And besides—they aren't entirely wrong. I am a dog. I have always been a dog. The only difference is that for a few weeks, I forgot it.
Others avoid me. They time their meals so we don't share the same table, take routes through the building that keep their distance, and step aside when I pass in the corridor, as if proximity is contagious.
These people are smarter. They understand that what brought me here could also bring them here, and they want no part of a story that Sergei Baranov had to correct personally.
I don't blame them.
If I could avoid myself, I would.
The days—what passes for days here—are manageable. The facility runs on routine and habit, much like the Kennel did. You wake, eat, move when told, and work until ordered to stop. This structure is familiar enough that my body can perform it without thinking, which is dangerous.
It leaves my mind too much room.
The nights are the worst.
At night, when my shift ends and the building falls silent, when the wind presses against the concrete as if it wants in, there isnothing between me and my memories. No feeds to watch. No manifests to pull. No rules to follow except the most important one: don't break.
I dwell on that motel room in Chicago until the thought grooves into my skull.
The first thin light creeping under the curtains. Smoke lingering in our hair from the distribution center. Ivan's laugh—sharp, bright, startled—when I kissed him like I'd been starving. The way he settled against my chest afterward, heavy and real, his fingers tracing slow patterns across my stomach as if he needed proof my body wasn't just a file.
I can still hear myself saying it.
In a minute. I'm not moving yet.
As if time could be negotiated.
As if the world had ever cared what I was ready for.
Then the phone rang, the warmth vanished, and by the end of that day, I was sitting in a transport vehicle with tinted windows, watching the Estate disappear behind a bend in the road.
Volgograd.
A word that isn't just geography to me. It signifies a return, a loop closing.
Cold. Concrete. Numbers instead of names. Voronin's voice explaining function while boys died behind locked doors.
I sleep under three blankets and still wake shivering, reaching out with a hand that expects skin but finds only air. Some mornings, my body reacts before my mind, muscles tensing,breath catching, as if I'm back in the cabin, the storm coming in sideways, and Ivan is beside me, alive.
The facility has ways of reminding you that you are not allowed to forget what you are.
There are no mirrors in the corridors.
The glass in my window is too high to show my reflection.
Even the water in the sink is so hard and cloudy it barely holds an image.
It's almost considerate, as if they know watching yourself become less human is easier when you don't have to see it.
Three months is a long time—long enough for hope to fray at the edges, long enough for a promise to feel less like a commitment and more like a desperate survival tactic.
Ivan said,I will come for you.
I believed him then.
Some nights, I still do.
Other nights, the thought of him forgetting me slips beneath my ribs like a blade, twisting until I have to sit up and breathe through the pain.
