Two days passed. Viktor brought everything on the list. Now, in the corner of the basement, there were black dumbbells, tubs of protein powder, and a stack of books with strange symbols on their covers. Anya trained. She was wearing the crop top and shorts he’d brought her—now that was her work uniform.
Viktor came down. He no longer felt that awkward arousal he’d felt before. It had been replaced by a strange curiosity. He watched her do lunges as she counted silently to herself.
He set a bottle of sports drink on the table—one he’d chosen himself.
“Your pulse.” He nodded toward the sports watch on her wrist. “What’s it at right now?”
Without breaking her rhythm, her voice ragged with exertion, she answered:
“One… forty… two.”
Viktor nodded.
“Good intensity. You’re taking this seriously.” He paused. “You know, I flipped through one of your books… Gurdjieff’s The Fourth Way. A pretty specific choice for a ‘bird with atrophied wings.’”
Anya stopped and wiped sweat with a towel. Her gaze sharpened, almost hard.
“For wings to grow back, you have to stop being mechanical, Viktor. Isn’t that what you wanted? For me to stop playing roles?”
She took a sip of the sports drink.
“So I’m learning to be in the moment. To be my body.”
Viktor sat on the edge of the table, watching her.
“Don’t you think you’re just building yourself a new cage? Before it was the basement walls—now it’s the discipline of your body. You’re still confined.”
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Anya walked up to him. Her skin radiated heat after the workout.
“Maybe. But in this cage, I have the keys. I decide how many times I lift the dumbbell. I decide what my next thought will be. You took the outside world from me, Viktor. I’m building one inside. Isn’t that fair?”
For the first time in a long while, he looked genuinely puzzled.
“That’s… unexpected. I thought you’d start asking for a TV or another bottle of wine to numb yourself. And you’re choosing awareness.”
He gave a small, amused snort.
“You know, it makes you even more… interesting. You’re becoming a project with a life of its own.”
“Projects don’t sip sports drinks or read Jung,” she said calmly. “Projects are blueprints. And I’m a process.”
She went back to the dumbbells. Viktor sat for a few more minutes, just watching her rhythmic movements. He felt he was losing his usual levers of control, but in exchange he was getting something new—intellectual excitement. After that, he left.
Anya finished the exercise, washed her face, and sat down at the laptop.
Hidden-volume note:
Something doesn’t add up. The Viktor who killed the cat and pinned it on me was emotionally unstable. The one who blushed at the sight of me half-dressed and trembled at an accidental touch was an insecure recluse.
But the one who dissected my psyche… that was a surgeon. Completely cold, logical, without empathy. Even his voice changed.
Either he’s a genius actor who’s been humoring me all this time, enjoying my pathetic attempts to fight… or there are two people living in that head. And if the first Viktor wants to ‘save’ me and ‘love’ me, the second needs me only as material. As a problem he’s already solved.
Anya absently touched the pocket where the small hair clip lay.
Fifteen scratches on the wall. Fifteen days. That girl… why was she here for so little time? Maybe she tried to play games with him too. And when the ‘Logician’ decoded her script, she became uninteresting to him? If I’m a solved problem to him now, then I’m dead weight. And dead weight gets thrown overboard…
Damn… Could he have some kind of dissociative split? There’s the ‘Protector’—weak, in love, guilty. And there’s the ‘Architect’—the one who built this bunker and the one talking to me now.
The ‘Architect’ doesn’t need my feelings. He needs results. If I get boring, if my ‘process’ loops—he’ll dispose of me. Like that girl. Fifteen days…
I need to bring back the ‘Protector.’ Only through his weakness can I get out. But the ‘Architect’ stands guard. That means I need a way to trigger an emotional malfunction in him. Something his logic can’t digest. Or… I need to find out what happened to that girl. If I put proof of his ‘imperfection’ in front of him, his system might glitch.