The ceiling was white.

  Natalie blinked. Once. Twice.

  The light above her burned. Her lashes trembled as the blur of faces came into view, silhouettes first, then color, then sound.

  “…She’s awake.”

  That was Hannah. Her small voice carried the kind of excitement that shattered the quiet.

  “Oh, thank God,” Tina exhaled, her relief almost collapsing into laughter.

  Marcin stood at the end of the bed, hands shoved in his pockets, his smile small but sincere.

  “Welcome back to the living, Natalie.”

  Natalie’s heart raced. Her throat was dry. She tried to sit up, but Tina immediately pressed a hand to her shoulder.

  “Don’t. Don’t move too fast,” Tina said gently. “You’ve been out for four days.”

  Natalie froze. “…Four?”

  Tina nodded.

  “You fainted. Right in the hallway, outside my dorm. Scared the hell out of us.”

  Natalie’s eyes darted from one face to another, confusion flooding her veins. “Fainted?”

  “Yes,” Marcin said, rubbing the back of his neck. “We thought maybe you were sick, but the doctors said there was nothing physically wrong. Just shock.”

  Shock.

  The word echoed through her like a gunshot.

  The room around her dissolved.

  ***

  Natalie stopped walking.

  The corridor had gone dead quiet. Only the hum of the old building’s fluorescent lights remained, flickering like a dying heartbeat.

  And then — she felt it.

  Before she saw him, she felt him. That familiar pressure, like gravity itself, had changed its mind.

  She turned her head slowly.

  Casimir was there.

  He walked toward her from the far end of the hall, his coat brushing softly against her. He didn’t speak. Didn’t even glance her way until he was close enough that the air between them felt too tight to breathe.

  Then, his shoulder brushed hers.

  Just a touch.

  Her breath caught. Her pulse stuttered.

  Casimir turned his head slightly. Their eyes met — blue on blue.

  And for that second, the entire world stilled.

  Then he kept walking. Calm. Effortless. Unbothered.

  Until he was gone.

  Natalie’s hands began to tremble. The air felt electric. She turned in place, too slowly, her vision blurring at the edges.

  Her chest tightened. The hallway spun.

  No, no, no, not again—

  She raised a hand to her mouth, stifling the sharp sob that slipped through.

  The world tilted. Her ears rang.

  “No…” she whispered, voice shaking. “I didn’t want to! I didn’t want to see the end!”

  Pain tore through her skull — like static, like light splitting apart.

  Fragments — a flash of blood, a child’s scream, the smell of mud and iron.

  “The demon, the demon… kill the demon…”

  Her vision shattered — and suddenly she wasn’t Natalie anymore.

  The demon. The soldier.

  Where had she heard that before?

  Then — a voice. Gentle. Familiar.

  “Do you feel it, Nine?”

  Ten stood at the end of the corridor. His face was calm. His eyes were clear — too clear.

  “The weight of the world is shifting,” he said softly. “We’re at the center of it all. You and me.”

  Nine took a step back, trembling. “Ten, stop—”

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” he interrupted. “The Polish soldier came here to see us. We’re the only ones who get to see the end. The beautiful end.”

  His words coiled in her chest like smoke.

  You, me, and the end.

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand—”

  His eyes softened. “Don’t be scared. Once the demon is killed, the soldier can see the end. Run for him. Run away from here. Take the gun, and run.”

  Her small hands shook as she raised the pistol.

  “Ten—”

  “Good girl,” he whispered, voice low and lullaby-sweet.

  “Now pull the trigger.”

  Bang.

  ***

  Natalie gasped.

  Her whole body jerked on the hospital bed, sweat clinging to her temples.

  Hannah yelped in surprise. “Natalie! What’s wrong?”

  Natalie blinked, breathing hard, her fingers gripping the bedsheet. Her head throbbed.

  “I’m fine,” she whispered, though her voice trembled. “Just… dizzy.”

  Tina leaned forward, concern etched across her face.

  “You sure, Nat? You looked like you saw a ghost.”

  Natalie gave a weak smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

  “Something like that.”

  Tina hesitated, then glanced at Hannah.

  “Oh, right. Hannah showed up outside the dorms the night you fainted. She saw the ambulance taking you away, so she came to me and Marcin, asking what happened.”

  Hannah nodded proudly.

  “I didn’t want to leave! So they let me stay.”

  Natalie’s gaze softened.

  “I’m sorry I left you at the café,” she said, her voice quieter now. “I didn’t expect to… faint.”

  Hannah waved it off with a grin.

  “It’s no problem. I was just worried!”

  Tina smiled at the little girl’s cheerfulness, but her curiosity was already gnawing.

  “So… Natalie,” she began carefully, “do you remember why you fainted? Was it—like—shock or something?”

  “Tina,” Marcin murmured, tugging her back by the sleeve, “maybe don’t push—”

  “It’s okay,” Natalie said suddenly.

  Her voice had changed. Quieter. Heavier.

  She stared down at her hands for a long time before speaking again.

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  “I saw him.”

  “Who?” Tina asked softly.

  Natalie lifted her gaze.

  Her eyes were pale, distant, like something behind them was still shaking.

  “Casimir.”

  Tina’s lips parted in disbelief.

  Marcin froze.

  Even Hannah, who didn’t understand the name, felt the shift in the air, that sharp, invisible drop in temperature, that silence that tasted like fear.

  Natalie looked past them, at nothing. Her pulse was still too fast. Her breathing is shallow.

  The monitor beside her beeped a steady rhythm, fragile and human.

  But somewhere deep inside her, she was still standing in that hallway, staring into eyes that mirrored her own, and hearing the echo of a voice she could never forget.

  "Now pull the trigger."

  Natalie’s breath caught in her throat — a sudden, audible gasp that made all three of them jolt. Her pulse spiked. The monitor beside her quickened its beeping, flashing erratically for a moment before settling again.

  “I need to find Kuroda,” she said suddenly, sitting up despite the IV tugging against her arm. Her voice was sharp — urgent, trembling with purpose.

  Tina blinked. “Who?”

  Natalie’s hands trembled slightly as she pushed her hair back. Her pupils were wide, her breathing uneven. “Kuroda. Kazou Kuroda.”

  Marcin frowned, puzzled. “Wait, that name sounds familiar.” He rubbed his chin, trying to place it. “Kuroda… yeah, I think I learned about someone with that name for a biology project last year. Something about experimental genetics... cloning, I think?”

  Natalie froze.

  Her eyes snapped toward him so fast that it startled him.

  “Kazou Kuroda?!” she yelled, her voice echoing through the quiet hospital room.

  Tina flinched.

  “H-hey, Natalie, calm down—”

  Marcin raised both hands, startled but defensive.

  “No, no, the one I studied wasn’t Kazou. It was Yuichi Kuroda. Some researcher from the Netherlands who—uh—worked on cloning memories or something.”

  The tension didn’t fade. It only changed shape.

  Natalie’s expression hollowed, the fire in her voice fading into something quieter, darker. Her head lowered, her curtain bangs falling forward to hide her eyes.

  For a moment, no one said anything.

  The IV dripped rhythmically beside her. The light flickered. The sound of the rain tapping faintly against the hospital window filled the silence.

  Then, Hannah’s small voice broke through, fragile but clear.

  “I haven’t seen Kuroda since the time he took the taxi,” she said softly, almost apologetically, like she thought she’d done something wrong.

  Natalie’s breath hitched. Her hands clenched in the bedsheets. “The taxi…” she repeated under her breath. "He said he would find him on his own..."

  Her gaze unfocused, staring past the wall, her voice barely audible now — muttering to herself, not to them. “Kuroda must know… He must know where Casimir is…”

  Her knuckles whitened.

  “He must not shoot…” she whispered. “He can’t. He can’t be the one to end it… I have to be the one…”

  Her lips barely moved. The words came out like fragments of a dream, too soft for anyone to understand.

  The others watched her, exchanging nervous glances.

  Marcin frowned. “Did she just say—”

  Tina shook her head, pressing a hand to his arm. “Don’t.”

  Then she turned back to Natalie, her voice gentle, the kind you use when trying not to break something fragile.

  “Natalie? Hey… are you okay?”

  Natalie blinked slowly. The fog behind her eyes seemed to clear for a brief moment. She turned her head toward Tina.

  Her expression softened into something almost human again, tired, pale, and impossibly sad.

  And then she smiled.

  Of course she did.

  It was a small, brittle smile, one that didn’t touch her eyes, one that felt practiced.

  “Of course,” she said softly, as if the word itself was an act of mercy.

  Tina exhaled, still uneasy.

  But Natalie only looked down again.

  Her fingers traced the edge of her hospital blanket. Her curtain bangs hid most of her face now, but her lips were still moving faintly, soundlessly, as if repeating something only she could hear.

  Outside, the wind pressed against the window. The rain thickened.

  And behind Natalie, her mind was already somewhere far away, replaying that hallway, that look in Casimir’s eyes, the sound of the gun, and the faint whisper of a promise that refused to die:

  You, me, and the end.

  ***

  The range smelled of spent powder and oil and late afternoon dust. Targets thudded and flapped in the shallow wind, an almost domestic sound amid the metal and concrete. Kazou’s breath came steady, desperate draw of the hunted, but the slow intake of a man forcing himself inward, deeper, toward a discipline that might steel him or break him.

  He sighted, exhaled, and squeezed.

  The crack of the rifle answered like a verdict. The round punched through the black center with a soft, confident pop. The paper behind it folded inward; the tiny circle at the heart of the target bloomed red.

  Victor, the trainer, was a blunt man with weathered hands and a laugh that never felt like mockery. He clapped once, slow and approving.

  “Clean shot,” he said, the words as plain as the dust on his boots. “That’s the kind of steadiness you need. You’re—” He stopped, searching for praise without overpraise. “You’re ready to be a hunter.”

  Kazou’s eyes narrowed almost without meaning, an old reflex, a scientist's narrowing before a lab. Tiredness sat in the corners of them; guilt sat heavier. For a second, the world receded to the sight line, the target, the small bright hole. He lowered the rifle and let the silence find him.

  “Thank you,” he said finally. The words were small, not entirely for Victor. They felt like payment.

  Later, under the tin awning of the training ground’s shop, the transaction was as practical as everything else had been that afternoon. Money slid across a scarred counter. Victor’s nod was quick, businesslike. He handed off the rifle in a plain over-the-shoulder duffel bag, no ceremony, no flourish. Kazou wrapped his fingers around the canvas as if holding an anchor.

  “Take care,” Victor said. “Don’t let it become the thing that owns you.”

  Kazou’s smile was brittle, practiced.

  “I know,” he lied, and for once he believed that lie enough to keep from answering the rest.

  Across the street, half-hidden behind the glass of a parked sedan, Detective Lisa Kowalska watched the exchange through a camera’s black tube. Her fingers were steady on the focus ring. The world zoomed in to small, telling details: the way Kazou’s hands trembled as he counted bills, the precise, economical motion with which he folded the canvas bag closed, the moment he tucked the strap over his shoulder as if trying to make the rifle a part of himself and not a thing apart.

  Lisa’s voice was quiet, a whisper to no one but herself.

  “Well, well, Kuroda,” she said, camera clicking. “Upgrading. New weapon, better aim. That means your next victims will fall in a way your old hands couldn’t manage. Why the upgrade, huh? Feeling single-minded today?”

  She watched him walk out of the shop, into the thin light. He paused beneath a streetlight to adjust the strap. For a fraction of a second, his face turned toward her car, either the motion of habit or something like a glance, but he did not look in her direction. He looked at his hands.

  Lisa put the camera down and sat back. She drove off slowly, tires whispering, eyes not leaving his retreating shape until the school buses and market carts erased him from sight.

  Kazou did not know about the camera. Or if he did, it did not find a shape in his mind that could hold it. He only knew the weight at his hip, and the silence pushed into his chest like a fist. The bag was heavier than he expected. The fabric rasped against his coat. He could hear Hannah’s small voice in the back of his skull; he could feel Natalie’s brittle insistence there too—words and ghosts braided tight together.

  At the curb, he stopped. The street bustled with ordinary life: a bicycle bell, a couple arguing softly in Polish, a dog’s distant bark. He looked down at his hands again, hands that had once held instruments for delicate, terrible work. They were trembling more now. Not the eager shake of adrenaline, but the slow unspooling of something that had been kept too taut for too long.

  “All right,” he told himself. The sentence had the taste of a vow and of a threat, and he could not tell which was which. “Soon I will end you,” he muttered—an audience of one. The words were meant for Casimir, for the phantom who had become his calculation and his torment.

  Soon, I will put a stop to your killings.

  Then the question came, as inevitable as the recoil of a gun: But why am I the one to do it? If I kill you… Won’t I become the very person I wanted to erase? I once brought life to cloned children, and now here I am, taking the life of one...

  The doubt was a cold thing inside him, a mirror that refused to crack. It reflected what he’d been before: a scientist whose hands had built blueprints for life, who’d been seduced by theory into a labyrinth he could not escape. It reflected Rose, who had loved and left and changed his life by leaving; it reflected the empty chair at which he’d once sat with a life that was not riddled with blood.

  He stumbled through the thought as if through a fog and then, without the dignity of a slow collapse, his knees gave. He dropped to them on the curb, bag thumping against the tar. People passed by, polite and unaware. A child stared for a second and then tugged at a parent’s sleeve to be pulled onward. A tram whooshed past, metal on rails singing.

  Kazou gagged once, a harsh, retching sound that tasted of iron and shame. He doubled over, palms pressed to his stomach as if he could hold the nausea back by force alone. It burst out of him in a small, humiliating heave into the gutter, no dramatic vomit, nothing cinematic, just the body’s banal protest.

  When he finally let his head fall back against his knees, his face slick with sweat, he heard the city as if through a membrane: life continuing its indifferent orbit. He whispered to the empty air, not sure whether to pray or to swear.

  “I shouldn’t have continued my father’s work,” he said, the name of the man he’d once revered sounding like a curse. “I shouldn’t have brought that demon back. I could have stayed a scientist a righteous one, with small truths and small joys. With Rose…”

  The thought of Rose made a new fissure open in him—memories like dry glass. For a time, he let the grief come, thick and slow: what might have been if he had chosen vanity and curiosity less often; what might have been if he had not allowed his intellect to justify the indefensible.

  He lay his head on his forearm and let the street blur. The bag rested at his side like a sleeping animal. In the dim of late, partly cloudy afternoon after the rain, the edges of things sharpened into accusation: a silhouette that might have been Casimir’s passing on the pavement; the echo of Mr. Nowak’s laugh; the little laugh Hannah made when she’d insisted on sweets.

  Victor’s earlier words came back to him with the quiet cruelty of truth: Don’t let it become the thing that owns you.

  Kazou closed his eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to be a man who brought life rather than hunted. He reached for the phrase that had once steadied him during the lav, the scientific faith in the small and careful repair of what was broken. It felt distant, like a city seen across a storm-swollen river.

  When he finally forced himself to stand, his legs shook. He buttoned his coat with fingers that had been steady enough a few hours ago and yet not steady enough for what he must do. He did not pretend to have made peace. The moral arithmetic sat in his gut and demanded impossible sums.

  He should have walked away. He should have left this map of sin untraced. Instead, the canvas bag bumped his thigh, a weight that would not be shrugged off. He walked back into the fold of the city, head bowed, neck taut, a man carrying the instrument of something he could not yet name—redemption or ruin.

  Behind him, across the street, Lisa’s sedan rolled slowly, and for a moment her profile was all a universe: watchful, patient, terrible in its persistence. She watched his figure recede, made a note, and in the dimming light, she thought of the victims ' faces that would never rewrite their stories. Then she said nothing, because there are questions a detective keeps like a lit match in a dark room: close enough to see the next step, but far enough not to burn.

  Kazou instinctively turned his head toward the sedan driving away. His hair blew in the wind. Suddenly, his eyes caught a banner on a nearby fence.

  Saturday at Wroclaw University School of Philosophy, presentation hall! 4:00 pm-7:00 pm:

  Philosophy speeches from students and the philosophy department.

  Plus, an honoring of Anna Smirnov.

  Drinks and food will be offered! Free entry! Seats are first-come, first-served.

  "Casimir..." Kazou muttered under his breath. "You'll be there, won't you?"

  Kazou shakily clutched the strap of his bag.