Killing Sarai

60

I feel like I've been dreaming for days. The same constant series of images and voices all around me always sound calming yet persistent. The images, they're what tells me that it's not real because everyone I see are already dead. Javier. Izel. Lydia. Samantha. My mother. They walk by me in a sort of quiet, contemplative state as if I'm not even here. I can almost touch my mother's hair when she passes.

I must be dreaming.

But the dreams are slowly fading and the strange, unfamiliar voices I hear are becoming more distinct. I feel like I'm trapped inside my own mind and it has forgotten that it controls my body. Because I can't move anything. Not my eyes or my lips or my hands. I can't even tell if I'm breathing on my own. But mostly what I think about are the voices, how clearer they're becoming. I find myself concentrating as hard as I can so that I can focus on their words, but I never get further than the sound.

At least not until I hear Victor's voice in the distance.

"I won't be here long today," I hear him say to someone.

I try to wake up, but I think the effort has the opposite effect because in an instant I'm consumed by blackness and all of the voices disappear.

More time passes. More dreams. More voices.

And then just like that as if a switched had been flipped in my brain, my eyelids break apart and I see that I'm lying in a hospital bed.

Victor is sitting next to me in a chair.

"You're awake," he says and smiles down at me.

"How long have I not been?" I'm still trying to put my mind back together.

"Three days," he says. "But you're going to be fine. They kept you sedated most of the time you've been here."

I try to raise my back from the pillow, but the pain in my stomach is too much. I wince and my hands come up to put pressure on the area, but Victor takes my hands and guides me back down. "You can't be moving around yet," he says and stands up. He takes the extra pillow from a nearby chair and positions it underneath the back of my head. Then he pushes a button on the side of the bed to raise it to allow me to sit upright. An IV snakes along the top of my hand, plastered to my skin with white tape. It itches like mad.

"The bullet missed every organ," Victor says as he sits back down in the chair. "You were lucky."

Niklas' face flashes in my mind.

"Or your brother is just a bad shot."

I look down at my arms resting on the bed at my sides. I want to know what happened to Niklas and I feel like I should hope that he's dead, but I can't.

"Is he-?"

"No," Victor says. "Half of me wanted to kill him, but the other half couldn't do it. I just wonder which half would've won if you hadn't been alive in that moment."

I reach across the bed a few inches with my hand in search of his. He interlocks his fingers with mine.

"I'm glad you didn't," I say, pushing a faint smile through to the surface of my face. "I couldn't live with myself if I had been the reason you killed your brother. I-I never should've come between you. I didn't know what I was doing, Victor. I am so sorry."

He squeezes my hand.

"You did something that no one else could," he says and I eagerly wait for him to tell me what that could possibly be. "You made me remember that I have a brother, Sarai. He and I have practically sat side by side at a table as strangers for the past twenty-four years. And I see now that despite his faults, he has never once betrayed me."