Sleep never again (13.1.2021)

I wake up. I’m back in chains.

This is my room, not the one from before but the one from now, the one I don’t share with Renée.

That thing from before is here. She’s leaning against the wall like she’s waiting.

“If you’re going to kill me, can you hurry up?”

I speak in English, which surprises her. It was pretty obvious before that she didn’t understand French, but I heard her shout at the guards in English.

“I haven’t decided if I’m killing you yet.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To decide that.”

She sits down at the foot of my bed without warning. Every time I blink the chaos of her soul threatens to blind me.

“What’s your name?”

“Kai.”

“Do you already know mine?”

“I do.”

This girl is like me, I can see that now. Like that invisible man too, her soul has been attached to something outside her.

“Kai.”

“What?”

“You have powers like mine, don’t you?”

She hesitates on her answer, glancing at me with suspicious eyes.

“…How did you know that?”

“I saw it. At the chateau. You didn’t kill those men, they killed you.”

“That they did… what’s yours?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain…”

“Just gloss over the details, you don’t have the full story of mine.”

Gloss over the details? It’s nothing but details.

“It’s like… I can see the real world… when I close my eyes, I see everything as symbols… people, things, concepts… I understand them all too much now… How long have you had your powers?”

“A few years, I don’t remember exactly how long.”

She doesn’t have a question to return on me, she just lets her body fall backwards, her face coming to rest just below my feet.

“Kai… can I ask you another question?”

“Go ahead.”

“… does it ever stop hurting?”

“Does what?”

“Your power, have you ever gotten used to it?”

“…no.”

The tears that had been holding themselves back start flowing down my cheeks.

“Can you hurry up and decide?”

“Tell me one thing first… This power, this ability to see things for what they really are. You can’t get rid of it. Knowing that… do you want to die?”

It’s such a harsh question. Of course I don’t want to die! I want life to go back to what it was, back to when I knew nothing.

That’s what I want… but if it’s a choice between closing my eyes and dying then….

“I don’t want to see anymore…”

Kai mounts me without a further word and presses a knife to my throat. She lets it sit in my skin for a moment, a chance for me to tell her I’ve changed her mind, that I actually can live with myself like this.

I’ll never be able to tell her that though.

She drags the knife across my neck, opening a cut from the bottom of my right cheekbone to the top of her left shoulder as I see the blood begin to stain her bedsheets.

The knife I stole from Trish, I thought Aaron had made it just for her but clearly, it can be used by anyone. Much like the thread, it links itself to the soul sequence of the person who uses it.

That’s why, when I cut Mallory’s neck, I felt the illusion of differing perspectives being washed away by the blood.