Chapter 1: Into the Abyss (2)
D-Zone was a scam compound near the China-Myanmar border, a place most Chinese people had at least heard of in news reports, always accompanied by words like "telecom fraud," "forced labor," and "unable to return."
When Elyse was dragged through D-Zone's gate, she finally understood what those words truly meant. This was not just an industrial park—it was a prison. Guard towers stood at regular intervals, ringed by walls three meters high, topped with barbed wire and surveillance cameras. Armed men patrolled in pairs, their expressions indifferent, as though human lives were nothing more than numbers on a ledger.
She was taken to a processing area, where a female guard strip-searched her with mechanical efficiency, confiscating every personal item. The guard was stoic and silent, her fingers cold as ice, rummaging through Elyse's body like searching through a pile of ragged clothes. Elyse bit her lip so hard it bled, holding back bile that rose endlessly.
But this was only the beginning.
She was assigned a communal dorm room—eight bunk beds, most already occupied. The women inside ranged from barely twenty to over forty, some gaunt and listless, others merely numb. After Elyse entered, a few looked up briefly, their eyes flickering before turning away like she didn't exist.
No one spoke. No one welcomed her. This was a place that had long since eradicated any sense of warmth between people.
From the third day on, Elyse was forced to start "working."
Her job was simple on the surface—using a phone and computer to chat with specific targets, setting traps to draw them in, doing everything possible to make them deposit money into accounts that didn't belong to them. The entire process had a highly standardized script, with an entire department developing strategies and analyzing targets. People like Elyse were just the frontline workers executing the con.
If she didn't meet her daily quotas, the punishment was a beating, followed by being locked in a dank, windowless room—sometimes with no food or water. Elyse quickly learned that resisting was pointless. She wasn't brave, but she was rational. In a place like this, what mattered most was staying alive.
She memorized faces, routes, schedules, passwords, codes. Every piece of information might be the key to her escape. She kept her head down, completed her work mechanically, and became as invisible as she could.
She also started looking for any potential allies.
In the compound, there was a young woman named Sylvie.
Sylvie was a few years older than Elyse, and no one knew exactly when she'd been brought in. What everyone did know was that she was one of the "higher-ranked" women in D-Zone—not because she was someone's girlfriend, but because she ran a small group of her own, overseeing several floor operations. She had curly hair cut to her shoulders, a petite frame, but her eyes possessed a rare steadiness, like someone who had seen far too much but refused to be broken.
Sylvie was the only person who spoke to Elyse first.
One evening, on the way back from the canteen, Elyse was shoved by a male guard for walking too slowly. She fell, scraping her knee on the gravel. Sylvie walked by, pulled her up without a word, and threw a glance at the guard that was not defiant, not angry—just cold, with a faint flicker of something Elyse couldn't quite identify.
"Be careful," Sylvie said quietly. Then walked on.
This was their first exchange.
From then on, Sylvie would occasionally share a bit of information with Elyse—a shift in guards' routines, a newly added patrol route, the location of a particular key. She always spoke in a tone so casual, so indifferent, that it seemed like she was merely commenting on the weather. Yet each piece of information was precise and valuable.
Elyse sensed that Sylvie wasn't an ordinary victim. But she never asked, and Sylvie never explained. In a place like this, asking questions could get you killed.
Sometimes at night, when the other women in the dorm had fallen asleep, Elyse would stare at the ceiling, silently reciting everything she'd learned that day. She imagined herself cataloging each piece of data, filing it away in labeled folders in her mind.
Sometimes, the emptiness would swallow her whole. She would think about her family, her life before all this—the tiny apartment she rented in the city, her steady if boring office job, the commute she took for granted, the noodle shop on the corner she frequented. All of it seemed like another world now, impossibly far away.
But every time she felt herself teetering on the edge of despair, she'd whisper to herself: You must survive. You must survive.
Because only the living can escape.