Obscure

Chapter 14

Kirill

Kirill didn't have a guard escort him to Elias's cell this time. That had just been for show. He was perfectly capable of getting in on his own.

Inside, the lights were dimmed almost to full darkness. A hint of yellow light remained, like a harvest moon. He had always found something sinister in the baleful glow of the harvest moon. Elias had told him it was nothing to be afraid of. Just an effect of the moon sitting lower in the sky. Now, as he stepped into the cell and eased the door most of the way shut, leaving it open just enough that it wouldn't lock behind him, Kirill wondered if he had been right all along.

This was only the second time he had set foot in one of these cells. The first time was when he had tried to fool Elias into thinking he was his new cellmate. He had been playing his old self that day. He just hadn't known it. No wonder it had come so easily.

When Kirill had come here, headquarters had assigned him a private room in the dormitories. In some places, private rooms might have been a privilege. Not so in headquarters. Here, they had to prove they were trustworthy enough for roommates.

His room had been half the size of this, with no toilet or sink. For the first few months, the door was locked all the time. He'd had to call a guard whenever he needed to use the bathroom.

But this room felt like a cell the way that one never had. Maybe it was because he'd had a drawer under his bed where he could keep any personal belongings—not that he'd had anything to put there. Maybe it was that PERI had called it a dormitory, like he was away at some fancy boarding school. He had been young enough then to be swayed by a difference in words.

Or maybe it was as simple as this: he had chosen it. No one who ended up in one of these cells had chosen to be where they were.

Elias muttered incoherently and rubbed his eyes, the sound of the closing door bringing him awake. Kirill didn't say anything yet, and he didn't walk closer. He looked down at the man in the bed, Elias's figure indistinct in the dim harvest-moon light. He saw his best friend, but impossibly old. He saw his prisoner, his adversary, but impossibly familiar. The two couldn't coexist. But they were both there in the same man.

Elias sat up. He showed no outward surprise when he saw Kirill. But his fear leaked through in his memories.

"Is this your next tactic?" Elias asked. "Catching me half-asleep, while my defenses are down? Not letting me have a moment of peace?"

"I don't need a new tactic," Kirill reminded him. "I already have one that works."

He instantly regretted his words as a look of raw disgust came over Elias's face. Maybe he should have been disgusted with himself for threatening Elias's son. Maybe he would have been, if he hadn't spent so long hollowed out inside.

How had he never realized there was nothing in his heart but the obscuring fog?

He still didn't know the answer to Elias's question. He didn't know who had been before the obscuring, before he had come here. He had changed in the decades since Elias had obscured him. The nooks and crannies where his old memories used to live were gone or reshaped, as unrecognizable as his current face would have been to anyone who had known his teenage self. His mind was a muddle now, the once-sterile space transformed to a chaotic jumble like the remnants of a house in the aftermath of a tornado.

"Then why are you here?" Elias's eyes were flat. Like Kirill's own eyes in the mirror. Only the trickle of memory betrayed that Elias was feeling anything at all. And it was a small trickle. Mostly anger.

"I thought we could talk somewhere that wasn't an interrogation room," said Kirill. "Somewhere we can have a real conversation."

"I'm sure this room has cameras, too."