False Hope Was Cheap and Cruel

Mu Li was an ordinary student.

He had grown up on Landon Star, a drab industrial planet on the frontier, born in one of its identical prefabricated alloy homes and breathing air that still smelled of machine oil despite passing through three layers of filtration.

Every day, he squeezed onto the cheapest shuttle bus to travel between school and home.

His grades were average, and he did not talk much.

He had no grand ambitions, either.

His biggest dream was simply to get into a somewhat better vocational college.

To find a stable job after graduation.

And let his parents stop worrying about him.

If there was anything remarkable about him,

it was his face.

All his life, there had been no shortage of people flocking around him, and love letters from secret admirers filled his private messages on the Star Network.

Even the auntie who served food in the school cafeteria, when she saw him,

would not only keep her hand from shaking, but also scoop an extra helping of meat onto his plate.

But lately, things had been unsettled on Landon Star.

Troubling posts had begun appearing one after another in a corner of the Star Network's local channel.

People were going missing.

At first, there had only been one or two inconspicuous missing-person notices.

Then they gradually grew more numerous.

Someone connected the disappearances and discovered a chilling detail they had in common:

The missing people were all exceptionally good-looking.

When Mu Li's parents saw the news, his mother went pale on the spot.

His family was not wealthy.

Mu Dad worked as a loader at Starport's cargo terminal, and Mu Mom worked for a cleaning company in the commercial district.

Their combined wages were just enough to support the three of them.

Even so, they gritted their teeth and rearranged their work schedules.

Every day, they did everything they could to make time, taking turns accompanying Mu Li to and from school.

Mu Dad took him in the morning, and Mu Mom picked him up in the evening.

But life on Landon Star was busy, after all.

Overtime, shift changes, last-minute assignments.

A laborer's time was never their own.

As those posts on the Star Network gradually attracted less attention,

weeks passed without any new reports of disappearances, and the tension eased like a slowly loosening string.

Mu Li's parents began occasionally letting him walk part of the way alone, or hurriedly telling him over the communicator, "We really can't get away today. Be careful on your way home."

They thought, It's been so many days. Surely everything's fine now?

One evening,

Mu Li was waiting for the shuttle bus alone.

Industrial exhaust had stained Landon Star's gray sky a murky orange-red.

From where he stood, he could just see the tower cranes at the distant Starport.

Mu Li was looking down at his communication wristband when he saw a message from his mother:

We're working overtime tonight. There's food in the fridge. Eat first and don't wait for me.

He replied, "Okay."

Then someone came up behind him and clamped a handkerchief soaked in an anesthetic over his mouth and nose.

Mu Li's parents waited until late into the night.

Until every call they made on their communicators was met with a cold busy signal.

Until they had run along every route he might have taken.

They asked everyone who might have seen him, and even obtained the Starport security system's surveillance records.

There was nothing.

Their child, Mu Li, seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Like an insignificant speck of dust, silently swept away by Landon Star's ceaseless industrial storm.

He had not left the slightest trace.

The Starport cameras had not captured him, and no witnesses in the neighborhood had seen him. In the vast machinery that kept the entire planet running, not a single frame had been left of their child.

For Mu Li's parents, this regret was not grief they could release by having a good cry. It was a set of sharp teeth sunk deep into their marrow, gnawing day and night at what little reason they had left.

Mu Dad grew quiet and withdrawn, sitting all night on the old sofa in the living room, his communication wristband clutched in his hand. The screen stayed lit on Mu Li's contact page, as though if he waited a little longer, that familiar profile picture would light up again.

Mu Mom shut herself in Mu Li's room, going through his old photos over and over.

Starting with the holographic recordings from his infancy.

That wrinkly little thing swaddled in blankets, waving chubby little hands and giggling at the camera, while Mu Dad clumsily held a bottle beside him and she herself showed half a weary but happy face at the edge of the frame.

All the way to the casual selfie her child Mu Li had taken the day before he disappeared:

In the photo, the boy curved his lips at the camera. He had not deliberately posed, yet he was already impossibly good-looking.

Behind him was Landon Star's ever-present gray sky.

Murky and oppressive.

Yet that face brought a touch of brightness to it.

Mu Mom's fingertips hovered over the projection, tracing the outline of his face through the air.

A tear struck the base of the holographic projector.

At times like these, she was always filled with regret.

Why didn't I go pick him up that day? Was overtime pay more important than our child's life?

If I'd lost my job, so be it. I could have found another one.

The one thing Landon Star never lacks is work for laborers.

But I only have one child. Once he's gone, he's truly gone.

There isn't another like him in the entire universe!

My child, my child.

Where on earth are you?

Before disaster struck, people always held on to false hope.

They thought bad things would not happen to them of all people. So many others were fine—why should they be so unlucky?

But when disaster really did strike, they discovered just how cheap and cruel that false hope was.

In a haze, Mu Li heard someone speaking beside his ear.

His consciousness slowly rose from the depths of confusion.

He managed to open his eyes a crack.

Through his blurred vision, he could vaguely make out a figure looking down at him.

Mu Li's eyes flew open.

The lingering effects of the anesthetic had not completely worn off, and his limbs were limp and weak.

He forced himself to sit up, bracing against the icy floor, and looked around.

This was a huge cage.

Thick alloy bars stretched from the floor all the way to the ceiling.

Each one was as thick as an adult's arm.

The walls outside the cage were made of cold metal.

Several dim, yellow-tinged cold lights hung from the ceiling, their light so faint it was like a layer of dirty gauze overhead.

And inside the cage, many boys like him were being held.

At a glance, there were at least twenty or thirty of them.

Their hair came in different colors—gold, silver, fiery red... deep blue—and their eyes were even more varied.

They were all about his age, sixteen or seventeen.

Perhaps a little younger; even the oldest could not have been over twenty.

If there was one thing they all had in common, it was that they were all good-looking and pleasing to the eye.

Mu Li's heart sank.

He remembered the posts about disappearances on the Star Network.

He remembered the rumors of those "good-looking" people vanishing into thin air one after another.

So they were all here.

"Awake?" a voice beside him asked.

Mu Li turned to look at the person next to him.

He was a black-haired, black-eyed boy, sitting against the bars with one leg bent and an arm resting casually on his knee. His features were much more sharply defined than those of the other pretty boys in the cage, with prominent brow bones, a clean-cut jawline, and a handsome face.

"Handsome" suited him better than "beautiful."

That boyish, somewhat sharp-edged bearing made him stand out all the more among the delicate, pretty faces in the room.

Mu Li could see no fear in his black eyes.

Nor could he see any anxiety.

It was as if being locked up in this godforsaken place was no big deal to him.

But Mu Li noticed something.

The boy was sitting with his back against the bars, and the hand on the arm resting on his knee looked relaxed.

In fact, his five fingers were slightly curled, ready to exert force at a moment's notice.

The black-haired boy glanced at Mu Li.

"You've been captured, but you'd better stay calm for now. Don't shout or scream, or they'll come teach you a lesson."