kept her eyes on the thin blade of light from the hole. Watched dust float through it. Watched the pregnant woman in the corner keep knitting. Blue yarn. Tiny sweater.

Her own belly pressed against the waistband of her pants. She’d been hiding it for months. Loose clothes. Hunched shoulders. Never standing straight. But inside the container, sitting on the cold steel floor with the others, she couldn't hide anymore. Her back ached. Her ribs felt like they were cracking open from the inside.

She reached for the hem of her hoodie.

Jungkook saw her move. His hand covered hers. “What are you doing?”

“I can’t breathe in this thing,” she whispered. “Not the air. The lie.”

She pulled the hoodie over her head. Folded it. Placed it on her lap.

Her belly was huge. Round and tight, the skin stretched shiny under the pale light. Nine months. Maybe less. The baby had dropped two weeks ago. She’d felt it settle into her pelvis like a stone sinking in water. Every step since had been a wager with gravity.

The container went quiet. Not the quiet of hiding. The quiet of seeing.

The bald woman stared. The girl with the bloody bandage stared. The man missing three fingers finally blinked—and kept staring. Even the knitting woman stopped her needles. Just for a second. Then she started again, faster.

A young boy, maybe five, pointed. “Mama, that lady has a baby in her belly too.”

His mother pulled his hand down. Didn't say anything. Her face said everything.

Jungkook turned to Y/N. His eyes moved from her face to her belly and back. He’d known, of course. He’d known since the night she’d told him in their one-room apartment, voice flat, hand over her mouth so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. But knowing and seeing were different.

He reached out. Slow. Like he was approaching a wounded animal. His palm hovered an inch above her belly.

“Can I?” he asked. His voice cracked.

Y/N nodded.

His hand landed. Warm. Heavy. The baby kicked. Hard. A heel or an elbow—something sharp and insistent pressed against Jungkook’s palm from the inside. He flinched. Then he smiled. The first smile she’d seen on his face in weeks. It didn't reach his eyes, but it was there.

“Strong,” he whispered. “Like you.”

The container hit a pothole. Everyone jolted. A wooden crate scraped against the wall. Someone shushed someone else.

Y/N covered Jungkook’s hand with hers. Pressed his fingers deeper into the curve of her belly. The baby kicked again. Three quick thumps. A message. I’m here. I’m still here.

“We’re not going to make it,” she said. Not a question. A fact.

Jungkook shook his head. “We’re already on the truck. Already past the first checkpoint. Already—” He stopped. Swallowed. “We’re closer than we were yesterday.”

The pregnant woman in the corner stopped knitting. Looked up. Her eyes found Y/N’s. Same belly. Same fear. Same stolen hope. She held up the tiny sweater. Finished. Blue. She folded it once, twice, tucked it into her coat pocket. Then she pressed her hand to her own belly and closed her eyes.

The truck turned. The container leaned. People slid. A woman cursed under her breath. The infant in the fourteen-year-old’s arms woke up and started to cry. A small, thin cry. Hungry or cold or both.

“Shh, shh, shh,” the girl whispered. She put her finger in the baby’s mouth. The baby sucked. Quieted.

Jungkook’s hand hadn’t left her belly since she’d pulled off the hoodie, and his thumb still traced the same slow circle, round and round the curve of her stretched skin like he was drawing a promise on her from the inside out. “She’s quiet now,” he said, his voice barely above a breath, meant only for the space between their two faces.

Y/N opened her eyes—she hadn’t realized she’d closed them—and looked at him in the thin light from the drilled hole. “She?” she asked, and the word came out flat, not a question really but a challenge, because she’d heard this from him before, this certainty about things he couldn’t possibly know. He nodded, serious and certain in that way he got when the world had taken everything else and left him only his stubbornness to hold onto.

“She’s a girl,” he said. “I’ve known since the first kick—the way she moved, the way she went still whenever you were scared, the way she kicks harder when I talk to her. That’s a daughter’s kick.” He pressed his palm flat against her belly as if to prove it, and the baby obliged with a small shift, a rolling movement that made Y/N’s breath catch.

“You’ve known since you decided to want one,” she said, and there was no cruelty in it, just exhaustion, just the bone-tired truth of a woman who had already buried one child and couldn’t bear the thought of burying another. “Same thing,” he replied without missing a beat, and then he smiled—that small, lopsided smile that used to come easily before the disappearances, before the food ran out, before Luna—and added,

“She’s going to have your eyes, and my stubbornness, and she’s going to be a nightmare for every guard who ever looks at her wrong. I can already see it. They’ll try to put her in a camp and she’ll talk her way out just by glaring at them.” Y/N almost laughed at that, almost let the sound escape, but the memory of where they were—the metal box, the twenty strangers, the guards outside with their rifles—caught it in her throat and turned it into something else entirely. “I hope it’s a boy,” she said, and the words fell heavy between them.

Jungkook’s hand stopped moving on her belly, and for a moment the only sound was the truck’s engine and the distant cry of gulls and someone’s child whimpering in its sleep across the container. “Why?” he asked, and his voice was careful, the way you speak when you already know the answer but need to hear it said out loud. “Because boys survive,” Y/N whispered, and she wasn’t looking at him anymore—she was looking at the rusted wall, at the dust in the light, at the pregnant woman in the corner who had stopped knitting again and was pretending not to listen.

“Because this world eats girls alive, Jungkook. You’ve seen it. We’ve both seen it. The labor camps, the facilities, the way they look at a pregnant woman like she’s a cow to be slaughtered for meat. I can’t—I won’t—watch another daughter disappear.” The word another hung in the air between them like a physical thing, heavy and sharp-edged, and Y/N felt it cut her throat on the way out.

Jungkook’s jaw tightened, the muscle jumping beneath his stubbled skin, and when he spoke his voice was low and rough and steady in a way that reminded her of the first time they’d met—before Ostravia had ground them both down into these hollow versions of themselves. “Luna wasn’t your fault,” he said, and he said it like a man stating a fact, like a man repeating a truth he’d already proven to himself a thousand times in the dark of their apartment while she slept beside him.

Y/N looked away from him then, looked at the thin blade of light from the hole and the dust floating through it and the knitting woman’s pink yarn—anything but his face, because his face was kind and she didn’t deserve kindness, not for this, not for what she’d done.

“She was three years old,” she whispered, and her voice cracked on the number the way it always did, the way it had cracked every night for two years when she woke up reaching for a daughter who wasn’t there. “Three years old. And I let her walk to the market with me. I knew there was a patrol that day. Everyone knew. The old women in the stairwell were warning each other—‘don’t take the children out, they’re taking them for the camps’—and I heard them, I heard every word, and I still held her hand and walked her right into them.”

“You didn’t know they’d be there at that corner,” Jungkook said, and his hand started moving again on her belly, slow and steady, as if he could anchor her to this moment, to this container, to him. “I knew they were somewhere,” she shot back, and the words came out sharper than she’d intended, a blade of self-hatred that cut them both.

“Somewhere isn’t the same as there,” he said, calm and unshaken, and she hated him a little for being calm, for being steady, for not falling apart the way she had fallen apart and never quite put herself back together. “We needed bread,” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, because the story had its own momentum now and she couldn’t stop it even if she wanted to.

“There was no bread in the apartment. Luna was crying from hunger—not loud, she never cried loud, she knew better even then—and I thought, just to the corner, just to the market and back, what are the odds they’ll be on that exact street at that exact time?” She laughed then, a short, broken sound that wasn’t a laugh at all but a cough of despair. “The odds were everything. The odds were always everything in Ostravia.”

“She called my name,” Y/N said, and now the tears came, silent and hot, sliding down her cheeks while she stared at the rusted floor of the container. “When they pulled her away from me. She screamed ‘Mama, Mama, Mama’ and I couldn’t move. I just stood there like a post in the ground. A guard had his rifle on me—not even pointed at my head, just resting on his shoulder like he was bored—and I didn’t run at him, didn’t claw his eyes out, didn’t do anything but stand there with my hands in the air while they threw her into that black van.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper so low that Jungkook had to lean in to hear her. “I heard her screaming for two blocks. Two blocks, Jungkook. And then the van turned a corner and I didn’t hear anything anymore. Just the market noise. Just people pretending they hadn’t seen anything. Just the world going on like a three-year-old girl hadn’t just been stolen from it.”

Jungkook shifted his whole body toward her then, ignoring the creak of the container and the strangers watching and the risk of making noise, because none of that mattered compared to the woman falling apart in front of him. His free hand came up to her face, turned her chin until she had to look at him, and his eyes were wet too—she saw that now, saw the grief he’d been carrying just as quietly as she’d been carrying this new child.

“Listen to me,” he said, and his voice was rough but gentle, the voice he used to use with Luna when she woke from a nightmare. “There were six of them. Rifles. A van with blacked-out windows and probably a driver and probably a radio to call for backup. What were you going to do, Y/N? Fight them with your empty hands? Scream at them until they felt bad and gave her back?”

He shook his head slowly, his thumb brushing a tear from her cheekbone. “You would have died. You would have died right there in the street, and Luna would have watched you die before they took her anyway. Is that better? Is that what she deserved—to have her mother’s blood on her hands before she even understood what death meant?”

“I should have tried,” Y/N said, but her voice was weaker now, the fight draining out of her because his logic was a knife and he was cutting away the rot she’d been carrying for two years. “I should have done something. Anything. Even if I died. At least she would have known I tried.” Jungkook’s jaw tightened again, and for a moment she saw the anger beneath his calm—not anger at her, but anger at the world that had made her believe this lie about herself.

“You would have died,” he repeated, slower this time, as if she were a child who needed to hear a lesson twice. “And she would have watched you die before they took her. And then she would have spent whatever short time she had left in that camp thinking about her mother’s body on the pavement. Is that the memory you wanted to give her?”

He paused, let the question settle into her bones. “Because I knew Luna. I knew the way she looked at you. You were her whole world, Y/N. Her whole world. And if her whole world had fallen down dead in front of her, she wouldn’t have survived the first night. She would have just… stopped. The way a candle stops when you blow it out.”

The baby kicked then—hard, right under Jungkook’s palm, a sharp and insistent movement that made them both look down at her belly. Y/N put her hand over his, pressing his fingers deeper into the curve, feeling the life inside her push back against the weight of all that death. “Luna had your hair,” Jungkook said after a long moment, and his voice was softer now, the anger gone, replaced by something tender and aching.

“Curly and unmanageable. Remember how she used to wake up with it sticking straight up on one side? Like a little dandelion that had exploded overnight. And she’d come stumbling into our room—remember?—and crawl into bed between us and put her cold feet on my back and laugh when I yelped.” Y/N remembered.

She remembered everything. The way Luna blew bubbles in her milk until it spilled over the rim of the cup. The way she sang made-up songs to the rats that lived in the walls, nonsense songs about cheese and moonlight and the cat that never came. The way she called Jungkook “Koo-koo” because she couldn’t say his name right, and how he’d pretended to be offended but had secretly loved it.

“I see her sometimes,” Y/N said, and her voice was steadier now, the tears still falling but slower, like rain that had finally stopped trying to flood the world. “In my dreams. She’s older now—maybe six, maybe seven, I can never tell. She has braids in her hair, and she’s wearing a dress I’ve never seen before, a blue dress with flowers on it. And she’s playing in a field of flowers, just running and running, and she never looks back at me. No matter how loud I call her name, she never turns around. Like she’s forgotten me. Like I was never her mother at all.”

Jungkook shook his head firmly, his thumb still wiping her tears even as new ones fell to replace them. “She hasn’t forgotten you,” he said. “How do you know?” she asked, the same question she’d asked him a hundred times in the dark of their apartment, the same question she already knew the answer to but needed to hear anyway.

“Because I haven’t forgotten her,” he said simply. “And I’m not even her mother. I’m just the man who taught her how to blow bubbles in her milk and who carried her on his shoulders when her feet got tired and who held her while she cried about the rat that died behind the stove.”

He paused, his eyes searching her face. “If I remember her—every curl, every laugh, every single made-up song—how could she possibly forget you? You were the sun she orbited around. You were the reason she woke up smiling every morning even when there was no food for breakfast.”

Y/N pressed her forehead to his then, closing her eyes, feeling the warmth of his breath on her lips. “I don’t know if I can love this one,” she admitted, and the words came out raw and honest and terrible. “Not because I don’t want to. Because I’m afraid. Because loving a girl in Ostravia is like handing the government a knife and telling them where to cut. They will find her, Jungkook. They will find her the way they found Luna. The way they found every other child with a mother who loved them too much and not enough all at once.”

Jungkook pulled back just enough to look into her eyes, and she saw something there that she hadn’t seen in months—not hope exactly, but something close to it, something that looked like a man who had decided to survive whether the world wanted him to or not. “Then we get her to New Seoul,” he said.

“And we teach her to be stronger than Ostravia. Stronger than the guards. Stronger than every man with a rifle and a black van. We teach her to run faster than them, to hide better than them, to fight dirtier than them. And if they still come for her, we die in front of her—not frozen, not standing still with our hands up, but fighting. Screaming. Making sure she knows, down to the last second of her life, that her parents never stopped trying to save her.”

“And if it’s a boy?” Y/N asked, because she needed to hear the other side of it, needed to balance the scales of her fear. Jungkook’s hand moved on her belly again, tracing that slow circle, and he almost smiled. “Then we teach him to protect girls,” he said. “Starting with his mother. Starting with every pregnant woman hiding in a shipping container on her way to somewhere better. We raise him to be the kind of man who stands between the guards and the children, not because he wants to be a hero but because it’s the only thing worth being.”

The baby kicked again—three quick thumps in a row, like a heartbeat, like a message from the inside out. Y/N put her hand over Jungkook’s and pressed. “I still hope it’s a boy,” she whispered. “I still know it’s a girl,” he whispered back. “We can’t both be right,” she said, and this time she almost smiled too. “We can both love her,” he said.

“That’s the only thing that matters. The only thing that’s ever mattered. The only thing that will matter when this truck stops and those doors open and we find out whether we live or die.”

The truck crawled forward, each rotation of the wheels a small victory against the mud and the morning and the weight of twenty-two bodies pressed inside a steel box meant for cargo, not for humans. Y/N shifted on the cold floor, her hips aching from the hard surface, her back screaming from the curve of her belly, and she turned her head toward the thin blade of light that came through the drilled hole in the container wall.

It was barely bigger than her fist, that hole, rimmed with rust and the ghost of whatever had been stacked against it before—but it was enough. Enough to see the port unfolding outside like a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding.

She pressed her eye to the gap and held her breath.

The truck was moving alongside a long chain-link fence topped with razor wire that curled in spirals against the grey sky, and beyond the fence was a staging area lit by floodlights that hadn't been turned off when the sun came up. There were vans there. Black vans.

The same kind she'd seen two years ago when Luna had been pulled from her hand and thrown into the dark. Her chest tightened, but she couldn't look away. There were women being pulled from the backs of those vans—not gently, not with any pretense of dignity, but by their arms and their hair and the collars of their coats. Some were pregnant. Some were not. All of them were screaming.

A woman in a grey dress—no coat, no shoes, her feet bare on the gravel—was trying to crawl away from a guard who had her by the ankle. She clawed at the mud, leaving thin trails in the dirt, and she was begging in a language Y/N didn't recognize, a desperate stream of words that meant nothing to the guard.

He dragged her back toward the van and kicked her in the ribs until she stopped moving. Then he picked her up by the back of her dress and threw her inside like a sack of grain. The van doors slammed. The engine started. The woman's face appeared at a small window—pressed against the glass, mouth open, eyes wide—and then the van pulled away and Y/N couldn't see her anymore.

A child came next. A boy, maybe seven, maybe eight, it was hard to tell from this distance and through the rust-flecked hole. He was running. Running faster than a child should have to run, his thin legs pumping, his arms pinwheeling, his mouth open in a scream that Y/N couldn't hear over the truck's engine but could feel in her bones.

Two guards were chasing him, not running hard, not even hurrying really, just jogging with the lazy confidence of men who knew there was nowhere for him to go. The boy reached the fence and tried to climb it. His fingers caught in the chain-link. He pulled himself up two feet, three feet, four feet. Then the razor wire caught him across the chest and he fell backward onto the ground, and the guards didn't even break their stride.

One of them picked him up by the collar of his shirt. The boy kicked and thrashed and bit the guard's hand. The guard backhanded him across the face, and the boy went limp. Not unconscious—Y/N could see his chest still moving—but limp the way a rabbit goes limp when a hawk has its claws in its back. The guard carried him to a different van, a smaller one, and dropped him inside. The doors closed. The van didn't move. It just sat there, idling, waiting for more children.

Y/N's hand flew to her mouth to stop the sound that wanted to come out.

Beside the vans, in a cordoned-off area marked with yellow tape, a row of women knelt on the ground with their hands on their heads. They were all pregnant. Every single one of them. Their bellies were round and low, some of them so close to term that the babies must have been pressing against their ribs, and they knelt in the mud while a woman in a white coat walked down the line with a clipboard.

The woman in the white coat stopped in front of one of the kneeling women and said something. The kneeling woman shook her head, frantic, her mouth forming words that Y/N couldn't read from this distance. The woman in the white coat sighed—actually sighed, as if this were an inconvenience—and nodded to a guard standing behind her.

The guard pulled the kneeling woman to her feet. The woman screamed. The guard put a hand over her mouth. The other pregnant women on the ground didn't move. They didn't look up. They just knelt there with their hands on their heads and their bellies in the mud and their eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance where nothing good was happening.

Y/N pulled back from the hole. Her heart was hammering so hard she thought the people next to her must be able to hear it. She pressed her back against the container wall and closed her eyes, but the images were burned into the backs of her eyelids—the woman being thrown into the van, the boy caught on the razor wire, the pregnant women kneeling like livestock waiting for slaughter. She felt Jungkook's hand find hers in the dark, his fingers cold and calloused, and she squeezed so hard she felt his bones shift under her grip.

"What did you see?" he whispered, his mouth close to her ear.