The bags weighed more than he remembered buying.
Kein went up the stairs of Rosslyn Lofts with one in each hand. The elevator worked. He ignored it.
It was 9:07 pm.
Filming had ended at 6 pm, technically. Then came the post shots: loose lines that Thorne wanted with a different audio angle, a reaction from Viktor that Chu considered insufficient in the cut of scene 1, two insert shots that no one explained what they were for. Kein did them all with the same tone, waited to be told he could leave, picked up the backpack and left.
The supermarket was on the way. Rice, tofu, two apples, something canned that he didn't read well but had a color on the label that seemed acceptable. He paid. Left.
He put the things away slowly. The rice on top, the tofu below, the apples on the counter. The can turned out to be soup of something. He put it next to the rice.
He sat on the bed.
[38 Units]
The interface flickered and disappeared. Outside there was traffic. There was always traffic.
He was going to sleep. That was evident. What wasn't evident was the other thing.
It wasn't fear. He checked it and reached the same conclusion twice. It wasn't fear. It was something more like being in front of an object in a dark room — you could see the silhouette, the general shape, the approximate size. You knew it was something. But when you moved your hand to touch it, the outline shifted. It didn't disappear. It only moved back enough so that the details didn't exist.
That was how the memories were.
That day I trained this. That day I achieved that. Fragments with a date but without context, without the how or the why, without full faces or exact words. Only the silhouette of things that had happened somewhere that smelled like metal and cold.
He could try to get closer. Prisma had explained the cost.
'Or,' thought Kein, 'I can simply sleep.'
He had committed to not running away. But running away and going to bed at 9 at night after a day of filming were different things.
He shrugged. Turned off the light.
———//————————————//———
In the dream he was 8 years old and didn't know it.
There were no mirrors in the block. That was the first thing you noticed. Not because they had been removed — but because they had never been there. Mirrors implied that it was worth looking at yourself. In the block, what was worth something was what you could do.
The walls were gray. The floor too. The beds were wooden slabs with a mattress that the child called A suspected was more symbolic than functional. Nine beds. Nine lockers. One window facing north so that direct sunlight would never enter. They lived like in the Spartan barracks he had read about in some old book: without luxuries, without comforts, only what was necessary to harden the body and the mind. Block A woke up at 5 am. Always. Without alarm. The alarm was yourself because arriving late to the yard at 5:15 had consequences you learned only once.
A had learned most things only once.
The morning training lasted two hours. Running, lifts, balance, falls. The instructors didn't explain what each exercise was for. It was your function to do it and find out what it was for when you really needed it. Classes followed: basic anatomy, pressure points, map reading, active silence. Active silence was listening without the other person knowing you were listening.
It was the only class where A got consistent results.
The afternoon was precision. Knife, rope, distance.
A was the worst at precision. It was a documented fact. Instructor Renner had it written in his notebook with a frequency that A considered unnecessary given that it was obvious to everyone.
That was how the days were. One after another, with minor variations.
Until the day the boxes arrived.
They were small, wooden, with holes in the lid. One per child. They left them on the beds without explanation and left. A lifted the lid with reasonable caution — in the block, boxes without explanation had a certain probability of containing something unpleasant — and found a bird.
Small. Brown. With round eyes looking at him from the bottom as if the situation were equally confusing for both sides.
A looked at it.
The bird didn't move.
'I don't know what to do with this,' thought A.
He looked at the other children. Several had the same expression. One had already taken his out and held it with both hands with a rigidity that suggested he didn't know either.
A's bird tilted its head three millimeters to the left.
'Still not giving me useful information.'
He left it in the box for the moment and waited for someone to explain something. No one explained anything that night.
The next morning the boxes were still on the beds. The instructors didn't mention the birds during training. They didn't say they were a mission. They were simply there.
By the third day, the child from bed five gave his a name.
By the fifth day, A still hadn't given his a name but had built a structure of sticks at the bottom of the box so it had somewhere to stand. The bird used the structure.
'Cute,' thought A with bright eyes.
That seemed tender to him.
By the tenth day he took it out into the yard during breaks and let it walk while he reviewed anatomy materials. The bird walked in irregular circles and sometimes stopped next to his boot as if waiting for something.
'I have nothing for you.'
And then he always found something. A crumb. A grain of rice from the dining hall. Once a piece of fruit no one claimed.
The bird ate with a speed disproportionate to its size.
Two days later, Z sat next to him in the yard while the bird made its circles.
"Did you name it?"
"No."
Z observed it for a moment.
"I named mine Arrow."
"Why Arrow?"
"Because it goes fast."
A looked at his bird. It walked in the same irregular circle as always, stopping at the same points, as if the yard had a map that only it could read.
'It doesn't go fast.' thought A
But he said nothing.
Z shrugged and returned to his own mental yard, which was what he did when he lost interest in something. Fast for everything, Z — to talk, to move, to forget that he had started a conversation.
A observed the bird for another moment.
It walked. Stopped. Walked.
'Ronda,' thought A. 'Its name is Ronda.'
He didn't tell anyone.
———//————————————//———
The following days the dream compressed them, as it always did with what didn't fit whole.
Ronda in the yard. Ronda in the locker at night. Ronda eating crumbs from breakfast with that speed that A still found disproportionate for its size.
If he had that speed the instructors wouldn't scold him thought A with hope
Renner didn't mention the birds. No instructor did. They were there like the beds and the lockers and the north-facing window — part of the block's inventory, without an assigned explanation.
A started noticing things.
The child from bed two spoke to his in a low voice before sleeping. The one from bed seven let it climb onto his shoulder during classes until an instructor saw him and said nothing, which A interpreted as implicit permission. Z had taught his to climb onto his hand when he lowered it to a certain height, and he demonstrated it whenever he could with the satisfaction of someone who had just discovered a useful trick.
"Mine can too," said A one afternoon.
"Did you teach it?"
"No. It does it on its own."
Z looked at Ronda, who at that moment was walking toward A's boot with her usual trajectory.
"That's not a trick. It's a habit."
"It's the same."
"It's not the same."
A considered this.
"Doesn't matter."
Z opened his mouth to respond and didn't, which was another thing he sometimes did — start arguments that he decided halfway weren't worth the effort.
Ronda reached the boot. Stopped. Waited.
A searched in the uniform pocket. Found half a grain of rice from lunch that he had kept without thinking too much.
He left it on the ground.
Ronda ate it in less than a second.
'Cute,' thought A, like the first time.
That night, with the block silent and Ronda in the locker, A heard footsteps in the hallway. Slow. Two pairs. They stopped— active silence was listening without the other person knowing you were listening, and A was the best in the block at that.
The voices came muffled through the door.
He didn't distinguish the words.
Only the tone. Two different tones. One drier. Another lower.
Then footsteps moving away.
A waited for the hallway to fall silent before closing his eyes.
'Tomorrow I'll find out.'
He thought it with the practical determination of someone who schedules a task without giving it more weight than necessary. It wasn't curiosity. It was information. Information was useful. More for him, who was the lowest rung in the block.
Ronda made a small sound from the locker.
A didn't respond.
But he didn't take long to fall asleep that night.
The dream sped up.
Loose images, in order but without transition.
Ronda learning to climb onto the left shoulder on her own. A letting her stay there during night reviews, still, as if she knew that moving wasn't welcome.
Z losing Arrow for two hours one Thursday because it escaped in the yard.
"Why didn't you look for it earlier?" asked A when Z found it under the dry bush next to the north wall.
"I was looking for it."
"You took two hours."
"I thought it would come back on its own."
A looked at Arrow, then at Z.
"Birds don't come back on their own."
"Arrow was going to come back."
"It wasn't going to come back."
"What do you know."
A didn't respond. Z didn't either. Arrow shook its feathers with a lot of dignity for someone who had spent two hours under a bush.
Then he looked at Ronda… who had gotten a bit fatter. A noticed it but said nothing.
The second instructor appearing sometimes in the doorway during training. Without entering. Without saying anything. A looked at him out of the corner of his eye and then looked away because staring at him felt strange, like doing something he shouldn't.
And then the dream slowed.
Hallway. Night. The whole block asleep.
A was going to the bathroom when he heard voices. They came from a half-open door at the end. He pressed himself against the wall — listening without being heard was the only thing he had been really good at since the first day.
"…Friday."
"The birds?"
"Yes. Each child kills their own. It's the test."
"..!!!" A was in shock while covering his mouth
"And those who can't?"
"Those who can't receive the standard corrective."
Footsteps inside. A didn't move.