In the darkness, he awoke.
He was lying down as his eyes opened to the blackness. He felt something hard and uncomfortable beneath his body. He could feel the cool dampness emanating from the air around him, seeping into his skin. He felt pain. It was everywhere, so strong and unyielding that he barely knew anything other than the pain.
He could see very little, just dark shadows. What he couldn't see was more significant than what he could. He couldn't see the cracks that ran above him in the ceiling. He couldn't see the wires that were hooked into his skin and the electrodes that had been pushed against his temples. He couldn't see the woman that sat in the chair at the opposite end of the room from where he lay, a clipboard held in her nimble hands as she glanced at the machines he was attached to.
The man was near-naked, clad only in a pair of simple black trousers. His chest and feet were bare. He had dark hair that was trussed up and messy, a wild and unkempt mass around his head. His nose was straight and angular and his jaw was strong. There was a small scar above his left eye.
His mind was blank. It wasn't because he wasn't aware enough or conscious enough to form thoughts. It was because there were no thoughts for him to form. He could remember nothing. He knew nothing of his past. Not where he lived. Not who he loved. Not even his name.
He was nothing but a blank slate.
He felt his fingers twitch against the bed beneath him. He moved them against the soft feel of sheets that covered the hard cot. He could feel the pull of wires in his arm as he twitched them and the motion caused his heart to thud involuntarily hard in his chest.
The monitor to his right beeped erratically as his heart rate sped up. He didn't know where he was. Didn't know why he was panicking. He just knew that this place didn't feel right. It didn't feel like somewhere he belonged. At the same time, he wasn't sure that he had ever belonged somewhere. It wasn't a notion he was familiar with or, if it was, he didn't remember it.
He heard, rather than saw, the woman rise from her chair across the room. The panic rose up in him again but he shoved it back down as he heard the heels of her shoes click across the floor towards him. The man tried to rise but found that he couldn't quite move. There were straps binding him down, he could feel them now if he concentrated.
"Shh, shh," the woman said. He couldn't see her, only the shadowy outline of her body. It did little to console his anxiety. "You're okay." He felt her lean over him and press something. He heard the click as she flicked a switch beside his bed.
And then, suddenly, light.
It was too bright for his eyes and he found that he shrank away from the source curling into himself painfully against the hard pillow on the cot. He turned his head down away from the lamp that loomed over his cot and closed his eyes. The blackness was gone, replaced by red behind his eyelids. The woman waited a moment; waited, until the light wasn't quite so bright any more, until he was able to squint and make out more than her silhouette.
"Hello," she said to him when he was able to look at her. "It's nice to finally see those eyes awake. I was beginning to wonder if we ever would."
The man said nothing. He just stared at her, wondering to himself who she was. Were they friends? Her tone suggested it. It was warm and soft and kind—the way someone might speak to someone they liked. He didn't know for certain. He couldn't remember anyone he liked or even disliked for that matter.
She waited for him to speak for a minute longer and then smiled when she realized he wasn't going to. "A little disoriented?" she guessed. "That's understandable. You've been asleep a very long time. Do you remember what happened?"
He shook his head. The motion felt odd, stiff, as if he'd laid unmoving for ages.
The woman pursed her lips. She was young, he thought. She didn't look like a doctor but the long white lab coat and clipboard suggested that she was. He didn't know how he knew that doctors wore lab coats. He just did. It was a fact to him, same as if saying that the sky was blue and the grass was green. He remembered those things.
But who was he?
"That's okay," the woman said brightly. He detected an accent in her voice, something foreign and, although he hadn't yet heard his own voice, couldn't remember what it sounded like, he knew that hers sounded completely unlike his. He just couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was that made it sound different. "It'll all come back to you eventually, I'm sure. You went through a great ordeal. But you served your purpose well and proved your loyalty to us. They've agreed to submit you for phase two."
Phase two? he thought. But what was phase one?
He didn't voice either of those thoughts. Instead, he asked, "Who are you?"
"You really don't remember anything, do you? Doesn't matter. We'll help you remember. My name is Dr. Savalas."
Dr. Savalas. He committed it to memory.
"Where am I? Who am I?"
She smiled. She had a nice smile. He liked seeing it. It made him feel not as panicked—not as scared and alone. She felt like someone he could trust.
"We're in a military base beneath Mount Elbrose. Do you know where in the world that is?"
He saw it in a mental map inside of his head. Like the colour of the sky, like the way he knew what a doctor was by looking at her outfit, he knew where this place was. It was just a fact, something pre-programmed into his brain. "Russia. It's in southern Russia."
Dr. Savalas smiled and checked something off on her clipboard. "Good. Very good. Now, come with me."
He swung his legs off of the cot and felt his bare feet hit the cool floor with startling awareness. He stood, drawing himself up to his full height, which was over a foot taller than the doctor. She stared up at him with a forceful gaze and then, with deliberate rigidity, she turned and walked over to a large metal door he hadn't noticed before. She took an access card from her pocket, swiped it against a scanner against the side of the wall, and the door swung open with an audible click, vanishing into the cavern beyond. Without waiting to see if he were following, she stepped out into the dark hallway beyond.
He followed with tepid steps, unsure of himself. His body felt nimble and lithe, but stiff and sore at the same time. Dr. Savalas had said he'd been sleeping a long time. He wondered, for the first time, exactly what that meant. He stared at the back of her dark head, feeling the trepidation course through his body. He wasn't sure what he was doing here. Wasn't sure why he felt such dread in the pit of his stomach. She said that he was from here...shouldn't that mean that he would feel like he belonged? Shouldn't something, anything, feel familiar to him?
There was nothing. He followed her down the dark hallway anxiously, trying desperately to find a connection somewhere to this place that he was in. But everything he felt was alien and new. The curvatures of the solid rock walls around him were unfamiliar. The fading and flickering yellow lights that hung at random intervals around him were foreign. If he were from here, he would know them, he thought to himself.
But would that also mean that he should know himself? How could he expect to remember a place when he couldn't even remember his own name?
It was cold there, in the damp, dank tunnels beneath the Russian mountain. He felt gooseflesh raise on his arms and the hairs on the back of his neck stood at rapid attention. Every step felt like a thousand. The hallway seemed a million miles long.
Eventually, Dr. Savalas stopped in front of another door. This one was thicker and more reinforced than the one he'd passed through before. That one had been flimsy compared to the beast in front of him. He stared at it, estimating that it was a few inches thick and completely solid metal. There was another scanner to the side of the door but instead of swiping her card, Dr. Savalas placed the palm of her hand against the device. She paused there a moment before there was a loud beep and the door opened.
"Come," she said without looking over her shoulder. "They won't want to be kept waiting. Not now while they know that you're awake."
He frowned to himself, hesitant, and then started forwards. "Okay. But, will they tell me what's going on? Who I am? And what's Phase two?" The questions flew from his mouth without his permission but he just couldn't hold them back anymore. He was aware of many things, the cold on his bare feet and chest, the pounding in his head, the soreness of his muscles, but it was the confusion that was most prevalent in his thoughts. The rest he could deal with in time.
Right now, he wanted answers.
Dr. Savalas smiled at him, her small, tender face gentle and kind. "Of course they will. I am not at liberty to discuss the parameters of Phase two. I'm afraid that it happens to be miles above my pay grade." She gave a little chuckle, as if that were going to diffuse the tension and solve the situation. And then, before he could ask anything else, she disappeared through the doorway.
He followed, slower and warier. Something, though he couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was, felt wrong. Still, he continued on. There was nothing else he could do.
The man emerged into a room that was all white. The floors, the ceiling, the walls, all the exact same blindingly bright shade. His eyes stung for a moment until they adjusted and it was then that he noticed a trio of men sitting clumped around a desk in the center of the room. They were watching as he entered with trepidation. The man looked around, his eyes searching for the familiar form of Dr. Savalas but, in his single moment of hesitation and the time it had taken for his eyes to adjust to the brightness of the room, she'd disappeared. There were no doors that he could see, save for the one he'd entered from. No evidence that she'd even been there at all.
She was simply gone.
"Hello," one of the men said. He was sitting in the middle of the other two. The man was older, face lined with wrinkles and hair starting to pepper and grow thin. There was a kind of power in his eyes, one that spoke of leadership and responsibility. He was a man in charge.
"Hi. Who are you?"
"Take a seat," he replied and gestured to the lone empty chair that lay across from them.
Hesitantly, the man stepped deeper into the room. The door behind him slid shut the moment he did so and, for a second, he was overcome with the sharpest edge of fear. It was the kind that told him to run away and screw the consequences of his actions. He felt trapped, like a cornered animal. He wanted out.
But, there was nowhere to go. No out. So, he sat, perched right on the very edge of the chair, ready to bolt at a moment's notice. "Who are you?" he asked again. "Who am I? What do you want from me?"
"What do we want from you?" the first man asked. His voice was riddled with incredulity. "Don't you mean what do you want from us? It seems your memory is failing you. You came to us, remember?"
The man furrowed his brows, trying desperately to remember something, anything, but there was nothing but darkness in his mind. He shook his head. "No. No, I don't remember. I don't remember anything."
The three men shared uncertain glanced. Then, the youngest of the three, a man with dark hair and smooth skin and a barely-visible scar on his jawline, said, "You were looking for a new start. You were running away from something in your past. You needed an out. We offered you Redfire."
"Redfire?" he asked with a frown.
The young man slid a closed file across the desk towards him. He reached out and grabbed it, flipping to the first page. His eyes flew across the words with rapid demand. He read through the entire contents of the file, growing more and more ill as what he read sunk in and the pictures enclosed committed themselves to his memory. When he finished reading, he looked up with a frown.
"I don't understand. What is this?"
"It's you," the third man said. His blond hair was starting to whiten. He was probably about fifty and his eyes were as cold and hard as sapphire stones. "The things you've done. The people you've killed. This was you before the accident."
"Accident? What accident? What happened to me?"
"You were working an Op. Things went south. People got hurt. You got hurt. It's exceptional that you're even alive right now. You've been in a coma for the past three months."
Three months? he thought to himself. That can't be right.
He dug through his muddled brain, trying to come up with some sort of clear path about who he was about the the things he'd done but there was nothing. He imagined a locked door in his mind, blocking his advance of knowledge. Behind it, he knew, was where his personality laid. He needed to get through the door but he just couldn't find the damn key.
The first man sighed and leaned forward so that his forearms were resting on the table. "Look, son. I know that you want more answers about what's going on. It's clear that something has happened to your memory which has caused you to forget all of our previous engagements.
"Now, I'm an honorable man. I am going to give you a choice. Your first option is to leave. We'll let you go, we'll even drop you off at the nearest town, but you'll have to find all of your answers elsewhere. Know that you are a wanted man. Every government agency across the globe has you on their radar. You will be on your own. We will not protect you. Or, you can stay here with us. You'll get your answers. We'll proceed with Phase two. Inside this military base you are protected. We can make sure that no intelligence agency is able to find you. But, the second you walk out that door, your life is out of our hands. The choice is yours."
"What if you tell me who I am and I don't want to proceed with Phase two after that. What if I want to leave?" he asked. He looked between all three men but none so much as blinked in concern.
The first man's eyes burned with ferocity and knowledge. "Believe me, once you get your answers, you won't want to leave. Go now or continue with Redfire. Those are your only options. I'd choose wisely if I were you. You won't get to choose again."