"It seemed easier in my head," Danil thought.
Truly, how is one supposed to go out and simply murder someone? Well, there is a first for everything then. He is still somewhat squeamish about the idea, and Lurek himself is no easy target, but Mara cannot be reasoned with at this moment so he has no choice. His guilt is less considering who the target is, however Danil cannot help but wonder about himself in this moment. He is aware of his apathetic trait but was he always so insensitive to death?
Intellectually he is aware that what he will do is bad, even under coercion, and what shocked him is that he didn't resist as much as he thought he would have. Is this what manufactured consent looks like, or was he always inclined to murder, with having an excuse to justify himself now.
Nathan's files are a big help but he still needs to scout out some things himself. South Street, a little beyond downtown, close to but not exactly the slums. Nothing good goes down in these parts.
"Hurry up, he's right on that floor," Mara urges Danil.
"Don't rush me, it's not as if I can just walk up and kill him," Danil pauses, "we gotta wait for the right time to get it done."
"Try squeezing your soul," Mara says, as if that is all the explanation needed.
"Huh?!"
Mara sighs before reaching out towards Danil. Her hand phases into Danil's chest, spreading a chill across his body.
"What ar—"
Before Danil can even finish his sentence Mara tightly grasps his soul, literally squeezing it. Danil feels his chest tightening, his skin seems to lose color and become transparent, his complexion matching Mara's.
The rats loitering around the alley rather than avoiding him don't even seem to notice him, as if his weight on the world has diminished, having his presence obscured.
Mara lets go of her grasp and Danil feels limp. His complexion returns and he now has to grasp his bearings lest he fall to the floor.
"Hold that feeling, this way people won't notice you."
Danil gives a pointed look towards Mara as he grasps for his breath, but he nevertheless complies and tries to keep his soul under control as Mara has pointed out for him. He succeeds in a limited capacity, finding that he can maintain a subdued presence with dim pale skin, however his skin does not become transparent.
Mara speaks in a disappointing tone, "Pathetic. Still, most people won't notice you in this state."
She lightly shoves Danil forward, "Go on now, you only have a year, we can't be wasting time on trivialities."
Danil swallows his irritation and walks forward.
The building Lurek operates out of is a decrepit tenement, where the walls have absorbed years of damp and bad decisions and the stairwell light flickers in a way that suggests it has been doing so long enough that nobody bothers fixing it anymore. The smell hits Danil first, something between mold and cigarette smoke ground into every surface, and he moves through the ground floor keeping the sensation Mara pointed out lodged somewhere in his chest like a held breath. It is uncomfortable, like walking with a cramp he cannot stretch out, and every few steps the presence slips and he has to refocus and find it again, which is more exhausting than he expected it to be.
Mara drifts beside him, a cold shadow at his shoulder.
"Second floor, third room from the left," she says, barely above a murmur, as though even she is being careful here.
The staircase groans under his weight as he climbs, and two men at the landing below glance up without quite looking at him, their eyes sliding past as if he is a smudge on the wall. One of them frowns for half a second before turning back to his conversation, and that frown unsettles Danil more than being noticed outright would have.
On the first floor landing there is a transaction happening in the open, a man with a split lip handing something small and folded to another man who has the build and expression of someone accustomed to people not arguing with him. Danil recognizes what it is without needing Nathan's file to explain it and fixes his eyes forward, keeping moving. It is not his problem, and even if it were he is in no position to do anything about it right now, and he tells himself this twice because the first time doesn't quite take. A door further down the hallway hangs half open and inside a woman is crying quietly while a man counts money at a table without looking at her, and Danil's jaw tightens as he walks past that too.
The second floor corridor is narrower, enough that he has to angle his shoulder to avoid brushing the peeling wallpaper on either side. One bulb is out entirely and the other bathes the hallway in a watery orange light that makes everything look slightly wrong, including his own hands when he glances down at them. He counts the doors from the left and stops at the third, listening. A television murmurs on the other side, and there is the sound of someone moving around with no particular urgency.
"He's in there," Mara confirms, unnecessarily.
Danil steadies himself. He has Nathan's information on Lurek's habits, the layout of the space, a general sense of what he is walking into, and he has the knife he has been carrying since this whole business started, though he has been careful not to think about it directly until this moment. He grips the handle through his coat pocket and pushes the door open.
The room is spare in the way of a place that is used rather than lived in. A cot against one wall, a small table with takeout containers stacked to one side, the television mounted crookedly opposite. Lurek is standing near the window with his back partly turned, a heavyset man with a shaved head and a scar along the side of his neck that catches the orange light coming through the glass from outside. He is on the phone, speaking in a low flat voice, and for a moment does not react at all.
Then he stops talking mid-sentence.
He doesn't turn right away. His shoulders shift instead, a slow tension rising through them, and his head tilts very slightly as though he is trying to locate something he cannot name. Danil freezes, grip tightening on the handle.
"Something wrong?" the voice on the phone asks, tinny and distant.
"Nothing," Lurek says, and hangs up.
He turns, and for a fraction of a second his eyes land directly on Danil and there is something unreadable in them, not quite fear but a recognition that whatever he is sensing is not right, and that instinct alone is enough for him. He moves first, fast for his size, and Danil lunges at the same moment which means the knife catches Lurek across the forearm rather than where it was meant to go and they crash into the table together, sending the containers clattering hard across the floor.
The fight is ugly and close and nothing like what Danil's head had sketched out beforehand. Lurek is strong enough that getting any kind of solid hold on him is like trying to wrestle something that has no intention of stopping and has the mass to back that up, and the presence Danil was maintaining fractures completely the moment his concentration has to go toward not getting his skull put through the wall. They hit the cot, the frame scraping loud across the floor, and Lurek gets a forearm against Danil's throat before Danil twists sideways and drives an elbow back into him.
The noise is not subtle. There is no version of this that the rest of the building does not hear.
It takes less than a minute before the door opens, and the two men from the lower landing are now inside the room and a third one Danil did not clock before is standing in the doorway filling most of it. Lurek has gotten enough separation to reach for something on the windowsill and Danil, already winded and bleeding from somewhere above his ear, backs up against the wall with three of them tightening the space around him and no clear angle out.
"Who sent you?" one of them asks, though nobody is actually waiting for an answer.
They come in, and it is simply a matter of weight and numbers and Danil goes down under them, his head meeting the floor hard enough that the room stutters for a moment and his vision breaks into pieces. He can hear Mara's voice through it, and then the temperature in the room drops so sharply that the man on top of Danil stops moving, and the one beside him makes a sound that is not quite language.
The cold gets worse, and Danil, still trying to reassemble his sight from the floor, cannot see what Mara is doing but can feel it from where he is lying, the way the character of the air in the room changes entirely, and the sounds the men are making shift from aggression into something that sounds much closer to panic.
Then silence.