Warning: This chapter contains violent and
disturbing scenes
On the shore of Amazon, the helicopter had settled over dark sand. Its rotors were still now, but the sand around it kept lifting whenever the wind blew in off the sea. Ahead, the yacht waited, calm in water that bore no resemblance to the destruction behind it.
Cypher stood facing a figure in a long coat, a hat hiding his features.
"Did it reach you?"
"Yes." Then, without preamble: "Did Gargantua succeed?"
"No. But something happened I didn't expect. I'll write a report when I get back to Aristia."
"I'll read it." A pause. "More importantly — did you kill him?"
"Yes. And I destroyed the entire facility."
"Good."
Cypher looked back at the forest behind him. Smoke was still rising from it, a gray column leaning with the wind.
"Will another base be built here?"
"No. Amazon's no longer viable. We got what we wanted from these experiments." Then, without changing his tone, as if asking about the weather: "What's the survival rate on the special case?"
Cypher stopped.
"Survival? Impossible. The radiation will vaporize anything left there."
"You're right."
The stranger turned his gaze toward the yacht.
"You can go. Get Sarah somewhere comfortable. She's been through enough."
"We forced her into this whole performance." Cypher's voice carried something that resembled anger without fully admitting to it. "They keep trying to drag her into everything."
"I've handled it. She'll go study at Stoke University. And you'll move from general warden to inspector, rotating between the universities of Spezia. You'll be close to each other."
Cypher said nothing. He carried Sarah and boarded the yacht. The stranger turned toward the great fire, and the smoke swallowed him before anyone could follow him with their eyes.
—
Somewhere else, Zenon was hearing a voice.
"Zenon. Zenon, wake up. Are you dead?"
"Mom, I'm on vacation. This is a warrior's rest after fighting through exams... this bed is my battlefield now."
"Wake up, or I'll splash you with water, you lazy thing."
He ignored her. He heard her footsteps approaching. Then the water.
Before the first drop reached his face, he opened his eyes.
Birds in an overcast sky. High, distant, circling without landing. Massive trees on every side. His hand was raised toward the sky, his fingers stiff, as if they'd tried to stop something falling and failed.
It wasn't water.
It was blood. Dry on his skin, sticky in the cracks between his fingers.
He stayed pinned to the ground a moment longer than he should have, staring at his hand as if it weren't his.
He got up, heavy. His head hurt unbearably, a pulse striking from the inside with every movement, syncing with his heartbeat as if his whole body were one broken clock.
Where am I?
He looked around slowly, turning with his whole torso, not just his head. Wreckage. Shattered stone. Walls collapsed on top of each other. No sound. Not even wind moving through the rubble. His stomach started making noise in the middle of all this.
I'm hungry.
The thought arrived with an irritating stupidity, in a place like this. He didn't laugh. He couldn't find a reason to.
So hungry. But what was I doing before this? Did I even sleep? Wait.
He stopped suddenly, as if something inside him had hit a wall he couldn't see.
Who am I?
No answer came. He stood there, barefoot on sharp stones he didn't feel.
He caught a smell. Burnt flesh, coming from somewhere ahead. He didn't think before moving toward it. His clothes were torn, his body coated in a dry black layer that cracked with every step. He walked into the still-burning wreckage. He felt no heat, not even when his foot passed over an ember still glowing.
He found a body on the ground.
He stood over it a moment, studying it with strange calm.
"Too burnt." He said it to himself, with genuine disappointment. "I don't want this."
Don't want what?
He's human?
And I'm hungry?
But does he have anything edible on him?
I'm losing my mind... that milk really was a stimulant.
What milk?
What even is milk?
Yes... I'm hungry.
He shook his head and turned. Another body, half pinned under a large rock. He stopped there. Saliva began sliding down slowly, a thin thread dripping onto his chin without his noticing. He ran to it and started clearing the rubble with bare hands, his nails breaking one after another without him stopping. The rock resisted for a long time. He pushed it with everything left in his body, the veins in his neck standing out, until it finally gave and dropped on the other side with a heavy thud that shook the ground under his feet. A few drops of blood flew onto his face, warm.
He looked happy. Genuinely happy, the kind that can't be faked. Despite himself.
He raised his head slowly. He found other bodies scattered around him, more than he'd expected. In one corner, three of them close together, huddled as if they'd tried to shelter in each other at the moment of death.
"This is a lot." He whispered it, as if doing the math. "Who did all this?"
He grabbed the hand of the nearest body and bit into a finger.
Something hard under his teeth.
He froze mid-chew. Looked.
A ring.
He pulled it out from between the flesh slowly and held it between two fingers, turning it in the dim light leaking down from above. He started reading what was engraved on it, letter by letter.
D…
He stopped.
r…
His hand started shaking before he finished.
e… a… m
The ring fell from his fingers.
Haïssi.
He didn't move. He didn't breathe for a full second. Then he pulled his hand back, very slowly, and lifted his eyes to the body's face. Blond hair, filthy with ash. Half the face burnt and disfigured, the other half barely recognizable — but recognizable. A white suit. The same suit as Zenon's.
It can't be.
He repeated it in his head, again and again.
He looked at the other corner, slowly this time...
Eddie. Alex. Sofian.
He looked at his hands. At the black layer covering them, at the cracks between his fingers. He gripped his face with both hands, staring up at the sky through his spread fingers, then opened his mouth and screamed. A scream unlike any he'd ever heard from himself before, long, breaking only when his lungs emptied of air before returning. His eyes went fully red.
After the scream came the vomiting. He dropped to his knees in the middle of the ash and tried to empty his stomach.
"I did this. Me. With my own hands." The words came out broken, his head bowed, staring at his palms as if they belonged to someone else. "Why did all this happen?"
He looked down... nothing came up. Nothing.
He watched his hands — the right one trembling nonstop... the left one still.
"It would make sense to throw up. I ate human skin... I watched a scene soaked in blood... I killed someone. No — more than that.
And I'm the only survivor."
He stayed like that a long time, silent, before he moved.
He picked up a sharp piece of metal from the wreckage, weighed it in his hand for a moment, then pointed it at his chest.
"I don't want to stay alive."
He tried.
He couldn't.
His hand stayed suspended in midair, shaking violently, out of his control, the metal hovering centimeters from his skin.
"I'm a liar." He said it in a hoarse voice, almost laughing. "A huge liar. I did all this willingly, so I wouldn't die. So how could I kill myself now."
The sound of a branch snapping behind him.
He froze. He didn't lift his head right away this time.
He finally raised it.
The stranger was standing there, watching him. The long coat, the hat, the hidden face — as if he'd been there from the beginning and no one had noticed.
"You're here." Zenon said it flatly, without preamble, as if he'd been waiting for this exact moment. "What do you see when you look at me."
"Something pitiful."
"I don't care." No anger, just exhaustion weighing down every word. "They had dreams. Haïssi wanted to live in Aristia. Look at him now. Dead. I want to die so I stop suffering... and I want to suffer so I don't die."
"Fate."
"Fate is written by what you decide." Zenon cut him off. "So I'm deciding... I don't know."
"What's the one thing you want to do right now?"
Zenon went quiet. He looked at the ground, at the ring lying between them.
"Cypher." He said it with total calm, a calm nothing like the screaming before it. "He has to die. Whoever did this can't be allowed to keep living."
"Then postpone your death until you kill him."
"As if I could. The two of them fight over it — one wants to let me live, one wants me dead... and also, he" — bluntly, without shame — "has power I don't understand. He works with an organization with no limits. And I'm nothing. Empty."
"He was like you once." Coldly. "You're not powerless. You're lazy. You don't want to learn, or grow."
"That's not reasonable. I'm somewhere I don't even know. No food. No way out. Nothing."
"And what if I told you I was Cypher?"
Zenon grabbed a stone off the ground and threw it with everything left in his arm.
It struck the stranger's chest and bounced off. He didn't move from his spot.
"What was that?"
"That's what I can do right now."
The stranger looked at him with something hard to name.
"You want to kill Cypher, and you're asking me to kill you, both at once. You know what that's called?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Your being here is a mistake. Your survival is a mistake. Only one chosen person was meant to walk out of this operation. That's you. Chosen to survive a certain death." He paused. "How lucky you are. A great many of the dead are watching you right now, envying you. If they'd been given what you were given, they would have overturned the order of this entire world... but they would have failed anyway, because they carry things that hold them back. You don't."
He pulled a gun out from under his coat.
"You asked me to kill you. I hope you're satisfied."
"Wai—"
The shot.
Straight into the contradiction that was his heart.
Zenon fell, clutching his chest. The scream came out before he could decide to let it. As if a soul were saying goodbye to him with difficulty.
The stranger tossed a green syringe on the ground beside him, and turned.
"Albatross is your enemy. Take whatever path suits you best, even if you walk it alone, broken, or weak. We may share the same road one day. Or we may not."
Footsteps moving away. Then a faint voice, barely reaching him.
"Live. I haven't cast you out of my world yet."
To be continued…