shiver (FEATURED) | ✓

o4o

vance

"YOU CANNOT CONTINUE like this, Vance. I implore you to see reason!" Reason. Reason. Am I losing the ability to find reason, cold hard logic, in the science and mathematics of a city built entirely on true ideals and good intentions? My hands tremble as I bring them up to card my fingers through my hair. Adamík has chosen my side, for now, and we stand together in front of the sinks in the bathroom, him staring at me, scrutinising my expression, me staring back at him, blankly.

"Keep your voice down, Adamík," I murmur, briefly closing my eyes. When I open them again, his expression is none other than troubled.

"Tell me again and then I'll walk you home," he says gently.

"I took my car," I answer flatly, and he sighs, placing a gentle hand on my right shoulder.

▿

I watch as he retrieves one of the blue pills from the bin, turning it around between his fingers. "It's this, then. What they've given you to suppress the dreams," he murmurs.

"Obviously."

He holds the pill up to the window, to the cyan lights outside on the streets, casting the city into a false luminescence, a dome of light, in stark contrast with the flat, snowy plains that carpet the floor of this great city. Adamík places the pill down onto the glass dining table: my eyes fall to it surreptitiously, before returning to his, once again, worried face. "Tell me about the dreams again. The colours, more specifically. What are the main colours?"

I shrug. "I don't- I don't know- mostly red, pink, green- oh, god, I don't know anymore!" My voice rises into an unmistakable crescendo, but it dies down soon enough.

None of it reassures my friend, and as I look back up at him, I see the chiseled facade of the podium in the Square, mirrored in his cold, slightly suspicious, and overwrought visage. He leans towards one side of this war, professionally, and towards the other, unprofessionally, because I am his friend. I wish I could make the same distinction, and not let memory and self-absorbed thoughts blur the line between profession and friendship. His hand moves over my stiff work uniform and gives my shoulder a gentle squeeze.

"It's alright. Calm down." It's like he's forcing the emotion to come through in his voice, and it's hardly reassuring. But it forces me to take several long breaths: that, on the other hand, helps me calm down and regain my balance.

I pick up the broken pieces of my pride from the floor and stare at them resting in my hands, meshed together by the weaving of my fingers over one another. The pieces are white on the outside, pure, beautiful- but the inside makes them crumble with the slightest twitch of the wrist. The hollow inside is lined with blue, the exact same shade as the pills.

"What are you looking at, Vance?" Adamík's expression reflects confusion, and... pity. It's like he doesn't know what to do with me; his shoulders are slumped forwards, his body tense, expression slightly lost.

I glance back down at my hands. There's nothing in them. "Nothing. I was just thinking," I mutter.

His disbelief is clear. I watch sullenly as he turns back to the table, passes a fingertip back over the triangular pill. "Why did you stop taking them?"

There's a long silence.

A sigh, the scraping of a chair. He sits down opposite me. "Vance, I can't help you if you don't talk to me."

More silence ensues. I can't tell him. He'll think I'm a fool.

"Vance." He closes his eyes briefly. "The President will have you killed if he finds out about this, high council or not. You know that," he tells me. "Just let me help you. Please. Why did you stop taking them?" His tone is softer, this time. It makes me want to tell him everything. Everything I know that they don't. But my secrets are burdens I alone have to bear, and they make me feel like Atlas.

I suck in a deep breath hollow my cheeks, purse my lips, then exhale slowly. My fingers begin to drum agitatedly against the glass tabletop,  my knee jolts up and down. "I want to... I want to remember." I run my hand across my face, feeling my voice suddenly shrink. The muscles in my throat constrict, as though intent on asphyxiating me. "I want to remember them."

When I look up at him, I can tell he knows. He knows everything that's been going on in my head, ridiculous fantasies of bringing back the dead, the damned, the departed. Those condemned to a fate without a choice, but by chance they were graced with poorer genes than the rest of us. 

"You mustn't dwell--"

"On such things, I know." Finishing his sentence for him is easy. Talking to him is easy. Going back to work won't be as easy. "You don't understand. I need to remember them, Adamík."

I'm an idiot. Of course he doesn't understand. Of course he doesn't. He doesn't understand what the pills have done to me, what Tetrahmon has done to me. They took my family from me, and just a little while ago, they tried to take something else from me, something inexplicable, something invaluable. They tried to take my name away from me.

They tried to take my name from me, turn me into a numbered drone.

C1032 ;

the number branded into my forearm.

I remember staring at it, that day, when they pulverised NW-60. When they killed him because of me. I was unable to save him. I betrayed him by spilling his crazed secrets, and so they had to shut him up, discredit every word he ever said. Murderer, it says. The black ink is stark against my skin, my eyes struggling to focus on the curve of the C, on the sharp upwards stroke of the 1. 

"Adamík." Rolling my sleeve back down to cover up the number, I sweep the pill into the palm of my hand from his and return it to the table as I stand. "I'm going, now."

I'm going, now, before they take everything away from me.