district 9 || stray kids

5

Time skip, one day

"Yesterday during maze I found another piece of glass," Chan reports during meal time. "Beside a fallen drone."

Junhoe lets a devilish smile tear across his face. "I did that. I chucked a rock at the forcefield."

"Good for you," Jeongin comments in a snarky tone over a mouthful of watermelon. "You could be the answer to our escape and chuck rocks at the air and raise suspicion to the doctor, then we all die."

Mark smacks him upside the head with one hand cheekily and continues eating.

"What about the drone, though?" Changbin asks.

"I think the glass must've taken it down." Chan bites into a slice of his fruit. Everyone nods contently.

"What did you do with the drone then?" Jaehyeong sips water from his cup. Jisung has started dozing off on Woojin's shoulder. Felix flicks half a spoonful of cold mashed potatoes at his face. It gets him in the cheek and he snaps awake, scowling at him.

Chan shrugs, pushing pieces of beef around his plate with a chopstick. "I kicked it aside. Was broken anyway."

Minho takes a swig from a plastic bottle. "You know," he starts, "we all could've been friends before the memory swipe. Maybe I even went to school with some of you guys."

"You look familiar, but I don't think we've ever conversed," Changbin says. "But then again I think I've seen Jisung in school..."

"What school did I go to?" Jisung asks with much enthusiasm, eyes glimmering.

"I don't remember that one. I hardly ever went to school," Changbin admits. Jisung frowns, a little disappointed.

"Don't worry, I think you hated school too," Changbin says. It puts Jisung at ease to hear it and he lays back against Seungmin. Across from them, Yoongi splutters and beats his chest; he tried to down a cup of water in one shot. Seungmin laughs at him.

"I don't think my mom loved me," Jin sighs, setting down his cup a little more forceful than he'd liked. "She wouldn't have given me up if she did."

"Look mate, think of this as a new life," Chan says, trying to comfort him. Felix nods in agreement across from him.

"I don't think she had a choice," Changbin mutters, pushing aside a watermelon rind.

After an hour, five nurses come in alongside the doctor to bring the boys back to their rooms, as well as send them into the maze. Chan finds he doesn't have study today. He whispers a few things to Changbin before disappearing into the maze and slips him a few pieces of paper from his sleeve cuff.

"Why red paper?" Changbin whispers.

"It was all I could find," Chan mutters.

...

The next morning, Changbin buttons up his sleeve cuffs tightly. If he wasn't trapped in a place where the sun never showed up or set, he'd buy cufflinks too.

"Head count." The doctor repeats the same words. "Don't move. Hold your tag out and stand straight."

Changbin pushes the cart again. For every boy he passes by, as he holds their hand to scan their wrist tag, he drops a tightly rolled up strip of red paper into their palm from his cuff as subtly as he can. He hopes with every inch of his heart that no one sees it.

Hyunjin glances at his back curiously as he walks away. The green light casts shadows under his eyes.

At night, Felix uncurls the paper. It contains badly scrawled Korean characters, but clear enough to read: coordinates, time, and place.

Jisung lays back against his bed in his room, ignoring his textbook, and reads the characters.

Chan smiles reading the paper rolled under his pillow and pumps his fist.

Relaxed, Minho giggles softly to himself and cries small tears of joy with his hand muffling his hiccups, wetting the paper. He buries his face into his bulky pillow and squeaks.

Every boy in the facility is unable to sleep that night, knowing escape is just four hours away, at three am when only a few nurses and robot janitors are around.