The Small Room — Morning
The room was small.
Its window was covered by dirty curtains that refused the light.
The ceiling was cracked, the corners fading to black.
It smelled of age — of damp carpet, of a cigarette extinguished hours ago.
James’s hands were shaking.
He set the backpack on the bed — metal frame, thin mattress, sheets that were not white.
He pulled the zipper.
He stuffed his belongings in.
First the passport.
Money — crumpled bills, some stained.
A compass.
And a gun.
Colt 1911.
Old.
Clean.
Its wooden grip gleamed in the room’s dim light.
He had to cross the border.
Today.
Knock.
Knock.
James’s hands dropped onto the gun.
Not to pick it up — just to be close.
Proximity to the gun, proximity to safety.
A voice from the other side of the door.
Feminine.
Soft.
The neighbor.
“It’s me… Marie. Your neighbor.”
James drew a deep breath.
Rose from the bed.
Tucked the gun into the back of his waistband.
Went to the door.
Turned the lock — a simple lock, the kind you could open with a screwdriver — and opened the door a crack.
Marie stood on the other side.
She was young.
Thin red hair, pale blue eyes.
She was smiling — a smile that, from years of neighborliness, had made a permanent place on her face.
She held a tray.
The smell of food.
“Hello, Mrs. Marie. What brings you?”
James took the tray.
It was heavy.
“Thank you for the food.”
“I’ll bring the plate back later.”
But Marie didn’t move.
She stood there.
Her pale blue eyes — suddenly they weren’t blue.
They were gold.
For a moment James thought it was the light, thought he was tired, thought he was hallucinating.
But no.
They were gold.
Bright.
Ominous.
“Mr. James… may I come inside?”
“Yes. Please.”
Marie entered.
Slowly, with short steps.
Her gaze went to the bed — to the backpack, to the map, to the gun whose grip protruded from James’s waistband.
“Are you going somewhere?”
James tried to smile.
A false smile.
“No. Just visiting a friend.”
Marie stepped forward.
Close.
Very close.
The scent.
She raised her hand.
Slowly.
Placed it over James’s mouth.
Her fingers were cold.
Her eyes had changed.
They were no longer kind eyes.
The gaze of an entomologist at a beetle beneath a magnifying glass.
The gaze of someone dissecting a small thing — without hating that thing.
She placed her other hand on his chest.
Over his heart.
And then —
Boom.
A sound not like a gunshot, not like an explosion, not like anything James had ever heard.
A sound from within.
The sound of his heart deciding to stop beating.
The sound of ribs bending under pressure.
James’s eyes went wide.
The whites filled with red veins.
His mouth hung open — he couldn’t close it.
Blood trickled from the corner of his lips.
Warm.
Sticky.
Suddenly, James’s body cracked, and from the cracks, mist poured out.
James’s body disintegrated.
Not flesh, not bone — mist.
A mass of gray particles that swirled in the cold room air, passed through Sofia’s fingers, through the dim light, through the scent of rosewater and stew.
For a moment — somewhere else — it reformed.
A few meters away.
Behind “Marie.”
Gasping.
The heart was beating.
Warm.
Alive.
Sofia — who was no longer Marie — turned.
The red hair was no longer red — it was black, long, ageless.
Her golden eyes glowed in the room’s dim light.
“You have an interesting power.”
James whispered.
The words were stuck in his throat, like a thorn you can neither swallow nor spit out.
“It’s… you?”
A Crowded Street in Suburban Chicago — 10:12 AM
James fled.
By will.
Not by fear.
He became mist again.
A gray mass that slipped through the window, through the ventilation gap, through the walls — through any place he thought no one should be able to pass — and escaped into the street.
Sofia didn’t move.
She smiled.
The smile of a hunter who knows that wherever the prey goes, sooner or later it will return.
Or it won’t — which is also a kind of return.
She opened her right hand.
Palm facing the sky.
From nothing — from invisible threads woven into the fabric of reality — a whip took form in her hand.
Semi-transparent.
Each thread was a decision, a choice, a lie.
A lie that had become truth.
Sssssssssshhh.
The sound of silk being cut.
The sound of a law being broken.
She, too, went out through the window.
The mist wove through the crowd.
A gray mass that, if you looked at it, you’d think was steam, smoke, a hallucination.
James tried to get lost.
People were selling fruit.
The stalls smelled of fresh bread.
A small stall named Yvonne.
A child was crying — he had a cold, or perhaps he’d lost his mother, or perhaps he just wanted someone to hear his voice.
A girl in a floral scarf was buying apples.
An old man in a cap was reading a newspaper.
Ordinary life.
No one noticed the mist.
No one noticed Sofia.
Because Sofia held their threads in her hand.
Like puppets.
Every step of theirs, every breath, every blink — was written in advance.
They didn’t know.
They weren’t supposed to know.
The mist compressed at the end of the street.
Gray particles gathered together, swirled, took shape.
James stood.
Drenched in sweat.
Hair plastered to his forehead.
Eyes wide and terrified.
He turned.
Sofia was twenty meters away.
Walking.
Unhurried.
Dragging the whip along the ground.
The cobblestones cracked beneath the whip’s tip.
James screamed.
His voice was lost in the crowded street — or it didn’t carry.
Perhaps it chose not to go.
“The Comson Organization! What do you ultimately want from this world?!”
No one turned.
The fruit-selling woman was arranging her fruit.
The newspaper-reading man had turned the page.
The child’s crying had stopped, and his mother had arrived.
“I know everything! A million humans a year! You breed them like cattle and sacrifice them!”
Sofia stepped forward.
Her heels on the cobblestones — tap, tap, tap — like a countdown.
Her voice was calm.
The calm of truth.
“Laws older than humanity. We’re simply doing our work.”
“You call the slaughter of millions ‘work’?”
Sofia sighed.
The sigh of someone who has heard this a thousand times and answered a thousand times, but still — is not tired.
Or is tired, but has patience.
“Seventy million humans are born every year. A million… is a drop in the ocean. I’m just an accountant.”
James attacked.
Not flight.
The mist shot toward Sofia like a spear.
A compressed mass of rage and fear and years of running.
Fast.
Silent.
Deadly.
Sofia raised the whip.
“Brave… but foolish.”
Shrrrrak.
The mist was split in two.
The gray mass tore apart — not like fabric, like a mirror.
Two halves, two Jameses, two fates.
One spun through the air and vanished; the other appeared several meters away.
Wounded.
Blood flowed from his arm — dark, thick, the smell of iron.
His breaths were ragged. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“Why won’t you die?”
Sofia coiled the whip around her wrist.
“Death is just another puppet to me. Do you know how many times I’ve died just to learn how not to?”
James attacked again.
This time from four directions at once.
From above, from below, from left, from right.
Invisible fists made of mist and will.
Three blows landed — shoulder, side, thigh.
The fourth blow reached Sofia’s throat.
Mist coiled around her throat — for a moment, the briefest flicker — and tightened.
Her laugh.
The mist scattered.
Like a balloon pricked with a needle.
“I’m inside your head, James. In your blood. In every breath you take.”
Sofia raised her left hand.
The air grew heavy.
Breathing became hard.
A weight that settled not on the shoulders, but on the soul.
The light dimmed — the sun was still there, but it seemed unwilling to shine.
The birds fell silent.
All at once.
As if someone had pressed the mute button.
And above the city —
A hand.
Vast.
Transparent.
Made of thread.
Fingers like wounded clouds.
The palm cast a shadow over the entire district.
It moved gently — like a puppet whose strings you hold, talking to yourself.
Time slowed.
Steps slower, the wind slower, even the light falling from the sky reached the earth more slowly.
“Everything is under my control, James. You were just a small knot… a loose thread.”
James tried to transform.
His muscles tensed, his will screamed — but nothing happened.
His body remained solid.
Terror exploded in his eyes.
“Why can’t I…”
“I’ve found your threads. Here… here… and here.”
The whip coiled around the throat of his existence.
Not his physical throat — that other throat.
The throat that, if torn, brings neither blood, nor scream — only silence.
Eternal silence.
Smoke crept from his mouth.
At first, a thin thread, like smoke.
Then wider, denser.
His soul.
His memory.
His fear.
The power he’d never known how to use.
James’s soul ascended to the sky.
Sofia’s smile deepened.
More satisfied.
James fell to the ground.
But he didn’t reach the ground.
His body began to fade.
The fingers went first.
One by one.
Silent.
Bloodless.
Then the hands, then the legs, then the torso.
Each piece that disappeared left emptiness in its place — no wound, no scar — just absence.
The face remained last.
His eyes.
Empty.
Astonished.
He didn’t know what had happened to him.
He didn’t know why he was fading.
He didn’t know why Sofia was smiling.
Then — nothing.
No blood.
No trace.
As if he had never existed.
Sofia gathered the whip.
The threads coiled around her wrist and vanished.
The vast hand above the city slowly, slowly faded — like an image whose ink dissolves.
The light returned.
The birds sang.
People walked.
Laughed.
Shopped.
Life continued.
As if nothing had happened.
As if no one had died.
Sofia looked at the spot where James had vanished.
The cold wind caressed her black hair.
“Now… on to the next one.”
And she vanished into the crowd.
Like a shadow.
Like a memory.
Like something that was never there.
Only the wind remained.
And a street that remembered nothing.
To be continued…