The Days I Once Lived

In this world, getting hurt isn’t the scariest thing. The scariest thing is that your wounds never heal.

Ethan Ward suffers from Blood Wasting, a condition like that. His skin is tougher than normal, but once it breaks, the bleeding won’t stop. If he wants to live, he has to lie in the company’s healing pod. It costs five hundred each time. He earns just twenty-five for a full day’s work.

So, like the 120,000 other Blood Wasting slaves, he has no choice but to wear yellow work clothes and risk his life in dangerous factories to buy himself more time. Every injury means another debt. One more injury, one more debt. Life is a wound torn open again and again, never allowed to scab over.

Then Ethan discovers that this isn’t a disease at all. It’s something the company deliberately engineered into their genes for profit. Even the medicine they hand out every day is designed to make them bleed more.

He wants to turn his life around. Along with two coworkers, he plans to steal money, disguise themselves, and break into a hospital to seize the machine that can prove everything. But the company makes its move first.

After the gunshots, someone falls and someone runs for their life. Ethan is left with only two choices: keep bleeding, or become the one who makes 120,000 people bleed.