Tuan’s words were like a sweet stream seeping through the thick door, slowly finding their way into every hidden corner of a soul long dried out. Each sentence, each word, was like a drop of water poured gently into Valentina’s heart. The past she had chosen to bury suddenly found its way back to the surface that day. Though it had been shrouded in darkness since the moment she was born, there were still faint traces of light lingering somewhere within it—and in those fragile glimmers, Valentina saw herself smiling beside Tuan, gazing at a star-filled universe.
Valentina Tereshkova had been one of the test subjects of the Gene-Edited Embryo Development Project using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. She was a lovely little girl, with short chestnut-brown hair and a pair of deep blue-violet, doe-like eyes – eyes as mesmerizing as a starry night sky. Her small, delicate lips and round, soft cheeks added a gentle, feminine charm to her innocent, kind-looking face.
She possessed the sharpness and intelligence typical of a Western girl, yet carried within her the soft, restrained temperament often associated with Asian women. Had she been born into an ordinary family, perhaps she might have lived a warm and peaceful life.
Valentina was born with innate psychic abilities. Her early childhood passed in relative calm – until her first awakening, when she was six years old.
From that moment on, the nightmare officially began.
Endless experiments, conducted day after day, quickly wore down her fragile body. Her once rosy complexion gradually turned pale. Dull, persistent pain clung to her relentlessly, even in her sleep. Dark circles formed beneath her eyes, and bluish veins began to stand out starkly across the backs of her hands.
As time passed, Valentina withdrew into herself. An invisible fear of adults slowly took root within her – especially those dressed in green surgical gowns. It was they who injected strange liquids into her body day and night, inflicting unbearable pain. And it was also they who extinguished the colorful dreams of a young girl barely past her tender years.
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“You’ve got insanely beautiful eyes!!”
Those words were the first to pull Valentina out of the dark tones of her life’s sketch. Startled, she hurriedly buried her face in the book she was reading. The boy standing before her seemed to be about her age. His eyes were fixed on her as if she were some rare creature in a zoo. He was rather small – perhaps even shorter than her – yet his mouth never stopped moving. She had no idea where he found the energy to talk so much.
“You’re the girl people have been calling a witch lately, right? I heard you sent two huge guys flying into the walls without even touching them.”
He slammed his fists together to reenact the moment, complete with exaggerated sound effects to make his performance more vivid.
“After that, the whole place went crazy. Everyone started saying you were evil and cruel, just like the witches in fairy tales. They said your skin was pale like a dead fish, that your hair was all messy like a ghost’s, and stuff like that… But no one ever told me you had eyes this beautiful.”
With that, the strange boy plopped down beside Valentina, casually leaning his back against the bookshelf behind them. He pointed toward the large skylight window of the common room.
“Look over there. That star shining in the corner belongs to the Big Dipper. It’s the brightest constellation – and also the easiest one to recognize when you look up at the night sky. People in the old days used it to find their way when they got lost in deep forests, or in empty places like deserts.”
After saying that, he lay flat on the floor to get a better look at the star, completely unconcerned about whether Valentina was actually listening.
A moment of silence passed between the two strangers, broken only by the laughter of other children in the room. The boy remained lying there at ease, one arm resting across his forehead, while the girl stayed shyly bent over her book, her cheeks burning red as she struggled to find a way out of the situation. A single minute felt as long as an hour.
