In the morning, Anya woke at once, without any murky half-sleep. There was a cold, unpleasant clarity in her head.
With Viktor, she already knew what to do. She saw the cracks in his system, knew where to press so that he would break and justify himself at the same time. A war against a human being was a war fought by rules.
But what had happened in the night… did not fit into any system.
She lay there, going over the details like beads: the three-second gap, the blocky artifacts in the recording, the sound that had “started earlier” than the moment she sprang up. She tried to force it into an explanation—a network failure, an equipment fault, a glitch in the player, a simple coincidence—but the explanations would not hold. And that was what struck hardest of all: she felt that she had shifted something she did not understand, and now she had no idea what would happen if she touched it again.
She did not know what to do next. Viktor was understandable, familiar in his monstrosity. But the incident in the night left her facing something without rules, without form, without boundaries. She no longer understood what she had gotten herself into.
For the first time in a long while, a thought came to her, sweet in its simplicity:
Run.
Walk out through the gate, dissolve into the city, go home, to her own place, to her mother—in whatever state she was in. Not play at being a “value,” or a ghost, or someone at war. Not touch what was not supposed to answer.
She had almost believed in the thought—and then, in the very same second, another piece of knowledge rose coldly inside her. Without emotion, without embellishment, simply as a fact.
Viktor would take revenge. He would have nothing left to lose.
Anya clenched her fingers so hard that her nails dug into her palm.
To run meant signing other people’s death warrants. There was nothing heroic about that thought. It was vile and heavy, like wet cloth.
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For the first time, Anya wanted to disappear. To evaporate from this world, never to have existed at all.
Because fighting Viktor was one thing. Touching something that did not answer like a human being was something else entirely.
She got up, dressed on autopilot, and went out into the garden.
In the morning, there was something lifeless about it: the neat paths, the perfectly trimmed bushes—here, even nature moved according to rules.
She sat down on the familiar bench, locked her fingers together so they would not tremble, and said, barely above a whisper:
“Nyuta…” The word came out heavy, as if it had no right to sound here. “Forgive me.”
She fell silent, looking at the ground in front of her.
“I didn’t want…” she went on, just as quietly. “I didn’t want to be in your place. I didn’t want this house. I… I was only trying to survive.”
The wind passed through the garden, and somewhere above her, a dry branch clicked. It was a small sound, meaningless—but in that silence, it sounded like an answer.
A prickle of discomfort passed through her, as if someone were standing beside her and listening. She swallowed and, without changing her tone, whispered:
“If you want… I’ll leave. I’ll just leave. I’ll leave the two of you alone. You’ll be together agai—”
She did not finish. From the road beyond the fence came a sharp, deafening crack, like a gunshot right beside her ear. Then tires screeched, an engine roared, someone braked hard. Other people’s voices followed—frightened, swearing. The noise was so loud that birds burst from the branches, though a second earlier she had not heard them at all.
Anya flinched with her whole body. For a moment, she wanted to laugh—because it was too well timed. Too loud. Too unambiguous.
Don’t.
She sat motionless until the noise on the road faded back into the usual background. Her heart was beating unevenly—not out of fear for the driver, but because something had cut her thoughts off in the middle.
She looked at the house again.
“I understand,” she whispered. “All right.”
She was quiet for a while.
“Then I’ll make sure you have a grave,” she said, barely audibly. “A real one. Somewhere people can come. Somewhere Kira can…” She faltered for a second, her voice trembling. “Somewhere people can say goodbye…”
The words cut at her throat, but she held on.
“But for that, I’ll have to get rid of Viktor,” she said without raising her voice. “Otherwise, he won’t let anyone go. Not you. Not me.”
She fell silent.
No answer.
No mysticism.
Only leaves and the distant noise of the city.
And suddenly, that silence felt right. Not “yes” and not “no.” Just: do it.
“All right.”
The word sounded like an agreement—first of all, with herself.
“I’ll do it. And after that…” She exhaled. “Whatever happens, happens.”
She sat there for another minute, then got up and went back toward the house. And in her head, beneath the feigned calm, one obsessive thought remained:
Now this was no longer a game with just him.