"I saw them," she whispered into his skin. "I saw what they do to them. The pregnant women. The children. They don't even pretend anymore. They just—they just throw them in like they're nothing. Like they're garbage."

Jungkook's hand came up to the back of her head, cradling her skull against his shoulder. "Don't look again," he said. "Keep your eyes in here. Keep your eyes on me. On the baby. On the floor if you have to. But don't look out that hole again."

"I have to," she said. "I have to know what we're running from. I have to remember. Because if we make it to New Seoul—if we actually make it—I need to remember why we left. I need to remember what they did so I never let myself forget that this place exists and that there are people still inside it."

Jungkook didn't argue. He just held her tighter and pressed his lips to her hair and let her cry against his neck while the truck carried them closer to the ship and the ocean and whatever came next. Behind them, somewhere in the container, someone was praying. The words were old and formal and probably forgotten by everyone but God, but the woman saying them said them anyway, over and over, like a charm against the dark.

The truck stopped at a gate. A guard's voice called out, bored and nasal, asking for papers. The driver answered in a language Y/N didn't recognize. Papers were exchanged. A flashlight beam played across the side of the container. Everyone inside held their breath. The pregnant woman in the corner stopped knitting. The fourteen-year-old clamped her hand over her infant's mouth. The bald woman gripped her wooden plank so hard her knuckles went white.

The flashlight passed.

The gate opened.

The truck moved forward.

They were inside the port now. The ship was close. Y/N could smell it—the salt, the diesel, the rust of a thousand voyages. She kept her face pressed to Jungkook's neck and didn't look out the hole again. But she didn't close her eyes either. She couldn't. Because every time she closed them, she saw the little girl standing alone in the staging area, crying for a mother who would never come. And she knew, with a certainty that sat like a stone in her chest, that the little girl's mother was probably already dead—thrown into a van just like the others, or shot in the street, or dragged off to a facility somewhere far away where she would spend the rest of her short life wishing she'd never been born.

The truck kept moving.

The ship grew closer.

And Y/N held onto Jungkook like he was the only solid thing left in a world that had turned to water.

The truck slowed again, this time with a finality that felt different from the earlier stops—no gentle coast to a gate, no idle chatter between driver and guard. This was a hard brake, the kind that threw everyone forward against the person in front of them, and the engine didn't just idle down but cut off completely. Silence fell over the container like a dropped curtain. Then came the voices. Not the bored, routine calls of the port guards. These were sharper. Military. The kind of voices that didn't ask questions but issued commands.

"Out of the vehicle. Now. Papers on the hood. Hands where we can see them."

The driver's door opened. Footsteps on gravel. A mumbled exchange in low tones—the driver's voice, nervous and fast, the same language he'd used at the gate. Then another voice, louder, speaking Ostravian with a heavy accent from the eastern provinces. "Container contents. What's in it?"

"Machine parts," the driver said. "Sealed at the factory in Sector Seven. Shipping manifest is on the clipboard."

A long pause. Y/N pressed her eye to the hole but saw only the side of another truck and a concrete barrier topped with razor wire. She couldn't see the guards. She could only hear them. And what she heard made her blood run cold.

"Machine parts," the officer repeated, and there was amusement in his voice now, the lazy amusement of a cat that had found a mouse but wasn't ready to pounce yet.

"Funny. We've had twelve containers come through this checkpoint in the last two hours. Every single one of them had machine parts. Every single one of them was sealed at the factory in Sector Seven. And every single one of them had people inside. Women. Children. Pregnant bitches trying to run to the coast."

He paused, and Y/N imagined him lighting a cigarette, taking his time, enjoying the power of the moment. "So I'm going to ask you one more time, driver. What's in the container?"

The driver didn't answer. Or maybe he did, but his voice was too quiet to hear. What Y/N heard instead was the sound of a rifle butt hitting a skull—a wet, hollow crack—and then the driver's body hitting the ground. Someone groaned. Someone else laughed.

"Open it," the officer said.

Inside the container, panic bloomed like a flower made of ice. The bald woman was already moving, her hands flat against the back wall, feeling for something. Then she found it—a seam in the metal, a hidden panel that slid sideways to reveal a second door, makeshift but solid, built from scavenged wood and bolted into the container's frame. A temporary wall. A false back. Behind it was a space half as deep as the container itself, just big enough to press bodies against the metal in darkness so complete it felt like drowning.

"Everyone back here," the bald woman hissed. "Now. Quiet. Move like smoke."

People scrambled. The pregnant woman with the blue yarn shoved her knitting into her pocket and crawled on hands and knees. The fourteen-year-old clutched her infant and slid between two wooden crates. The man missing three fingers pulled a girl of about ten behind the false wall, his hand over her mouth before she could whimper.

Y/N tried to stand but her belly made it impossible to move fast—she was a turtle on its back, all weight and no leverage—and Jungkook hooked his arms under her shoulders and dragged her backward across the steel floor.

The front door of the container rattled. Someone was working the latch from the outside.

"Faster," the bald woman whispered. "Faster, faster, faster."

Jungkook got Y/N behind the false wall and then looked around wildly, his eyes searching for something—anything—that would get them off the floor and out of sight. The space behind the temporary door was cramped, but there was a wooden crate against the back wall, massive and old, stamped with Cyrillic letters and roped with thick twine.

It stood nearly as tall as the container's ceiling, leaving only a narrow gap of maybe eighteen inches between its top and the metal roof. A gap just big enough for two bodies to squeeze into, if they were desperate enough and quiet enough and willing to risk everything on a climb that could break their necks.

Jungkook grabbed the twine and pulled himself up, his boots finding purchase on the crate's rough slats. He climbed fast, the way he used to climb the fire escape of their apartment building when the patrols came at night, and when he reached the top he swung his legs over the edge and reached down for Y/N. "Come on," he breathed. "Come on, give me your hands."

Outside, the latch gave way. The container door swung open with a groan of tortured metal. Light flooded in—harsh, white, the light of floodlights and early morning and the end of everything. Y/N heard the officer's boots on the steel floor. Heard him step inside. Heard him stop.

"I know you're in here," the officer said, and his voice was calm, almost gentle, the voice of a man who had done this a hundred times and knew exactly how it would end. "I know you're scared. I know you don't trust us. But listen to me—you're not in trouble. We're not here to hurt you. We're here to help."

Jungkook's hands wrapped around Y/N's wrists and pulled. She scrambled against the side of the crate, her belly pressed flat to the wood, her feet slipping on the twine. Her muscles screamed. Her lungs burned. Above her, Jungkook's face was a mask of strain and terror, his jaw locked, his eyes wide.

"Come on," he mouthed. No sound. Just the shape of the words.

She found a knot in the wood, a place where two slats met at a corner, and she pulled herself up another foot. Jungkook grabbed her under the arms and hauled her over the edge. They landed in the narrow gap between the top of the crate and the ceiling, their backs against the metal roof, their bodies pressed together so tight she could feel his heart hammering against her ribs.

Below them, the officer kept talking.

"I know you can hear me," he said, and his footsteps moved deeper into the container, slow and deliberate. "I know you've heard stories about what happens to people who get caught. Most of those stories aren't true. Some of them are. But I'm not here to take you to a facility. I'm not here to separate you from your children. I'm here to process you. To get you registered. To make sure you get food and water and a warm place to sleep."

A pause. Then a sound that turned Y/N's stomach to water—the officer patting the side of a wooden crate, the same kind she and Jungkook were hiding on top of.

"There's no reason to hide," he continued, and his voice was so kind, so reasonable, so perfectly pitched to sound like safety. "Come out. Come out slowly, with your hands where I can see them, and I promise you—I promise on my mother's grave—nothing bad will happen to you today."

Behind the false wall, someone was crying. Soft, wet sobs that she was trying to muffle with her sleeve. A young voice. A girl's voice.

The officer heard it too. "There," he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice now, the smile of a fisherman who had just seen a tug on the line. "That's it. That's good. You're being so brave. Just a little more. Just come out and let me see you."

The crying stopped. There was a long moment of silence so complete that Y/N could hear the blood rushing in her own ears. Then the sound of the false door sliding open—not the whole way, just a crack, just enough for someone to peer through.

"I trust you," a girl's voice said. Young. Terrified. Pregnant—Y/N could hear it in the way her breath came short, the way her words were broken by the weight in her belly. "Please. Please don't hurt me. I'm only sixteen. I didn't want to run. My mother made me. She said—"

The gunshot was deafening in the enclosed space. It slammed against the metal walls and multiplied into a hundred echoes, each one louder than the last, until Y/N thought her eardrums would burst. The girl's voice stopped mid-sentence, cut off like a string that had been snipped with scissors.

They were dead.