The older boy’s jaw tightened. "I want to see them now. I want to go home now."

"I know," Yuyan said softly. "I understand wanting that so badly it hurts. But there are two hundred of you, and the special team need to do this carefully to make sure everyone gets matched with the right families. It won’t be instant, but it will happen."

She sat with them for a while, letting them tell her about their families, their homes, the lives they’d been stolen from. The older boy had a younger sister who he was supposed to walk home from school. The younger boy had parents who ran a small restaurant and let him help in the kitchen. They clung to these memories like lifelines, proof that they’d existed before the basement, that they had places they belonged.

Moving through the guest wing, Yuyan encountered different variations of the same story again and again. Children who’d been sold because their families were poor and desperate. Children who’d been kidnapped for trafficking. Children who’d been promised jobs or education and then imprisoned instead. Each story was heartbreaking in its own way, each child carrying trauma that would take years to properly address.

In one room, she found a teenage girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, sitting alone and staring at nothing. Yuyan approached cautiously, recognizing the particular kind of disconnection that came from severe trauma.

"Hi," she said gently. "I’m Yuyan."

The girl didn’t respond immediately, didn’t even seem to register Yuyan’s presence. When she finally spoke, her voice was flat and emotionless. "They said we could leave. Go to better places. But I don’t believe it. Something bad always happens."

Yuyan sat down beside her, not too close, giving her space. "I understand why you’d think that. After what you’ve been through, trusting that things can get better is really hard."

"I was sold," the girl said, still in that flat tone. "My uncle sold me when my parents died. Said I was too expensive to feed. The people who bought me said I’d work in a factory, but instead they put me in the basement. Six months. Maybe longer. Time stopped making sense."

"I’m so sorry," Yuyan whispered, her twelve-year-old heart breaking for this girl only a year or two older than herself. "That’s not fair. None of this is fair."

"Fair doesn’t exist," the girl said. "Fair is a lie adults tell children to keep them compliant."

The cynicism in her voice was terrible to hear from someone so young. Yuyan wished she could argue, could tell her that fair did exist, that justice would be served, that everything would be okay. But she’d learned her own hard lessons about the world’s unfairness, being poisoned, spending months in a coma.

"Maybe fair is rare," Yuyan said instead. "Maybe it’s something we have to fight for rather than something that just happens. But my mother fought for you. She found you in that basement and got you out. She’s fighting to make sure you go somewhere safe. That’s a kind of fairness, isn’t it? Someone using power to help instead of hurt?"

The girl finally turned to look at Yuyan directly, really seeing her for the first time. "You believe that? That your mother is actually trying to help?"

"I do," Yuyan said firmly. "She’s not perfect, and she’s scary sometimes when she’s angry. But she cares about people who’ve been hurt. She understands what it’s like to be powerless and alone. That’s why she’s doing this."

The girl considered this, something shifting in her expression. "What happened to you?" she asked, noticing for the first time Yuyan’s distinctive silver hair, the lingering fragility in her frame that spoke of recent recovery.

"I was poisoned," Yuyan said simply. "By people I don’t know and probably wanted me gone. I was in a coma for months. When I woke up, everything had changed in a better way, I didn’t have a mother , but now I have, and she is the reason I’m alive today! That’s how I know she means it when she says she wants to help you, she has a kind and gentle personality but also very protective."

They sat together in silence for a while, two girls who’d survived different kinds of betrayal, finding a strange comfort in shared understanding that things were complicated and painful but not necessarily hopeless.

Eventually, Yuyan moved on to other rooms, checking on other children. Some were sleeping still, exhausted from their ordeal. Others were awake but didn’t want to talk. A few were playing quietly with toys that Yu Shou had somehow procured during the night, finding moments of normalcy in an abnormal situation.

It was in the corridor between the west and central guest wings that Yuyan encountered the teenage boy. He was standing in a doorway, his expression troubled, and when Yuyan approached with her characteristic kindness, intending to offer the same gentle support she’d given the others, she didn’t see the warning signs of how fragile his mental state actually was.

"Hi," she said, smiling softly. "I’m Yuyan. Are you okay? You look upset."

The boy’s eyes were red from crying, his face twisted with emotion Yuyan couldn’t quite read. "They’re going to send us away," he said, his voice rising. "I heard the man with strange eyes talking about it. They’re going to separate us again."

"It’s not like that," Yuyan tried to explain, moving closer instinctively, wanting to comfort him. "You’re going to safe places with doctors who can help. Places where..."

But she never got to finish the sentence. The boy’s trauma-damaged mind interpreted her approach as a threat, her words as lies, her presence as danger. His hands shot out and grabbed her shoulders, pushing her backward against the doorframe with surprising strength.

"You’re lying!" he shouted, his grip tightening painfully on her shoulders, fingers digging into flesh hard enough to bruise. "Everyone lies! They said we’d be safe before and then they locked us in the dark! Why should I believe you?"