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The Polyhedron had only seemed quiet the last time he had been there. The laughter of children strung loosely up and down the stairs, the echoes he couldn’t quite countenance, of crashing waves or armies, had softened would-be silence to a cathedral hush, a sense larger than the tower itself of life at a peaceful distance.
Life still reachable, if he found himself feeling too bereft of it. The Polyhedron, the last time he had been there, had been a dream-space folded out of soft white paper and lavender mist. The lantern had seemed as if it could lead him, be a landmark in that larger space, if only he looked at it a little differently.
It stood dark now, and the Polyhedron held true silence. If Simon was, indeed, lurking in its walls, he seemed to have no interest in entertaining Daniil as a guest.
Why had he come back there? He had looked up at it from the bottom of its stairs, and, for the first time, it had seemed hollow.
Perhaps Peter had been right. Perhaps it had needed the town somehow – not a marvel independent, but part of a balanced system. Perhaps there had been no way to eradicate the Sand Pest without somehow killing it as well.
But Daniil wasn’t prepared to believe that yet. Patients who lay deep in coma, or who even seemed to be dead, had been brought back to the conscious world before. If that tower had been wounded in some way, or starved of some vital fluid, surely he, of all people, should be able to diagnose and treat it.
If it was as much of a body as it had once seemed. Not a husk – not a shed cocoon. Not a corpse.
He followed the stairs down through it, towards the darkened lantern, the way he had never been able to diagnose a body before. From the inside, opening his senses to whatever it might tell him about its condition. Had all those people taking shelter in it during the bombardment tilted it from its precarious balance?
Had their fear and grief infected it? He stopped on the landing over which the lantern should have glowed; the paper cranes that had swayed and fluttered like moths around it before hung utterly still, black cutout shadows with their heads bowed in repose.
Or mourning. Had it needed the children to live? Brash young Caspar Kain seemed to think so. He claimed that both it and the children were half-dead for being separated from one another.
But he seemed to think that static reality itself was death, a disease of adults, so Daniil was in no hurry to accept his diagnosis. Staring up at the lantern, which had seemed to cast shadows from more than the cranes, more moving things than could be seen, he strove to discern his own.
They had survived, he and this tower. He had saved it. That had to count for something in its estimation, if it had such. Could it understand how much he had sacrificed for it?
How much you sacrificed?
He turned on his heel, towards what had seemed, for a second, so much like a voice. Just a rustle of paper? No one was there. No one would be, by the Kains’ orders, for as long as he needed to make his diagnosis. But for that second, he had been so certain.
It had sounded so familiar. The darkness seemed vaster around him for its sneering, glancing blow.
Yes, he tried, hesitantly, to address it. Not out loud, his voice would have been unbearably small in all that space, but whether he was only reassuring himself or reaching something in the dark, thinking through his own porous skin like speaking through a thin wall, he felt heard.
Yes, he had made sacrifices. He had done everything possible to save the town, until the rotten state of the soil beneath it had been revealed. The same way he had fought for Thanatica, not only after its doom must have been decided, but, in ignorance, after it had already been destroyed. Years of his life, every kopek to his name, and then his soul, there in that town, shaved away piece by piece to nothing, by the decisions demanded of one who would try to stop an unstoppable disease. He had sacrificed everything in pursuit of impossible victories. The last of his soul had surely burned under the cannon’s barrage.
Yet there are those who sacrificed more.
He turned again, trying to catch that voice where it couldn’t have been just the rustling of paper this time. But the stairs climbed and fell into darkness around him, the only light was listless and ambient, and he was still, in every way he could see, alone.
Alone. Yes, there were those who had sacrificed everything. His colleagues, who had sent him off with all their hopes. Artemy, who had insisted there was a way to avert the town’s destruction, but had never returned from the Abattoir to say what it might be. Others, so many others in the town who had not died meekly but had fought, doomed from the start, to save themselves and their neighbours.
He closed his eyes before the stinging in them could brim over wet. Yes, his life was the only thing he hadn’t succeeded in sacrificing, but was that failure selfish on his part? Even soulless, even marred and twisted beyond recognition, his life was a tool that could be put to good use. Revive the tower. Dissect its secrets. Rebuild them, somehow, into the engine of change he could now only imagine crushing the Powers That Be under great, studded treads.
He opened his eyes, and mellow light poured into them from windows that were not in the Polyhedron’s wall.
He blinked, and the windows continued to stare back at him. The wall continued to seem as solid and real as he had seen it a hundred, a thousand times in the capital, in the only room of Thanatica with significant access to outside light.
West-facing windows, so the light had always reached them at that low orange tide. Lapping across the desks, burnishing the coffeepot to something like fine bronze. It had been the living room of the apartment above a failing butchery before they had bought the building, the most space they could afford, flagrantly ill-suited to their purposes, but they had renovated it, reinforced the downstairs walls for safety in their experiments, sterilized and repurposed the old freezers. They had resurrected it – the early joke about how, if fighting death didn’t work out, they could all just become butchers had disappeared behind coats of new white paint, glass and steel, they had expanded into the building that practically shared its southern wall when the last of its residents had given up on having them for neighbours, and, for a while, it had felt like the start of a tidal change. Soon, they had all believed, for a while, their ideas would be surging across the country.
His chest hitched with something as much like laughter as that illusion was like having Thanatica back.
“Really?” he asked the windows, the smoky horizon that seemed to lie beyond, and the acoustics were that of the room in which he’d shared so many dreams and debates with his colleagues. “You finally stir yourself to reflect something in my mind, something you think I want to see, and it’s this?”
The room where coffee had done in place of sleep, where he had so often slept, when coffee couldn’t hold it at bay anymore. Where the lazy light and long shadows had made puppet plays of him and his colleagues, his compatriots and closest friends, and the things that had sometimes happened there when it had been only him and Anatoliy at the end of the day...
“You think I have any use for this?” His voice cracked, and the acoustics of the room minded it well. “This...shadow play? Is this all you’re capable of? If so, what the hell did I save you for? What...”
He steadied himself with a hand on his desk. Miraculous, yes, that it felt so real. But useless, worse, poisonous, if all it could show was what people could wander at any time in their own hearts.
“Of course you wouldn’t have any use for what’s in your heart, oynon.”
He didn’t turn this time. Didn’t want to. The voice, that title, which had always sounded a bit like mockery, no matter what Artemy Burakh claimed it meant...
“You’re not here, either,” he informed the voice. “If you didn’t die in the Abattoir, you must have in the bombardment.”
“Yet you ordered it anyways.”
Without knowing. While knowing for certain that there were people still in the town, if not Artemy, then those who had stubbornly refused to leave. For the sake of their homes, which they apparently loved more than their own lives, or for sick loved ones who wouldn’t be able to come with them. Better to die with the doomed, apparently, than to let them die alone.
“It was in the soil,” he argued, as he had to the general, as he had to himself so many times, before and after it had been done. “The very foundations of the town were fatally poisoned. To stop it from spreading...”
And to save the Polyhedron, of course. If he hadn’t been there to guide the general’s aim, the bombardment would still have taken place, but it would have been complete. Nothing, no one would have survived.
“A noble justification. So noble, you can’t look me in the eye while saying it.”
So noble, he had hidden himself in there to play at diagnostics instead of facing the people who no longer had a home. What could he possibly say to them? None of them would have made the choice. Even the mysterious Changeling had vanished – only he had been able to do it.
He turned. Holding a breath that smelled of warm dust and cigarette smoke and the dregs of the afternoon’s coffee, bracing himself for every death he had imagined Artemy suffering.
Every state he had imagined him being left in. Burnt or battered or torn to pieces, all his clever insight and scrutiny and stubborn determination reduced to life’s final joke – to a butcher’s scraps of meat.
But Artemy leaned with his thighs against Anatoliy’s desk, with his arms crossed over his chest, looking much as he had when he had first asked Daniil how they would part – if it was possible for them to be friends, or if destiny had already doomed them to be fatal enemies.
Whole and so seemingly real. The light lay across his left shoulder the way it would have if Daniil had ever been able to bring him there, to show him that place.
“You’re not real,” Daniil reminded himself as much as that apparition. “None of this is.”
“It’s as real as you are,” Artemy said. And sounded so much like himself, Daniil could understand how the children had believed every sort of dream here. Especially those less cruel than the world outside. “You carry more refugees in your heart than this place ever could.”
The door behind him, the creak in the hinges they had never been able to oil away, opened and closed. He didn’t mean to turn to it, didn’t want to see, again, but, like looking back in a childhood nightmare to see the monster that was chasing him, he couldn’t resist the magnetic dread that turned his head.
Bound to the narrative of that waking dream. Stakh Rubin stood with his hand still on the doorknob.
His fate, Daniil knew well enough to see traces of it on him. The Kains had never had the chance to punish him for the theft of their patriarch. The Kin had reached him first, and had offered up his body as proof of their contrition.
Proof that they would not allow any of those educated in their ways to stray. His skin had been florid with bruising, his body loose and malleable with broken bones. There had been no sign, in twist fractures or telltale contusions or blood under his nails, that he had struggled against his fate.
He still wore it all, every sign of a willing death, as he turned to Daniil. The desk was there to stop Daniil shrinking back from him.
Artemy was there, standing at Daniil’s shoulder. “You climbed all our corpses to safety. Did you think you could do so all the way to this place? Or to one built new, better than it, without the smell of cow’s blood still hanging in the basement?”
“No.” Daniil shook his head, and glass glinted, and different light, in the corner of his vision. The desk where he had hunched over papers, pillowed his head on them, sometimes, was covered instead with the test tubes and instruments that should have been safe in the blue-tinged, windowless light downstairs. “No, I-”
Brought there into the false sunset, it seemed, just so Artemy could hurt him with them. With a sweep of his arm, the man who had asked Daniil if he thought they could be friends sent all of it crashing to the floor.
With a sound only as much like shattering glass as crumbling masonry, screams, he could have sworn he heard screams beneath his own shout of “No!”, the sounds of those too sick or stubborn to evacuate as their world collapsed on top of them.
He lunged for what wasn’t real, what was already shards and ash where it was real, what he had always been too late to save. Artemy’s arm, strong as sound masonry in that place, held him back from it. Behind him, past the desk and shattered mess, stood-
Daniil moaned. He couldn’t imagine most of them in detail.
Most of those who must have died as the cannon roared, rolling back along the rails with the force of its own firing. Or those who had died sooner, to decisions he had mishandled, in the cathedral or other ultimately useless quarantines. The room should have been too small for them, even patched together as it now was with downstairs light, clean white counters and steel doors, but their faces, ashen and solemn, stretched as far as he could see.
Silent, save for a tiny click as Rubin locked the door.
“No,” Daniil could only whisper now. “No.”
It wasn’t enough to stop a sweep of Artemy’s arm from flinging him onto the cleared desk. Onto his back, his heels knocking hollowly against its side. The ceiling swung over him, and, just for a moment, he wondered whether this might be a dream he could wake up from. It was all a product of his mind, after all, wasn’t it?
“Of course it is,” another voice skipped fleet and golden through the light that swallowed his head and shoulders. “You really shouldn’t have brought your mind to a place like this, though. Not everyone is suited to being a place – not a safe one, at least.”
No. He wouldn’t look at Eva, squeezed his eyes shut, he wouldn’t. The silence around him had filled with shuffling footsteps; Artemy’s hand, braced to fingertips, pinned the fevered pounding of his heart against the desk.
“Look at you,” Artemy said, with a sneer that had never been in his living voice. “A man who’s failed at everything but letting other people take the fall for it. How many more have to die before you accept that your helping hands have only ever torn the world’s wounds wider open?”
No more. No more, Daniil wanted to say, and it would have been as much an answer as a plea. But a finger pressed to his lips, a tender shh, and everything he could have said for himself collapsed beneath it. He had barely thought of Eva after failing to secure her escape from town the day after his arrival.
Something as slight as her finger but startlingly cold in contrast touched him lower. Just under his navel, and he had no time to recognize it as a knife slipping through the buttoned front of his slacks before it identified itself with a decisive slice up towards his chin.
Could he die there, to something like that? The question bolted through him, even his shock had always been made of curiosity, before he could realize that the knife hadn’t cut him. Only his clothes, opening him neatly to the skin from slacks to chin.
Artemy, such a precise, decisive cut could only have been his, tilted and teased the knife under Daniil’s chin. Perhaps he was there to die. Perhaps that was the only way to wake from a nightmare such as this.
The knife’s needle-fine point left his chin. He realized only as a swallow stretched down his throat how he had bared it to the blade.
“If dying was what would hurt you most, you would have done it by now,” Artemy said like a diagnosis. Tucked his fingers through the slit he’d made in Daniil’s clothing, like opening the long incision of an autopsy. A diagnosis too late to be any good. “Do you really think you came here to prove yourself to the miraculous tower?”
Daniil parted his lips with nothing to say, no convincing case to make for himself, to himself, and Eva’s finger slipped into his mouth. Circling his tongue, eluding his attempts to push it out. Deft and playful, but the taste was blood, granite, and bitter. Artemy pulled at his seams with implacable strength, popping buttons, splitting him bare there on the desk where he’d written down everything from formal proposals to wild hopes.
He opened his eyes. There was always room for curiosity to damn him a little deeper.
A frame of solemn faces stared down at him. Anger, it seemed, could only run as cold determination in the veins of the dead. Some faces chewed ragged by the Pest, others as whole and flawless as if they were standing there alive...
He knew too many of them. Too many for his heart to take, yet not enough of them, when their deaths had been his fault. He had fought for and sacrificed them.
“I’m sorry,” he whimpered, and of course it meant as little to them as it did to him.
“Sorry never set anything right,” said Rubin, standing over him with the rest. “Trust me, I know.”
“Neither will this,” Artemy chimed in. “But your ego won’t countenance them all overlooking your sins, will it? Not seeing you the way you see yourself. You deserve condemnation, even if you have to conjure up a crowd yourself to deliver it.”
“You understand the weight of betrayal,” agreed a voice like the fall of a gavel. Another face in the crowd. “Of claiming responsibility for the lives of others when you are incapable of taking it.”
Turning his head, he found Aglaya’s face through the crowd. Somewhere in the distortion of distance, the direction where the door should have stood and didn’t any longer.
“I wasn’t at all sorry to hear about your death,” he said; Eva’s finger, tucked to the corner of his lips, made room for it.
Aglaya’s face remained unmarred, as sharp and implacable as the carvings that had stared from the destroyed cathedral.
“Why am I here, then?” she asked.
The breath he wasn’t drawing to answer, he had no answer, became a startled gulp as a finger breached him below. Long and deft and just slick enough with saliva, perhaps, not to encounter any undue resistance as it circled the first few inches past his sphincter.
Or perhaps his body would offer no resistance to anything they chose to do to it. He had brought them there, after all. He had invited this.
Yet he tried- a part of him still pounding with fear, surrounded by all those faces, tried to reason that it was, at least, just a physical harm they were threatening. He could survive that. His mind could – he could hide it away, like a refugee in a back closet while the rest of the house was ransacked.
But this was already in his mind. Artemy was already frowning at him in faint, almost paternal disappointment, as if he’d overheard.
Daniil couldn’t hide from this any more than he could conceal a patient from their own fever. He couldn’t see the edges of the crowd of people who had, in one way or another, counted on him.
“Please-” he tried to say, and Eva’s fingers stopped up his mouth like a rough fucking.
“I told myself that last day that, if you asked what I was planning, I would tell you,” she murmured, in contrast, still so tenderly. “If you told me not to do it, that there was a better way, I wouldn’t. But you never came.”
He gagged on her fingers, on what would have been I’m sorry again. Artemy’s finger withdrew, and something of greater, unmistakable girth pressed into its place.
Panic fired a flare through Daniil’s bidding daze, at last and far too late. He tried to scramble up the desk on his elbows, but found a dead end between Eva’s thighs. Her fingers wetly cupped his chin, and cold hands, cold determination closed on him from the closest circle of condemning faces, shackling his arms from wrist to shoulder.
He kicked his heels against the side of the desk, but succeeded only in filling the room with the hollow beat of his heart. Pulling away from the hands only replaced them with more. Only when he ran out of breath for it did he realize the bloodless hum of panic in his head had been a moan aloud.
He’d tried. He’d tried, he’d sacrificed-
The breath he drew to replenish the sound burst out as a yelp, as Artemy jerked the two of them roughly together. Daniil’s heels beat one more hollow thump against the desk, and then their rhythm was Artemy’s, the knock of a headboard against a wall or an insistent guest. Each thrust seemed to bore deeper in Daniil, deeper than their separate corporeality would allow, driving a stake into the heart of his noble justifications.
The hands that couldn’t find a place on his arms spread and clutched like a corset down his sides. Cupped his jaw, where Eva was kind enough to share him. Between the dull knocks of that stake driven deeper, their voices, too, closed in to clutch at him.
I couldn’t leave my aunt. She was blind with the pain, she cried out as the walls came down, she didn’t understand what was happening-
-no water. Infected would have been better than nothing at all. The little ones cried for it, their lips cracked, they died all the same-
-you didn’t have time for games. That was what you said. You saw me as silly and harmless, the same as everyone else, so when you heard that I was taking my father’s gun to the town hall-
Cold hands smeared the tears across his cheeks. The hammering quickened, the pain incandescent from his thighs to his navel.
“You told me that, if I wanted to waste time sifting through slaughterhouse muck, it was my business. You were staring out the window at this damned tower when I left.”
Did Artemy finish, or just wrench himself free? Like a knife from a wound, leaving it to bleed, a last nerve-twitch jerk of Daniil’s legs before he stepped from between them.
Before Daniil could hope it might be over, Rubin, moving like a body not whole beneath the surface, stepped into his place.
“You didn’t tell me anything,” he said as he took hold of Daniil’s thighs. Dead in voice and eyes, no hate – just duty, as ever. “I didn’t hear from you once between the day we gave out the last of the vaccine and when they came for me.”
“Hubris,” Aglaya intoned, only a faint, musical loftiness to distinguish her voice from Rubin’s gravestone tone. Her hand cupped over Daniil’s forehead, colder, even, than the rest, pressing his head to the desk. His view to the patchwork light and circle of faces above. “Hubris is the first step in betrayal – it makes promises that it cannot keep. It promises protection while drawing the inevitable consequences of itself down on those who believe in it.”
So that he couldn’t see when resolve or anger must have hardened Rubin’s bruise-mottled face. Couldn’t brace for that grip on his thighs curling tight, or the pain already pounded as deep as his gut redoubling. Even in that rhythm, in rape, Rubin was steady, methodical.
Dependable. So many determined faces. So many hungry eyes. Would they all...?
He couldn’t hold the question, the answer, any more than he could count those eyes. They moved and multiplied, jostling for space in what now only looked like his old office for the distant orange idea of a smoky skyline.
A flutter of cranes taking flight into the setting sun. His noble justifications broke against Rubin’s steady battering. His panic drowned in a sea of eyes. He had tried.
He had sacrificed. But the world had never wanted it. The one diagnosis he had never been able to make, never been able to accept, was for himself. A chronic condition – unnecessary.
He lay slack in the pain. The hands. The smothering hum of accusations, and didn’t try to count them, or how many took their turn between his legs. To hurt him however they could. He stared at the light on the ceiling, a sunset unending, until pain became numbness and he could almost have believed he had escaped it for good.
You told me you would come back.
He craned his neck against the steel brace of Aglaya’s hand. She allowed it, just enough, with a struggle, for him to see Anatoliy staring sadly from where the crowd had pushed him to the forefront.
As he started forward, Daniil found the futile strength to struggle again. As he took his place to take his turn, Daniil began, at last, to scream.
#
Andrey was the first to breach the Kains’ orders and the tower’s entrance, of course. What he found curled on one of its lower landings, beneath the lantern, wouldn’t speak to him or anyone. Its only words were for the dead – apologies muttered endlessly over again to those buried too deep beneath masonry or the Abattoir’s broken back to ever hear them.