The footsteps pass the door. They fade into silence.
I’m alone.
“Fuck.” The word comes out cracked and broken, a pathetic sound in the vast quiet. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
No one answers. Of course no one answers. There’s no one here. Just me and the dark and the drain in the floor and the ghost of water on my tongue.
I hear it then. Water. Running water, somewhere in the walls, the sound of pipes carrying what I need just inches away from where I sit. It starts as a trickle, then grows to a rush. I twist toward the sound, straining against the leather cuffs, my parched throat working convulsively.
I realize I’m crying. The tears are hot on my cold cheeks. They slide down to the corner of my mouth. They taste like salt. I try to catch them with my tongue, desperate for any moisture.
“This is pathetic.” My voice echoes strangely in the darkness, flat and dead. “You’re pathetic, Nikolai. Licking your own tears like a fucking animal.”
“You were always pathetic,” says Dmitri.
I freeze.
The voice came from my left. From the empty air beside my shoulder. But it sounds wrong—too close, like it’s coming from inside my skull rather than the room. An echo without an origin. My cousin’s voice, distorted by the darkness and the sleep deprivation, warped into something that might not be a voice at all.
“You’re not here,” I say to the dark.
“Of course I’m here.” The words overlap with the sound of the pipes, the consonants blurring into the rush of water. “Where else would I be? You gave them my name, Kolya. You traded me for a few drops of water. You sold your own blood for a drink.”
“I didn’t trade you. I took the water back. I spat it in his face.”
“After you swallowed. After you let him touch you. After you leaned into his hand like a dog begging for scraps.”
My hands clench into fists. The restraints bite into my wrists, reopening wounds that haven't had a chance to heal. The pain is grounding, but only for a second.
“Shut up.”
“He tilted your head back and you let him. He brought the glass to your lips and you opened for him. You would have done anything he asked in that moment. We both know it.”
“Shut up!”
“Papa always said you were weak.” The voice warps, stretches, becomes something that sounds like Dmitri and the pipes and my own pulse all at once. “He told me once—that’s why Mama stopped taking her medicine. Because she couldn’t bear watching you become another him. Because she looked at you and saw the rot setting in early.”
The word hits me like a physical blow.Mama.
I haven’t let myself think about her in years. The memory is too sharp, too dangerous, a blade I keep sheathed because I know it will cut me if I touch it.
But the darkness has no sheaths. The darkness strips everything away.
I remember her hands. Small and cool and always gentle. I remember the way she would sing to me in Ukrainian, the old songs from her village that she wasn't supposed to remember. I remember the last time I saw her, in her bedroom at the dacha, her face gray against the white pillows, her voice barely a whisper as she told me to be good.
I wasn’t good. I was never good after that.
“She didn’t die because of me.”My voice is shaking, high and thin like a child’s. “She had a heart condition. It was genetic. The doctors said?—”
“The doctors said what Papa paid them to say.” Dmitri’s voice is soft now, almost gentle, but it comes from everywhere at once. “At least, that’s what I heard them arguing about. Papa screaming at Uncle Mikhail that she’d stopped her medication, that she’d chosen this. I was only eleven. I didn’t understand what it meant. But you understood, didn't you, Kolya?”
The claim lands differently now—not omniscient truth but overheard fragments, a child’s interpretation of adult conflict. But the possibility is worse than certainty. The not-knowing.
I’m screaming. I don’t remember starting, but my throat is raw and the sound is tearing out of me in waves, wordless and animal. The darkness swallows it. There’s nothing left but the echo in my own skull and the sound of Dmitri laughing—except the laugh fractures, becomes the gurgle of pipes, becomes silence.
When the scream finally dies, I’m shaking so hard that the chair is rattling against its bolts.
“You’re not real,” I whisper. “You’re not here. This is what happens when the brain is deprived of sleep and light. This is just chemistry. Neurons misfiring. Awake-dreaming.”
