1.

“Hah… hah……”

If she’d known it would come to this, she never would have made that resolution in the first place.

Why was there a cliff here? She hadn’t even strayed from the trail. Why?

What kept her from plummeting was a thick, protruding tree root. But she knew instinctively. She wouldn’t be able to hold on for long.

“Help! Is anyone there?”

Her throat felt ready to give out. How could a national park be this empty?

As the strength drained from her hands, a bitter contempt for her own stupidity rose up inside her. Stupid. She should have taken the settlement money and gone looking for a place to rent. Instead she’d gone on about new beginnings at the place she’d been abandoned, and now look at her.

Maybe it was the unexpectedness of standing at death’s door. Bewilderment, fear. More than any of that, the single emotion that rose above everything else was one thing only.

“It’s so unfair! D*mn it…… it’s so unfair!!”

Her shout echoed off the mountainside with no one to hear it, and the last of the strength in her hands gave way.

A dizzying weightlessness took hold. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Please. Please. Please.

* * *

“……Ow……”

A rough voice tore out of her. Startled by the sound of her own voice, her eyes tried to open on their own but seemed blocked by something. She had fallen from a cliff. She’d expected her body to be shattered with pain. The fact that she felt more or less intact was, strangely, more unsettling. She was afraid her spine or something had snapped.

“Wha…… what…… aaagh!”

Had her eyes been hurt in the fall? They were burning. The pain was bad enough to make her resent regaining consciousness.

“Ugh…… it hurts. It hurts……”

Her trembling hand moved toward her eyes. The moment it neared her face, someone grabbed her arm hard.

“Wh…… who are you?”

Unable to see anything, eyes burning, the sudden contact made her skin crawl. She shook her head involuntarily, as though trying to look around. But still she could see nothing.

“Lisa. I told you not to touch them.”

An unfamiliar accent. An unfamiliar voice. A stranger spoke with a note of warning.

“……Pardon?”

Her lips parted and a dull sound came out. She was so startled that the pain was briefly forgotten. When had anyone told her not to touch anything? Why was he angry? And above all else, who are you?

Confusion swept through her all at once.

‘Is he calling me Lisa?’

Eyes that wouldn’t open. Pain. Was she having a bad dream before dying? If this wasn’t a dream, she couldn’t make any sense of that name, ‘Lisa.’

“Since you won’t listen, there’s nothing to be done. You brought this on yourself. Remember that.”

The man spoke in an ice-cold voice. A faint, settled contempt lay beneath it. Her body trembled at the hostility of a stranger.

“Wh…… why are you doing this?”

The bewilderment lasted only a moment. The man took Lisa’s hands and began securing them somewhere. She wanted to stop him, but her body had no strength at all. She must have injured herself properly in the fall.

“Stop it!”

“……Who taught you such vulgar manners.”

A slap came without warning. A sharp, ugly crack rang out as her head whipped to the side.

The pain bloomed from her cheek and rang through her skull. The burning sensation in her eyes grew sharply worse.

“Ugh……”

A m*an escaped her involuntarily. This couldn’t be a dream. If it were a dream, her eyes wouldn’t feel like they were being scorched, and her cheek wouldn’t throb with swelling heat.

“Two days from now. Don’t even think about leaving this room. Bear that in mind.”

The man stepped back immediately. The sound of his footsteps grew more distant, and she gathered he was leaving.

A door creaked shut. The moment she thought the strange, violent man was gone, her mind sharpened.

“What…… ow. What on earth is happening.”

With her eyes burning like this, her head felt ready to split. Had she hit her head in the fall? If so, she should have woken up in a hospital. Whatever this place was, it was nothing close to a hospital.

‘Have I been kidnapped?’

Right. That might be it. Some kind of perverts might have picked up a person who’d fallen down a mountain.

‘I have to escape. Which means I need to get my arms free.’

Thud. Thud.

She tried stamping her feet, which at least weren’t tied. But no matter how hard she struggled, her body wouldn’t move properly. Whatever they’d fixed the chair to, it didn’t budge an inch.

She squirmed and thrashed for what felt like a long time. Then the pain spiked suddenly, as though it had broken through some threshold.

“Aaagh!!”

Every attempt to move stopped at once. At the same time, the strength drained out of her body all at once. Like someone had inserted a straw into her life force and swallowed it in a single gulp.

The body that had refused to move through all her struggling went limp. It felt as though she had turned to liquid.

“What did I…… ugh. What did I do so wrong……”

Resentment surged up immediately. The bitterness and grief of having been abandoned at birth were things she’d largely shed at the orphanage. Right, she’d told herself. Some lives are just like this. But the pain that had descended on her so suddenly was bewildering and utterly unfair.

She had watched every crosswalk signal her whole life. Because she didn’t want the younger kids at the orphanage to be looked at with contempt somewhere, just for being children without parents. She had tried so hard to live properly.

But even those thoughts kept breaking apart. So this was what it felt like when the exhaustion after unbearable pain stripped away every last bit of energy. She hadn’t known until now.

There was no way to stop her body from sliding down to the floor. Together with the chair she’d been sitting in, her bound hands and all, she toppled sideways with a thud. Then, from somewhere far away, the sound of urgent footsteps reached her.

Thump thump thump thump thump. Click.

“Lisa!”

An urgent voice. Another stranger’s voice, and yet somehow she felt a small measure of relief.

The sudden calm pulled her consciousness down with it.

‘Who on earth is Lisa.’

A sense of wrongness flickered through her fragmenting thoughts. Something about this felt like it had a reason, and her mind tried to chase it, but couldn’t hold the thread.

The world went dark. Then even that darkness faded. Complete blackout.

* * *

If she had to name this feeling, it would be ‘confusion.’

“Lisa! Lisa, open your eyes! Lisa!”

Coming back to her senses, the first thing she registered was touch. Her body felt like it was melting into the soft bedding that wrapped around her. Then came the sound of crying. She flinched, half-wondering if it was a ghost, then froze completely at the sight of a white-haired figure pressed against the side of the bed, weeping.

“Lisa. Sob…… you can’t die.”

The crying was so heartbreaking. She couldn’t find the right moment to announce that she was awake. So she lay there, eyes rolling quietly, studying this woman. What she’d taken for white hair was, remarkably, silver.

‘Where do I even start. First of all, I’m not Lisa, and I don’t think I’m dead. Hmm, if I say I was in terrible pain, she’ll probably be too shocked.’

It was hard to say anything. The biggest reason was simply that she had never seen this woman before in her life. And yet here was a stranger wailing and calling her by an unfamiliar name, which led to the fairly reasonable conclusion that this woman was deeply strange.

‘What do I do. Is this some kind of cult or something? I should run. I’ll pretend to fall back asleep and wait for my chance……’

But the sudden rollercoaster of thoughts didn’t last long.

The silver-haired woman snapped her head up all at once.

“Lisa!”

‘Her eyes…… are red?’

Eyes she had never seen in real life were staring straight at her.

“Wh…… what. What are you.”

The words slipped out before she could stop them. And the voice that came out was one she had never heard before either. The blood drained from her head and her body went cold.

“Lisa, what’s wrong? Don’t you recognize me? It’s Lena! Your little sister!”

“……What?”

“I need to call the doctor, the doctor again. Don’t move, just lie still!”

She stared blankly at the door as it slammed shut. Come to think of it, she had never seen that door before either.

Had she been dragged onto some kind of film set? Questions bounced around inside her like a rubber ball, impossible to predict. A strange, unsettling wrongness refused to go away.

‘Something is very wrong.’

She slowly pushed her aching body upright. But something was off. The frame of this body was far too thin.

The wrist that caught her eye looked like it could fit in one hand, nothing like the sturdy body she’d built through years of part-time work. And at the edge of that gaze, trailing over her shoulder and across the bedsheets, silver hair caught the light.