I walked out of the building and the man from the elevator followed me the whole way, not in body but in every thought I had between the doors and the parking lot.
Mute. Brahim. Whatever the thing underneath that face actually answered to. Because one truth had come out of that elevator with me and it wouldn't leave.
I did something to him.
Something bad enough to outlast his own death. Bad enough to drag him back into the world wearing a stranger's skin with my name in his mouth.
The question underneath it was worse.
How. When. Where does a boy from the plain wrong a man who died before the walls went up.
I searched for it and found nothing.
Our lives didn't touch anywhere. The only ground old enough to hold the two of us was the plain, and the plain had never given me a person to hurt. It gave me the infected. It gave me hunger and distance and a sky that didn't care whether I got up in the morning. It didn't hand out grudges in human shape.
