Every step I took toward him felt like the ground was registering a verdict.
The distance between us was nothing.
Then the building began to shake - explosions somewhere deep in the structure, walls cracking, the whole palace announcing its own end.
The judge laughed.
"You think you're going to touch me? I don't lose.
And if I do - I'm taking you with me"
I laughed too.
His laugh died immediately. Something moved across his face — the first real fear I'd seen there.
"Why - why are you laughing, you -"
"You think this little trick is enough to put me down?" I said. "You lose, so you take me with
you?"
I let one second of silence sit between us.
Then I raised my voice until it filled the burning room:
"I don't fall. Buildings fall. Mountains fall. I'm still standing. You think you're a mountain? You're an insect. I could crush you and not feel it?"
The walls were coming down. Curtains igniting, fabric blackening at the edges and then consuming itself in orange. The fire made its own light, filling every corner the electricity had abandoned. Ash drifting through the air like gray snow. Smoke thickening above us, pressing down.
He saw his moment and broke for the window.
Left his daughter without a glance.
A sports car waited outside. He threw himself into it.
I was already ahead of him.
I had disabled every vehicle on the grounds before I came inside.
Itook his daughter and threw her through the windshield.
The glass shattered. Her head split open on impact.
He scrambled out of the car trying to run on foot.
I raised the rifle and put a round through his left leg.
He hit the ground face-first, screaming.
I climbed out of the window without hurrying.
Walked to him at a pace that had no urgency in it whatsoever - because there was nowhere he was going.
I covered his mouth with my hand and brought my face close to his.
"You see? Pain is interesting, isn't it. Isn't there something almost pleasurable about watching someone you hate writhe in front of you?"
His daughter's head was bleeding out on the ground nearby. I broke both his hands — left, then right — and dragged him across the gravel to her.
I threw him down in front of her.
"Watch your daughter die. With your own eyes."
He was weeping already — a broken, formless sound. Begging with whatever syllables he could produce.
I went to the girl and tore her clothes.
I looked back at him.
"If you want me to help you - do it yourself.
Assault her"
The judge laughed. A real laugh - shocked, almost delighted.
"That's all?"
"You'd actually do it?"
"Yes."
He began trying to move toward her - dragging himself with his broken hands, using his feet.
When he was almost there, I kicked him across the face and put the barrel of the rifle against him.
He went completely still. The fear coming off him was total, animal, the kind that has no dignity left in it.
"If you were actually going to do that," I said, the anger in my chest something I'd stopped trying to name, "then you don't deserve to be alive."
I was about to pull the trigger.
He said: "Stop. Don't kill your father."
I stared at him.
"Your father?" I said, with the particular contempt reserved for a man running out of options. "That's what you're going with? Have you exhausted every other option?"
"It's the truth. I'm your biological father."
"Stop talking"
"The doctor told you — you and Nino share a mother, but different fathers. Didn't he?"
Something shifted.
"What are you saying"
"Do you want proof?"
"You - my father" I kept my voice flat. "Watch what you say very carefully. You were never there.
You have no claim on that word. Whatever proof you think you have, Put it in your ass."
"Your mother was my wife," he said. "The man you believed was your father — he was an ordinary man. But you are not ordinary."
"What do you mean, not ordinary."
"You're an experiment. You're like sixty children
— but you were the first."
"The children were abducted two months ago.
How am I connected to them?"
"When you entered the laboratory the first time - did you see sixty children?"
"Yes"
"And you found a doctor performing surgery on a child's brain. Correct?"
"How do you know that"
"Because that memory is yours. The doctor and the child -that was you. And me
I couldn't assemble what he was saying into something that made sense.
"That's impossible. I was on the streets at that age.
I was homeless."
"Then tell me - do you actually remember those days? Any of them?"
Istopped.
He was right.
I don't remember any of it. The only memories I have are the drunk man, and the night under the bridge. That's where my past begins. Everything before it is simply absent — a space where memory should be and isn't.
He kept talking.
"Your mother left me because she couldn't tolerate what I was doing to the children. I told her our son would be extraordinary. She said 'he is my child, not yours. I lost control - I hit her, she fell.
There was a juice bottle near her. She broke it on my head and stabbed me in the stomach"
He lifted his shirt and showed me the scar.
My eyes filled.
"She defended me?" My voice came out smaller than I intended.
"Don't assume I'm the leader of the Organization," he said. "And don't assume sixty children were the beginning. There were many before them. Accept the truth, Tai. Experiment zero."
Experiment zero.
"Look at yourself" he said. "You look like me. Your face, your features. Didn't she hurt you because every time she looked at you, she saw me?"
The memory arrived without warning - her face, the way she'd look at me before her hand came down — and my head split open with pain. The world tilted. The fire around us seemed to rotate.
I went to my knees.
And something fell from my pocket.
Nino's letter.
Ilooked at it on the ground. Picked it up.
The judge went silent. His voice changed when he spoke again — something small and cornered in it:
"Is that - is that Nino's letter?"
"What are you afraid of?" I said. "That it contradicts you?"
He said nothing. Trying to look innocent. It wasn't going to work.
I brought out the wire and bound him where he knelt.
Then I opened the letter.
The paper was stained. Dark. Irregular.
My grip tightened around it before I'd read a word.
Iread.
———
Hello, Tai.
This is the first letter I've ever written you. Im nervous.
Ahem — that doesn't matter. Let me say what I need to say.
Listen carefully. Whatever they tell you about me, about you, about us — it's lies. Don't believe them.
Don't fall into the trap.
They've been taking children. The one who killed me is Mimi — the girl with the glasses. I wasn't assaulted the way they'll say. You'll ask: how do I know what they told you? Because I was listening to their plans.
In the beginning they took me. I was home, I put my head on the pillow, I closed my eyes, and I heard glass breaking. I went to my window and looked out - I saw them carrying bodies. Four of them.
Someone noticed me. He fired. The bullet nut my right shoulder. When I fell I tried to run, but he was in front of me before I could. He broke my window and took me. That was when you heard it.
They put me in a truck. Tied with rope, thrown into the cargo hold with the bodies. My shoulder was bleeding badly. The pain was something I couldn't think through. I tried to call for help. No one heard me.
The truck stopped. I heard gunshots. Then silence.
I was dizzy from the blood loss. The cargo door opened. I tried to see who had saved me - and lost consciousness.
When I woke up I was in my room. Clean. Quiet. I thought I'd dreamed everything. I came downstairs and you were gone.
I finished school. I graduated. I tried to call you and they told me you were in prison. I couldn't believe it. Why were you in prison?
I went back to collect my diploma before university.
I found suspicious people in a place that was almost hidden — like a forest clearing.
At first I found Mimi. I wanted to tell her I was starting university. But something about her was wrong — she kept looking over her shoulder, like she didn't want to be followed.
I followed her.
I found her with the judge. And another man - the school guard.
They were throwing children's bodies into a deep pit and burning them.
I was terrified. I tried to back away — but the twins found me. The ones called "O." They took me to the judge. The judge threw me into the pit.
I was burning. They left without looking back.
I climbed on the children's bodies to get out. When I escaped I went to the police station to report what I'd seen.
An officer grabbed me and said: "Your clothes are indecent. Are you trying to tempt me?"
I kicked him and ran. I understood then that the police couldn't help me.
I wanted to call you. I remembered you were in prison.
I gave up and went home.
The twins were there.
I tried to run. They caught me again. This time I had paper and a pen.
They put me somewhere - I could hear waves, seagulls. I knew I was near the ocean.
They tied me to an iron chair. I was partially restrained. I was able to write this letter because I sacrificed my left arm.
Yes. It was cut off. By the judge - he found me trying to escape.
When he cut it, the blood came like a waterfall. I screamed until I couldn't hear myself anymore.
He laughed at my face. Then he left.
That was when I wrote this.
I found out you're not my brother when you were in prison. I found papers, documents, inside a private room under our mother's bed.
Tai. I don't know what day it is, or what time, or whether this letter will ever reach you.
But I wanted to tell you — don't listen to their lies.
I'm not your sister.
And finally.
I LOVE YOU...
———
Time froze.
Ilooked at the judge's face.
Terrified. Completely.
The fire was consuming everything around us.
And then the clouds opened - rain coming down through the broken structure, falling on the flames, on the ash, on me.
They did it to her.
They did it while I was locked away and couldn't reach her.
Every word of this letter.
Written in her blood.
I stood up.
Like a corpse that had decided, for one final purpose, to move again.
I kicked him across the face.
Then I stood on his feet and pressed down until the bones gave way beneath mine.
He begged. He wept like an infant - formless, unrecognizable sounds. Reaching for mercy with a face that didn't deserve to ask for it.
I took him by the hair and pulled his eyes level with mine.
"Listen to me," I said, and my voice was quiet - the quiet of something that has moved past rage into something colder and more permanent. "You worthless, contemptible thing.
Beg for mercy whenever you want. I will not give it.
Ask for forgiveness whenever you want. I will not grant it.
Plead with me whenever you want. I will not leave you alive.
You do these things — and then you ask for mercy and forgiveness and compassion? Didn't the children ask you for those things? Didn't Nino?
How dare you show that face after what you've done.
I will not leave you breathing. Even if the whole world turns against me for it."
I pulled his hair out by the handful. Strand by strand.
I broke his fingers one by one.
It wasn't enough.
I brought out the wire.
And I took him apart.
———
When it was finished, I went to the daughter.
I checked for a pulse.
She was already gone.
I took the blade and drove it into her throat anyway. Then I worked methodically - fifty strikes, every inch of her — until there was nothing left that resembled what she had been.
I straightened up.
A light from above — searching, white, sweeping across the grounds. A helicopter. The entire property surrounded.
Ilooked up at it.
Then I went back to her and finished.
I walked out through the garden.
The police had formed a perimeter. Weapons raised. Lights everywhere — the red and blue cutting through the rain in a way that was more noise than color, more irritant than authority.
I walked toward them and through them. Not around. Through.
Someone tried to fire.
His weapon had been cut. He looked at it like a man who had just discovered a law of physics had changed.
The helicopter kept following. The voice through the speaker telling me I was under arrest, telling me to stop.
I didn't stop.
Then the voice got louder.
I turned. Looked up at it. Picked up the blade.
And threw it.
It crossed the distance like a thought. Punched through the front glass. The voice stopped.
I kept walking.
———
The ground didn't want me to get there.
The rain was falling hard enough to make the earth into something that moved beneath my feet.
I slipped. Went down on my face. Got up. Slipped again. Got up again. The mud didn't matter. The rain didn't matter. The direction was the only thing that existed.
The shipping yard.
I searched every container. Every one. For an hour
- and found nothing.
When I was about to leave, my foot came down on something that wasn't the ground.
Ilooked.
Nino.
What remained of Nino.
The decay had already begun.
Silence Only the rain.
No sound came out of me. Nothing. I stood there and there was simply nothing left in me that knew how to react to this.
I picked her up.
I carried her.
With every step, pieces of her fell. I stopped and gathered each one and kept walking. Her body was cold, brittle - the cold of something that had been cold for longer than I could think about — and with every movement, what remained of her came apart like autumn in my arms.
I walked to the cemetery.
I set her down carefully.
I looked for a shovel.
There was none.
Ilooked at my hands.
And I started digging.
I dug with my fingers, my palms, the sides of my fists — into the earth, into the mud, pulling it out in handfuls, deeper and deeper, until the skin tore and the flesh beneath split and my hands were bleeding into the same ground I was opening.
I dug until it was enough.
Itook off my shirt. My jacket.
I wrapped her in them — what was left of her, every piece I'd carried and gathered - and I placed her inside.
And I buried her.
As though I were burying the last light I had ever known. The last warmth. The last thing in my life that had ever been given to me without conditions.
———
The police arrived.
They surrounded the entire cemetery.
When they closed in, they found me sitting on the ground beside the grave.
My face had stopped doing what faces do.
The rain washed my tears away.
It did not touch the grief.
I reached into my pocket.
Found a cigarette.
Lit it.
And sat in the rain while the smoke rose and disappeared, and the red and blue lights moved across the headstones, and everything I had ever been given was in the ground beneath my hands.
(End of Chapter 37)