Page 77 of Decimation

The vibration changes, the hum dipping lower as the car slows. Gravel crunches under tyres. Then the motion stops entirely, and I am left in silence save for the frantic beating of my heart.

A door opens. Cold air rushes in, sharp with the scent of pine and damp earth. Not a city, then. Somewhere remote. Somewhere no one will hear me scream.

Hands slide under my body, one beneath my knees, one behind my back, and I am lifted as though I weigh nothing. I flinch, a violent full-body spasm, and a low sound rumbles from the chest of the person carrying me. Not words. Just a soothing vibration, like you might offer a frightened animal.

It does not soothe me.

Nothing can soothe me.

The air changes. We are inside now. The cold gives way to warmth, the pine scent to something older; woodsmoke, beeswax, stone. I know those smells, I recognise them. They smell like home, my childhood home. Memories stir, unwanted and unbidden, and I think of my mother. I think of how they caught her, how she too was brought to the Grand Master. Is she dead? Did they kill her? No one has even spoken of her since the day we arrived.

My feet do not touch the ground. I am carried like a bride over a threshold, and the thought makes bile rise in my throat. I have been a bride before, in a nightmare. I will not be one again.

I am lowered onto something soft. A chair, upholstered, the fabric nubby under my trembling fingers. The hands that held me withdraw, and I hear footsteps, the rustle of clothing, the soft click of a door closing but I am not alone. I can feel him there, a presence in the room like a drop in pressure before a storm.

“Easy now.” Someone says, “I’m going to take the bandages off. Stay still.”

I do not trust myself to speak. I nod, a jerky motion, and then there are fingers at my temple, working gently at the edge of the gauze. The bandages loosen, layer by layer, and I feel the air touch my eyelids for the first time in what feels like days. I keep them squeezed shut, afraid. Afraid of the dark, afraid of the light. Afraid that when I open them, there will be nothing at all. That I will be just as blind as I fear I am.

“Try to open your eyes,” the voice says. “Slowly.”

I do, and it is agony. Light sears through me, a blade of white fire, and I wince, tears springing instantly to the surface. I blink again and again, my vision swimming in a blur of shapes and shadows. For one horrible moment everything is a smear, and I think he blinded me, he really blinded me, but then the world begins to resolve. Edges sharpen. colours bleed into being.

I am in a room I do not know. Whitewashed walls, heavy drapes, a fire crackling in a hearth. It looks like something from another century, all dark wood and flickering shadows. And there, in front of me, is a face I know.

Konstantine.

The scream tears out of me before I can stop it. I jerk back, the chair scraping against the floor, my body trying to fold in on itself, to disappear. My hands fly up to protect my face, my throat, the soft vulnerable places he has already violated far too many times. I am shaking so hard my teeth chatter.

He grabs my hand.

His grip is firm but not cruel, his fingers wrapping around my wrist and holding me still. I wait for the pain, the twist, the punishment for my defiance. It does not come.

“I am not him.”

I stare at him, my breath coming in ragged gasps, and I do not understand. His face is Konstantine’s face; the same sharp cheekbones, the same cruel mouth, the same dark hair swept back from a high forehead. But his colours are wrong, I see that now. Konstantine’s colours are yellow, a sickly, jaundiced yellow shot through with veins of black, like a bruise that will not heal. But right now, they are deep, swirling hues of indigo, violet and something that glints like gold; mesmerizing, terrible and beautiful all at once.

“There’s, there’s two of you,” I whisper. The words feel too small for the enormity of the realization crashing over me. Oh god, there’s two of them.

He nods. A single, slow inclination of his head. No smirk. No gloating. Just confirmation.

The world tilts, and everything I thought I knew rearranges itself into a new and horrifying shape. The shifts in mood, the unpredictability, the way he could be cruel one moment and almost tender the next, it was never one man fracturing into pieces. It was two men, two brothers wearing the same identical face.

And I was passed between them like a toy, never knowing, never understanding.

Rage detonates inside me. White-hot and blinding, it burns through the fear, the exhaustion, the drugs still fogging my blood. I lash out, my free hand swinging toward his face with every ounce of strength I have left. My palm connects with his cheek, a sharp crack that echoes through the room. His head turns with the blow, but he does not stumble. He does not strike back.

I try to hit him again. This time he catches my wrist, his fingers closing around it with an unbreakable gentleness that makes me want to scream.

“Where am I?” I demand. My voice is raw, shredded, but I do not care. I will not be quiet. I will not be meek.

“You are safe,” he replies.

Safe? As if such a thing could ever exist for me again. I screw up my face, feeling the lie in my bones but I look at his colours, those deep, swirling, impossible colours, and I see no deceit. No yellow rot. No black veins. He believes what he is saying. He believes it.

“Safe where?” I spit.

“Where he cannot find you.”