We went to the library after that, browsing through the shelves until we found what Zwierek was looking for. Books about hunting and tracking. How to approach something without being seen, how to predict direction. Where to strike for a speed kill, where to strike if you wanted it to last. It was all written about animals, but we read it differently. The language was neutral and educational. But the meaning sat just beneath it. Zwierek didn’t explain everything; he didn’t need to.
“You see it, right?”he asked once, not even looking at me. I didn’t answer. He laughed, soft and low.
“Yeah,”he said.
“You see it.”
After that, he stopped being patient.
“Stop looking at it like that,”he snapped one day, with more bite than usual.“You’re still hesitating.”My grip tightened around the page.
“Hesitation gets you hurt,”he continued.
“Or worse, it makes you useless.”His eyes locked onto mine, cold and focused.
“You want to stay like this?”he asked.
“Just… letting things happen to you?”My chest tightened as he leaned closer.“You already know what needs to change,”he said, almost as a whisper.
“You’re just too comfortable pretending you don’t.”
That stayed with me because he was right.
That’s the worst kind of person, little Ghost. The kind who doesn’t convince you, just points at something you already know.
The house felt different after that. Smaller, almost claustrophobic. Like everything inside it was waiting for something to happen. And for the first time, I wasn’t just waiting with it. I was starting to understand what it would take to make something happen instead.
The Utterance
Chapter 14
I noticed it first in the library, in how it kept following me after I’d gone.
No one really kept track of what I did during the day as long as I stayed out of the way and didn’t cause problems. And I had gotten very good at that then.
So I stayed at the library very often.
Often enough that the woman at the desk stopped looking at me twice when I came in. Long enough that I knew which tables didn’t wobble and which shelves had that faint smell of glue and paper. It was quiet there in a way the house never was. The house always had something under it, even when nothing was happening. The library didn’t.
At first, I told myself it was just reading. Just something to fill time. But that’s not really true. It stopped being just reading pretty quickly. There’s a difference between picking up a book andstudyingit. I didn’t realize when that shift happened either.
One day, I was flipping pages. The next, I was memorizing things without trying to. I learned it from animals first. Where the body gives, where it breaks, how it comes apart if you apply just enough pressure in the right places. Bone, tendon, tissue. None of it was random. And then I started translating it. From animals to humans.
Anatomy books became something else entirely.
Maps, guides, instructions. Over time, I didn’t need them anymore. I carried it all inside me, an internal lexicon of the human body. Every joint, every limit, every way it could be taken apart. How much force is actually needed if you know where to place it, where the structure gives first, and where it doesn’t.
The books described it as technique, as skill, and as practice. But once you strip that away, it becomes something else, something simpler. How predictable everything was once you understood the structure of it. I think that’s when it started changing something in me. Because once you see that, really see it, you can’t unsee it again. It doesn’t stay inside the pages; it follows you.
I started noticing things differently.
I had always observed my surroundings and the people in them, but it had always been about survival. This kind of observation felt different. Darker and more personal somehow.
The way Bartosz moved when he was tired versus when he had been drinking. The difference in his steps on the stairs. Heavier when he was angry, slower when he wasn’t.
The way Krystyna’s voice changed depending on whether she thought someone was listening. The small pauses in conversations that didn’t quite make sense unless you paid attention.
If you observe something long enough, little Ghost, it stops being random. It becomes a pattern, and patterns can be predicted.
