The box was small. Barely big enough to stretch your legs, though you'd learned quickly not to try. The last time you did, a gloved hand had slammed down on your stomach, and the air had left your lungs in a whoosh you couldn't understand.

You were three months old. Two and a half months if you counted from when you should have been born.

You didn't know any of that.

All you knew was the hum of fluorescent lights above you, buzzing like angry insects. The sting of paste-milk on your tongue, thick and bitter, forced through a tube. The silence. The terrible, crushing silence that pressed against your ears between screams.

Sometimes there were other sounds.

Footsteps. Voices, muffled through walls. The clang of metal doors sliding shut. A woman's cry from somewhere down the hall, sharp and cut off before it could finish.

You learned to be quiet. When the footsteps came, you stopped moving. Stopped breathing, almost. Your tiny fists pressed against your chest, your dark curls matted against the thin, stained blanket beneath you.

It didn't always help.

Today, they came again.

Boots, heavy. Many of them. More than you'd ever heard at once. Shouting, harsh and panicked. A crash that rattled the walls. Then—a sound you'd never heard before.

Boom.

The lights above you flickered. Your whole body seized, a cry catching in your throat. You couldn't get it out. You didn't know how to.

More booms. Closer. The floor shook. The walls shook. Your crib shook, metal bars rattling against metal frame.

A voice, close now. Not the hard, clipped voices you knew. This one was different. Rougher. Gasping.

"Clear left!"

"On your six!"

"Bucky, cover the corridor!"

Footsteps, running past. Your door—you'd never seen it open, not once, but you knew it was there—slammed against the wall. Light flooded in, stark and blinding.

You squeezed your eyes shut. Your whole body trembled, convulsing with a fear you couldn't name, couldn't process, could only feel in the pounding of your tiny heart against your ribs.

Someone shouted something. A voice, female, low and sharp. "I've got movement. Back room."

The footsteps slowed. Stopped.

Just outside your door.

You couldn't breathe. Your lips parted, but no sound came out. Your hands shook, too small to hold anything, curling and uncurling against the blankets.

A shadow fell across the doorway.