Anya sat in front of the open laptop, staring at the dumbbell. One question hammered in her mind: how much time did she have? A month? A week? A day? If she was right, and what stood in front of her was some kind of “Architect,” then to him she was just an equation. The moment he solved it, the moment she became predictable, she would become trash. Fifteen days had been enough for that girl. Anya had been here for more than two weeks already…
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I can’t wait. I can’t wait for him to suddenly ‘wake up’ in Protector mode. If I just keep training now, he’ll see a compliant mechanism. And then he’ll write me off. I have to break his script. Right now…
She snapped the laptop shut. The screen went dark; the encryption reset automatically—she’d enabled that paranoid setting first. There was no time left for doubt.
She grabbed the dumbbell. Five kilos of solid iron. In the hands of a woman whose anger had been forged into cold resolve, it wasn’t sports equipment. It was a battering ram.
She timed it to a loud exhale. A strike. The dumbbell landed exactly on the seam between panels. There was a dry crunch of drywall and a sharp rattle of something hollow behind it.
The door upstairs flew open at once. Viktor didn’t run—he came down slowly, and the measured sound of his steps was more frightening than any shout.
He came up to the broken panel and shifted his gaze from the hole to Anya. There was no Protector’s rage in his eyes—only the Architect’s icy curiosity.
“So?” he asked quietly.
Anya stood there, breathing hard.
“My hands… got sweaty. It just slipped. I was swinging and—” She looked him straight in the eye, meeting his gaze with practiced sincerity. “—it flew in there. I didn’t know the wall was so fragile. You said yourself everything was solid back there.”
Viktor smirked, and that smirk was worse than a snarl.
“Slipped. What a lucky coincidence.”
He gestured toward the breach.
“Since you were so eager to look behind the curtain, come here. Look at what you found.”
Anya stepped closer. She leaned in. An icy draft brushed across her face—and with it, the dust was drawn inward in a thin stream.
She expected to see earth, concrete—at worst, a dead end; at best, a hidden passage. But in a niche wedged between two partitions, on a neatly spread white cloth, it sat.
A human skeleton.
Perfectly clean, bleached white, like an exhibit in an anatomy lab. The skull was tilted slightly to the side; empty eye sockets stared straight at Anya. The little claw clip she’d found earlier had belonged to it.
Anya lurched back; a strangled rasp tore out of her. Horror locked her in place, but Viktor didn’t give her time to recover.
He grabbed her by the neck. His fingers clamped like vises. He threw her to the floor, pinning her face to the concrete. Anya felt the cold of the ground and the weight of his body. A sharp punch to her back drove the air out of her lungs.
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“You wanted the truth?” he hissed into her ear. “Here it is. Clean. No decoration.”
He yanked her up by the neck and slammed her against the wall beside the breach. Anya choked; her feet barely touched the floor, but she didn’t thrash. In her wide, wet eyes there was no panic. Only bottomless, endless sorrow.
“Well? What do you say now?” he spat.
“Did you… did you want… me to see this?” Her voice broke; she forced the words out.
Viktor froze. He’d expected begging, screaming, let go, I’ll do anything.
But this quiet sadness disrupted his script.
“Why do you keep it?” she asked, her voice still ragged. “To make me feel worse? So I know my ending? Why didn’t you bury it in the garden like the cat? What do you want, Viktor?”
She looked at him as if she almost pitied him.
“You don’t rape me. You don’t torment me for pleasure. You spend money on my books and dumbbells. What do you want? My obedience? Or for me to become just as… quiet and white as she is?”
Viktor slowly loosened his grip on her throat, but he didn’t step away. He looked at the skeleton with such reverence that Anya thought he might speak to it. In his gaze, something showed through that she’d never seen before—something like existential revulsion.
“Obedience?” His voice sounded like dry leaves. “Anya, I don’t need a slave. There are billions of slaves in this world. They obey alarm clocks, tax forms, and the fear of death.”
He moved his hand through the air without touching the bones.
“I keep this because it’s the only thing that’s true. Look at her. No lies. No masks. No ‘strategies.’ She reached absolute perfection. She no longer tries to seem like something she isn’t.”
“You killed her… so she’d become ‘true’?” Anya asked hoarsely.
“She was never alive for me. Only a tool. A reflection of what remains when everything unnecessary disappears. I don’t want you to be a tool, Anya. I want—”
He didn’t finish.
Anya jerked in his grip. Nearby, the blue dress, hanging half off the edge of the couch, shifted, and a small plastic claw clip slipped from its folds and dropped onto the concrete.
Time stopped. Viktor’s eyes dropped to the floor.
The fingers that had been clamped around her neck opened. He let Anya go, and she sagged to the floor, grabbing at her throat.
He sank to his knees and picked up the clip. It looked tiny in his large, calloused palm. His face began to twist—muscles under the skin jumping as if he were trying to hold back an internal explosion.
“You… you touched her things,” he whispered, and in that whisper there was the crack of a mind breaking. “With your dirty, scheming hands…”
“Viktor, I just found it in the dust… I didn’t mean—” she rasped.
“SHUT UP!”
That scream wasn’t a human voice. It was the roar of a wounded animal. He spun and struck Anya across the face with a backhand. The blow was so hard it threw her into the wall. Her head hit the concrete with a ringing crack; sparks burst in her eyes.
Anya fell onto her side, trying to cover herself with her arms, but Viktor was already out of control. He landed several more blows—heavy, methodical: to her shoulder, to her ribs. Each one came with his harsh, ragged breathing. This wasn’t the Architect and it wasn’t the Protector. This was primal rage made physical.
At last he stopped. Anya lay curled on the floor, feeling something warm running down her face, a dull pain flaring in her side.
Viktor stood over her, squeezing the clip so hard the plastic bit into his skin. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t gloat. He only turned and went up the stairs in silence.
The lock slammed shut with such force it felt like the whole house shuddered. Only silence remained—the smell of dust, and the pale skeleton in the breach, which now seemed like the only calm presence in this place.
She thought:
It hurts… It hurts to breathe. But my ribs are intact. Just bruised.
I made a mistake. I thought his mind was his strength. But his mind is just a thin crust of ice over an abyss of madness. The clip… That little piece of plastic did what my words couldn’t. It brought out the monster. I thought I’d found the key to his emotions—I found a detonator.
Everything has changed now. “Sincerity,” “training,” “esoterica”—none of that matters anymore. He left without a word. That’s the worst thing. It means he won’t come back to apologize. He’ll come back to finish the process. Fifteen scratches on the wall…
I don’t have much time. While he’s up there, choking on his hatred, while the “logical” part of him wrestles with the “killer,” I have to decide. I felt the draft—so there’s a way through behind that niche. Even if it’s just a narrow duct I can’t squeeze into, it’s my only chance, my only opening. Either I break through this wall all the way and pray for a miracle… or I accept the role of that skeleton…