Lin Bei was sold by his best friend for thirty thousand dollars a head.
Twelve people, three hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Outside the train car, Liu Yang's haggling sounded just like someone bargaining at a market. Six years of friendship, ten thousand meals, and countless times saying, “It's okay, brother. I've got you.”
Sold.
But that wasn't the end. Several SUVs intercepted them along the way. Gold-rimmed glasses, mercenaries, fully loaded rifles. At three times the price, they were resold on the spot for a million dollars in cash. The last thing Lin Bei saw was a syringe piercing his neck, liquid entering his veins, and his vision collapsing inward from the edges.
He woke up. A deserted island. A white laboratory.
A monitoring band was locked around his wrist and couldn't be removed. His number was 142. More than a hundred living people were locked behind glass walls. They drew blood every day and took five people away every five days. No one ever returned, until the fifteenth day, when a Black man was carried back. He was emaciated, his eyes unfocused, and all he could do was repeatedly draw the same symbol: a circle with a line through it.
It was a surgical procedure. Implanting a chip into a living person's brain.
Then it was Lin Bei's turn. On the operating table, he saw the thing descend: the size of a broad bean, with three metal feelers and blue light flickering at their tips. Then his consciousness sank into darkness.
When he woke again, there were corpses everywhere. Some sprawled on the reefs, some lay stretched out, others were half-submerged in the sea. They all wore the same blue jumpsuit as him. Failed specimens. He shouldn't have survived
Then a voice rang inside his head.
“Get up. Go right. Coconut tree. Don't make a sound. Stay alive first.”
The voice was called 142. The same number as the one on his wrist.
It had awakened the moment he was wheeled into the operating room.
