Set You Free (CANEM)

LXX

(TW - Violence)

The soulless came for a soul, the very thing they could never regain. They came to take innocence and feel the evil joy as they sunk into the filth of indifference. 

The grief, enough to sink the mighty. 

-

They drove into the night until they were enveloped in its darkness. A night so black, the darkness hummed. They returned to where he belonged, deep in the corners of the city; its outskirts where nobody would ever find them.

Belatedly, they appeared out of the abyss like skylarks did as they flew out of branches into the morning sky. The lights of neighbouring towns glistened in the distance. In the slight fog, the city was blurred like an old painting. The buildings were silhouetted black, two-dimensional. The streets yawned in every direction without only the old newspaper dispensers and street-lamps to break the view between buildings so high that the tops disappear in the swirling black.

Like veins of a body, each street connected to each other as they drove, taking them deeper and deeper into new territory, but more importantly further away from Istanbul.

As she looked ahead of the vehicle, each street only lasted fifty yards or so as the road would begin and end again and again at junctions. Would they go left or right? This led to a consistent fitful motion to the numerous squares that would be on all the maps in the suburbs and could be seen easily from the sky. Nevertheless, the direction of the street, despite its interruptions, did proceed orderly up until the skyline.

The car drove smoothly again and Sanem watched the empty suburbs as the golden street lights illuminated the occasional tree or car that left abandoned in front of houses or shops closed for the night.

"I'm going to pull in here," Yiğit said firmly. "We need fuel."

He crossed over his hands as he turned the car into a petrol station.

"Stay in the car."

The door slammed with a bang and Sanem quietly sighed, shocked by the noise at first. Looking down at her hands, she held them together for support. Looking around the vehicle, they were the only customers there. Squinting due to the distance, a lady sat inside the office, wearing a dark blue sweater, flicking the ends of a cigarette out of the open window.

She must have been crazy with the temperature outside, Sanem thought.

There was a part of her that just wanted to get out and run to her, bang on that window and scream for help but she knew it was no use. If she was even going to do something as bold as making a run for it, she needed to pick her moment carefully.

Staring out of the window, she took the time to think of any possible option.

The sound of the car door opening brought her back to her senses as Yiğit hunkered back down, closing the full door after him. Assessing her, he started the car again and pulled out onto the main road.

She could feel the breath in her throat as she began.

"I will come with you but can I ask you a question?"

He hesitated at first and glanced at her. "Tamam, söyle."

"You said we are going away and I assume that means leaving the country. Won't we need documents to pass through the Turkish border? I don't have any ID with me."

For a moment, there was simply silence in the car. An empty void that separated the two of them. In all honestly, in the horrors of the past 24-hours, the quiet had been a godsend, allowing her to process what was happening. On the other side of things, this silence was uncomfortable as she had come to recognise that this new person she was discovering that had always been hidden from her obvious view was erratic.