"Do you think there are files like that about me?"
Raizen didn't answer straight away.
His mind was was somewhere else — almost nineteen months back and a long way east, in a forest he still didn't want to remember.
He remembered the cold first, he always did. The tingling blood slicking his arm, the pain in his legs. He'd been running and behind him there had been something that had already decided what was going to happen to him. The whisper without a voice. The one that had just pulled, gently and insistently, through the black trees. The one he had followed because he had nothing left to follow.
And in a hollow between two roots, there had been a girl.
No coat, in that cold – just a perfectly white dress. Curled on the ground, golden hair shining with moonlight.
