| |
DEMITRI
It’s black here, while he sleeps.
Behind the eyes once mine, I exist. In limbo. Alive, yet unliving. Watching from afar every single movement Vedmak—or the Vardøger, as he insists on being called—makes. Every breath he takes I experience it as if it were mine, yet I am not in control.
Here in the recess of my own mind, I am a prisoner. He relishes it, knowing it pains me to feel my own body do the things he commands. Especially to sweet Anastasia, his Robust pet. It’s the only reason he does it. Because he knows the torture it inflicts upon me. To feel her skin crawl, and see the absolute disgust in her eyes staring back, as Vedmak forces my body to penetrate her. I hate myself for being unable to stop him.
Next to me, here in the dark, I can hear her shallow breathing as she sleeps.
He used to take the mask off. To allow Anastasia to see my face, burned as it is. So she could despise me. It was a mistake. Without the stim, I was able to grasp control. She thought me, him, crazy—this body thrashing and crashing into the walls, arguing with seemingly no one, until I was victorious. Until I had control. She kicked and scratched as I released her bonds. I just kept repeating over and over that I was sorry, that it wasn’t me. It was Vedmak, and I was Demitri. That he made me do things. I told her to run, to escape. She chose to hit me in the head with the steel of her restraints. The shock, the injury, had the opposite effect of what she desired. It loosed my hold on my own body and allowed Vedmak back. In her eyes, I could see the horror as she watched my face change expression—one minute me, the next him.
That was three months after he first captured her, out in the Vapid. She’d been attacked by Rippers and some other unknown assailant. We found her shaking in the stripped cart, muttering the word ussuri over and over.
Occasionally, when Vedmak sleeps, she talks to me; calls softly to me, asking if I am here. If I can hear her. Telling me she knows I am strong. That I can save her. There are even moments when my will feels powerful and I can push words through the lips of my own sleeping body to her. I tell her that one day I will save her. But it is a lie. I can’t.
After my attempt to free her, Vedmak keeps the mask on. I try so hard to fight. Sometimes I prevail, holding back his body. Holding back his lust. But mostly I fail. Fail her. I’m not sure why it matters so much—this one girl, this one Robust. Perhaps it is because she looks like Mila. He cut her hair short and sliced a wound into her face, using his laser scythe, to match Mila’s scar. But Mila never searched my eyes as she does. Every time he punishes her, she searches for me—hoping against hope this time I will come to her rescue. In the three years he has kept her, I have grown to admire her strength, her resolve, but most of all her belief that there is still a good person somewhere in this engineered shell.
Perhaps what makes it worse is Vedmak doesn’t even want Anastasia. It’s Mila he wants to torture.
He knows hurting Mila would kill me. I’d probably fade away to nothing from the pain. But he can’t let her know his whereabouts—he’s not ready yet. She’s been searching for him. For me. There have been times she has been so close and didn’t know it. He’s sat in the dark, breathing heavily behind his mask, watching her march by with her band of resistance fighters. I even screamed out, but of course she couldn’t hear me.
The stim cocktail he’s created, based on the Red Mist, and used to keep me at bay has been modified so often. Every time I feel I’m overcoming it, he changes it. Lately, the dose has been so strong I seem to have been dissolved for days. When I return, chunks of his plan have jumped forward. But the stim is imperfect. His Gracile warriors, attached to demons like him, do as he bids most of the time, but they have fits—psychotic episodes—where they are uncontrollable. Vedmak’s workshop, the poisons lab he calls it, is dedicated to perfecting the stim, but so far he’s still dissatisfied. I’m no biochemist, and of no help. But he knows what I know. And so, tomorrow, when he wakes, he plans to travel to Zopat and find the Alchemist—the Robust woman who sold me Red Mist all those years ago. Destroying the leader also destroyed me, the pain stripping away my hold on my own body, leaving it open for Vedmak to take complete control. And he’s been in control now for four years. Busy the entire time. Plotting and scheming. Utilizing my knowledge to forge his plan—to continue what he started so many years ago in Revolution-torn Russia. He’s so close, yet so far. The process is slow and his target will be hard to achieve. It will take many more years to fulfill what he plans to accomplish. Especially without the Tokamak.
This is what enrages my occupier most.
Many times I’ve tried to tell him. The process can’t be accelerated. Not with the resources we have. He abused Anastasia for a week straight, believing I was holding out on him. Trying to make me tell him a faster way. There is none. But even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell him. Even if he tortured her to death. Compared with what the Gracile Leader wanted, to create a black hole, the side effect alone of Vedmak’s plan is far worse. But he’s deaf to it. Thinks I’m only trying to dissuade him. I’m not. His plan is flawed. And if he’s successful today, tomorrow, or in fifty years it won’t matter.
Anastasia shuffles on the cold floor, the fingers of her bound hands brush against my back. She mumbles my name. If I had control of my own body, I know tears would now well and a stone would form in my throat.
Sweet Anastasia. Even if I could save you, we’re all going to die, anyway.
