Chapter 1

“Fear doesn’t kill you. It forces you to live too fast to remain yourself.”

Claustrophobia is a strange thing. It doesn’t grab you by the throat, it doesn’t scream in your ear, and it doesn’t chase you down a hallway with a knife. It just… squeezes. First the air. Then your ribcage. Then your consciousness.

I learned that I was afraid of tight spaces when I was seven, when a neighbor boy — Sam — decided to play a prank and locked me in an old shed behind the garages.

He didn’t hold the door for more than a minute. But I, like an idiot, screamed until I was hoarse. I cried all night afterward. Mom said it was just a fright. But I knew: it was something else entirely.

It was as if the space itself — those pathetic four square meters — was trying to crush me, to grind me between the walls, to make me a part of itself.

Paradoxically, I chose swimming.

Why?

Because water is also confining. Because a pool is a box. Because I always wanted to conquer my fear, to tame it. And it seems it only laughed in response.

My parents disappeared seven years ago. They simply didn’t return from an evening walk. No car, no witnesses — only the rain that lashed against the asphalt, erasing any tracks.

I couldn’t believe it for a long time. At first, I thought it was a mistake, a misunderstanding, that they had just gotten lost, were running late… but three days passed, then a week, then years…

No one spoke about my parents’ disappearance, as if they had never existed. As if they had dissolved — the way water disappears down a drain.

Since then, I have been raised by my aunt — strict, laconic, and un-familially detached.

My name is Miranda. I am a swimmer. Not just an athlete. I am part of a team where everyone has a pulse in unison, and our dreams smell of chlorine and starting signals.

And we have a coach.

Mr. Vines. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a face as if carved from steel. His gaze isn’t just evaluative; it X-rays you. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t ask how you feel. Because feeling is a luxury. He believes in discipline, not compassion.

They say he was a true legend in his youth. A swimmer with almost superhuman results — they called him “The Machine.” An Olympian. Then came the injury. The end of his career. A few years of silence. Rumors had it he worked as a design engineer in the defense industry — precision, calculation, control, order.

And then — a return to sports. But from the other side. Not as a participant, but as a creator. An architect of other people’s strength. He coached as if he were programming humans like machines. Emotions interfere with speed.

To us, he was something like a God. A stern one. An unforgiving one. One for whom a second chance is a sign of weakness.

I remember the first time I saw Mr. Vines. I was fifteen. I had just moved from the junior group to the adult one, and I felt like a nothing among titans.

He came to the qualifiers like a judge. He sat at the back of the hall, silently, with a notebook and a thermos in his hands. No one introduced him, and he didn’t introduce himself. He just sat there, as if by accident.

When I stepped onto the block, my toes were trembling. My heart wasn’t beating in my chest — it was somewhere in my throat. I jumped too early, hit the water like glass, and already knew the start was ruined.

But then… then I swam.

I don’t remember the process itself, only a frantic desire not to be worse. Not to fail. Not to be “that girl who forgot how to breathe.”

When I surfaced, he was already standing. Notebook under his arm, arms crossed. His gaze — like an X-ray, as if he were deciding right then: what are you made of — meat or steel?

“Name?” he asked.

“Miranda,” I wheezed.

He nodded.

“You’re in.”

And that was it.

No “well done.” No “congratulations.”

You have been processed. Next.

From that day on, I tried with all my might. Not for medals — for that look. So he would look again and say: “you are made of steel.”

I learned to breathe differently.

Not like normal people — fully, freely. But like those who are hiding.

Small sips. Soundlessly.

I learned it in the water, when fear hammered at my temple like a metronome: tick-tock, you won’t get out, you’re here forever.

Claustrophobia isn’t just the fear of being locked in. It’s the fear of being forgotten.

As if you are shut away, and no one will ever open the door. Because they’ll forget. Because you don’t matter.

I felt the water in the pool like the lid of a coffin. Cold, heavy, suffocating.

But it was my battlefield. Every swim was like a war against myself.

I developed my own way of coping.

When I started to panic, I imagined that I was not me. That my body was just a mechanism. Hands, legs, breath — everything on command.

I would turn off my fear, like an old television.

For a second. For two.

That was enough to get from wall to wall.

To survive.

Once, I stayed underwater longer than I should have. Forced — the coach demanded we swim a segment “on a hold,” without a gulp of air, as if we weren’t people, but dolphins with an oxygen tank in our spines.

I lost my orientation.

I didn’t know where up was, or down.

The light from the lamps above looked like needles, and the chlorine burned my eyes and skin.

My heart began to panic, and a scream flashed in my head: You won’t make it out. This is it. This is the end.

I surfaced, thrashing like a fish, and started coughing. I was shaking.

He was standing on the deck.

Watching. Silent.

Then he threw out:

“Next time — either don’t panic, or don’t surface. Die with dignity.”

That wasn’t an insult. That was an instruction.

I learned not to show it. Neither fear. Nor weakness. Nor doubt.

I learned to smile in the face of those pushing you into the abyss.

At first, I thought it was a victory over myself.

Now I think — it was something else.

A loss. An erosion.

The point where Miranda ended, and… just a team member began.

He repeated:

“Either you’re first, or you don’t exist.”

When we were driving to those competitions, the bus was silent. No music, no talking. Everyone was thinking about time, about breath, about the start. And also — about him.

He sat in the front, not turning around. But we didn’t need to see his face to understand: he was waiting for gold. Nothing less.

The city where the competition was held was strange. Gloomy. As if it were too gray even for autumn.

And the pool itself…

We were warned right away — it would be a “special” format. A trial. Support for a new sports project: the labyrinth pool.

We thought — a show. Advertising. A gimmick for the spectators.

But something inside was wrong.

Corridors underwater. Multiple paths to the finish line. Turns, mosaic walls, mirror panels. It seemed it wasn’t for competition, but for getting lost.

We reached the finish. Not first. Second.

0.7 seconds.

And everything collapsed.

The coach didn’t yell. He just looked. As if he had stopped recognizing us.

A day later, he said:

“Tomorrow you will go with me. A new type of training. As close to extreme as possible. Developed by me personally.”

We didn’t know that we had crossed the line then. The threshold.

The boundary from which not everyone returns.

The team was called “Iron.” Not because of the results — though we had them — but because of how we held on. Like nails driven into a board, we held onto each other and to the cruel system we had become a part of.

There were eight of us in total. Seven plus me.

Rose — my roommate and probably the only one I truly trusted. Her voice always sounded a little quieter than necessary, and her gaze seemed sluggish, like someone living inside their own head. But in the water, she was fast as a shot.

Thomas — loud, self-confident, a joker. He was always the first to rush to carry out the coach’s tasks, as if he wanted to prove he could be a leader.

Lia — quiet, but with the eyes of a fighter. Her muscles were like taut strings, and it seemed she didn’t swim, but cut through the water.

Simon — the youngest, still a teenager, but already with the abs and posture of a Marine.

There were three others — Ailis, Nick, and Jack. Each with their own story, each trained in their own way. Sometimes it seemed to me that we weren’t even a team, but elements of a single mechanism that the coach was assembling for himself, like a Lego set where there should be no unnecessary parts.

He said:

“If you aren’t a team, you are victims. Understood?”

Yes, we understood. We understood a lot that we didn’t talk about.

Inside the collective, there was our own hierarchy. Unofficial, but quite palpable. Leaders and followers. The coach encouraged it. Pretended not to notice how the strong pushed the weak around. Sometimes he even gave hints. “Don’t pair up with her—she drags you down,” “Let him sit on the bench — he’s not ready.”

The hardest moment happened in winter, during a closed training session. The equipment was right by the pool. The air was like steam in a bathhouse, everything humid, slippery, buzzing with the sound of a whistle.

Rose wasn’t looking good then. She had caught a cold but didn’t dare say anything. She had a fever of nearly 104°F (40°C), but she was in the water.

We were doing circular swims with weights — a special vest that pulls you down. To learn “to extract strength from despair,” as Mr. Vines said.

On the third lap, Rose went to the bottom. I noticed immediately — she wasn’t surfacing for too long.

I lunged for her.

She was unconscious.

We pulled her out. Me, Lia, even Simon abandoned his start and jumped in.

The coach didn’t budge.

When Rose was lying on the tile, lips blue, eyes closed, he approached.

He looked down from above, as if at a broken thing.

And said:

“Weakness must die. It’s good she didn’t drown. But you need to draw conclusions.”

We did.

From that day on, we knew: here, you are either a machine or trash.

We lived like in the army. Wake up at 6:00. Exercise. Breakfast by the minute. Then training — dry and in the water. Then theory classes. Then water again.

Freedom? Freedom was only in our dreams. But even there — in our chlorinated dreams — he stood. Mr. Vines. With a stopwatch, with a harsh voice, with the demand: faster, stronger, higher.

Sometimes I caught myself thinking that I didn’t know what my own voice sounded like outside the water.

And I didn’t know what I wanted — truly.

Do I want gold? Or do I just not want to be crushed?

Those competitions were our test. The final selection. A chance to escape the gray mass into history.

And we — lost.

Nothing by the standards of eternity. Infinity by the standards of Mr. Vines.

When we climbed out of the pool, breathing heavily, eyes red, muscles like concrete, he was just standing by the edge.

Silently.

His face — stone.

We already knew: worse than his shouting was his silence. Worse than a blow was his quiet.

In the evening, at a meeting in the hotel, in a room that smelled of wet towels and worn plastic chairs, he said:

“I saw how you swam. And you know what I’ll say? You are weak. You started fearing defeat more than you wanted to win. This must be corrected. I have developed a new program. The program is not for everyone. Only for those ready to go to the end. Tomorrow—we leave. The weak can stay behind. I’m not holding anyone.”

He left, leaving a heavy trail in the air behind him.

We sat in silence.

One by one, we realized: no one would stay.

No one would dare.

We had already crossed the threshold.

At dawn, a bus arrived for us.

The sky was the color of steel, the asphalt glistening from the night rain.

I stood on the sidewalk with a bag over my shoulder and thought: “Something has cracked. Inside. But it’s still holding.”

We were going where training turns into trials, and fear turns into fuel.

Where labyrinths are built.

And where every step could be your last.