Chapter 2 - Room

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I awoke to the color gray.

The kind of gray that doesn't shift with the sun, that doesn’t promise time or weather or presence. Just permanence. Just silence. The ceiling above me was smooth steel. No markings. No seams. Just a solid, suffocating lid.

For a moment, I didn’t move. I let the weight of that silence press into my bones. My body throbbed with the memory of force — the drug, the struggle, the screams. Yukari’s voice, strangled by fear. Aiko’s little hands, reaching. The smell of chloroform, the prick behind my neck.

Then the stillness now.

My eyes adjusted. No windows. One metal door without a handle. A metallic toilet bolted to the floor. A camera dome in the upper corner, faintly red. And a black television screen, dead as coal, flush against the opposite wall.

No lights. Yet everything was lit, like the room itself breathed illumination.

It was a box.

A perfect, sterile, 12x12 coffin.

And I was the occupant.

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I rose slowly. Every joint protested. My breath fogged for a second — they keep it cold in here. Not for comfort. For control. Cold sharpens you. Keeps you from sleeping too deeply. Makes the skin ache. A subtle violence.

I stood and began my scan.

Twelve steps across. Twelve back. Four steps to the wall. One to the toilet. No air vent visible. No floor seams. I knocked gently on the walls — dull, solid responses. No variation.

No way out.

My pulse stayed even. Years on the force taught me one thing: panic is the predator’s favorite perfume. If I wanted answers, I had to become something colder than fear.

I approached the door. Seamless. No handle. No slot for keys or cards. Just a faint horizontal slit about shin-height. Maybe for food. Maybe for gas.

I laughed quietly. The sound startled me. I sounded like a man in a joke only he understood. A detective trapped in a steel cage. A cruel metaphor.

I sat. Cross-legged. Back straight. Palms open.

Time to think.

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First twelve hours: observation only.

That's what we were taught in isolation training. Rookies used to call it “ghost time.” You don’t scream. You don’t demand. You don’t talk to yourself. You observe. You build the room in your mind. Every detail. Every creak. Every inconsistency.

I stared at the camera dome. They were watching. Of course they were. What was this? Revenge? A trap? A setup? Where was Yukari? Where was my daughter?

The back of my throat tightened. I refused to cry. Tears were currency. They wanted to see me break.

So I gave them nothing.

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I discovered the scratch marks four hours in.

They weren’t deep. Just faint grooves along the lower panel of the left wall. Not random either. Grouped in fives. Like tally marks. 147 tallies.

Not mine.

Someone had been here before me.

Someone who counted days — or weeks — or maybe even meals — before they stopped.

That discovery should’ve unnerved me. Instead, it focused me. I found a metal rivet at the base of the toilet. I pried it loose and used the edge to make a new mark. Day 1. My mark was straighter. Neater.

I wouldn't die in here. I wouldn't vanish. I would leave behind order.

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The screen flickered to life around what I assumed was the twelfth hour.

No sound. Just static for three seconds. Then a sharp beep.

A white bowl of rice appeared onscreen. Slowly, it rotated. Then faded out.

A second later, the metal flap at the door clicked. A tray slid in. White rice. Water. A single boiled egg.

I approached cautiously. I waited. Five minutes. No gas. No explosion.

Just food.

I ate it.

Cold. Flavorless.

But it filled the space in my gut that panic wanted to occupy.

When I stood to return the tray, I caught something in the reflection of the now-dark screen.

A glint of red.

Not on me.

Not in the room.

It was in the screen’s reflection, just behind me.

But when I turned, it vanished.

I pressed my forehead to the glass. The screen didn’t react.

It was the same pendant from the night I was taken.

Ruby-shaped. Teardrop. Hung on black thread. I remembered it dropping to the floor when the third attacker stuttered. That little hesitation — the only human crack in a faceless assault.

Why was I seeing it now?

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They’re playing with me.

That was my first conclusion. Hallucination, maybe. Or stimulus conditioning. Maybe I’d been drugged again and this was the afterburn of some neurochemical trick.

Or maybe the answer was worse.

Maybe it was me.

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I spent the next hours — or days — running the same mental autopsy.

Who wanted me gone?

Not just dead. Removed.

You don’t trap someone like this unless you want them to rot unseen. No ransom. No video demands. No leaks to the media.

So who benefits from my disappearance?

I made enemies. God knows, in sixteen years as a detective, I buried enough devils in the ground. But nothing recent. Nothing big enough to warrant… this.

Unless it wasn’t about me.

Maybe it was about what I knew.

Or worse — what I didn’t.

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I tried talking on day two. Quietly.

“Rei Kirishima,” I said aloud. “Detective, Tokyo Metropolitan. Serial 89-KU47. I want to speak with my family. I want to know if they’re safe.”

Nothing.

I waited five minutes.

Then the screen flickered again. This time, just static. No image. No beep.

A game.

I started laughing again. This time louder. I couldn’t help it.

There’s something deeply absurd about begging to a wall.

Like confessing sins to a god you don’t believe in.

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I began dreaming in broken sound.

Yukari’s voice. Aiko’s laugh. Then replaced by something… not mine.

A voice that spoke with my own mouth, but not my words.

“It’s done.”

That phrase. I heard it just before blacking out in the apartment.

My voice.

Saying something I never said.

A confession from my mouth I never gave.

A memory someone else wrote inside me.

What if I didn’t know what I did?

What if I had done something?

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I pressed my palms to the wall and whispered: “Tell me what I did.”

The steel said nothing.

The room of nothing, after all, was exactly what it promised to be.

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To be continued.