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When Daniil opens his eyes, the first thing he notices is Khan, seated by a riverbank. He's still blinking away hot grains of sand when Khan starts to speak.
“She can’t hear us here. That's all I could do for you in our present circumstances. I’m sorry."
She?
“I suppose I ought to thank you,” Khan continues. "For defending us against Block. And, well. For everything else."
Daniil pinches his eyebrows together. For the life of him he can't remember where he is, where he was coming or going.
“For what? What else?”
“Well, I was going to say—’thank you for remembering me,’ but I see that’s now pointless.”
His tone, filled with such a genuine sense of disappointment, leaves Daniil disarmed. Instead of snapping back that of course I remember, how could I not— he chooses to assess his surroundings for the first time since he gained consciousness.
The world around them is a wash of scarlet, sunset, desert. The only living thing around is a wide river, mirror-still. Floating like the corpse of a leviathan, the skeleton of a small biplane is stubbornly planted in the riverbed, its silhouette cast in smoldering black.
Khan's arms are crossed over himself, his legs tucked up underneath him. He’d look very small except for the fact that Daniil is looking up at him.
Somehow, his body was buried in the sand with only his head sticking out.
He thinks about asking to be dug out from his predicament, but changes his mind.
“It’s fine. It’s enough,” Daniil replies. “But could I have some water? I feel as if I'm dying for it.”
The boy lets out a weary noise, which feels completely inappropriate to Daniil.
“That’s all you ever want, now. Water.”
Nevertheless he dips a cupped hand into the stream, sending ripples across the river for miles.
Then Khan stands for a moment, holding the precious water in his hand. It dribbles between the cracks of his palms and fingers, leaving craters at his feet. Although it was currently sunset, it's still unclear to him where the sun had actually set. But Daniil imagined Khan would be facing it then.
“What on earth are you waiting for?” Daniil complains. “As if I have all the time left in the world.”
Khan looks at him reproachfully as he stares back. He feels perplexedly young across from those old wayfaring eyes. Perhaps Simon might've shared those eyes, once. Perhaps Daniil could have shared them once, too, had he given it a chance.
“Don't we, though? There are more universes there than grains of sand. I thought you of all people might know that.”
“That’s all well and good. But I can’t see any of them, buried like this.”
Khan kicks the ground, sending a small spray of sand to be carried off by the wind.
“Well, it doesn’t matter if you can see them or not. They’re still there."
Daniil gives him a befuddled expression.
"Which one would you like to go to?”
Daniil thinks for a moment.
“Well, obviously one where I’m not stuffed in a hole in the ground.”
Khan bends down and offers the water to Daniil’s lips to drink.
As far as Daniil knew, the original plan for Khan was to go back to live in the Crucible after the Tower fell. Simon’s quarters were still inexplicably kept off-limits, and Khan looked white as a ghost at even the thought of encroaching on them. He showed little interest in Victor’s wing. But he still had Maria, or whatever was left of her.
The arrangement lasted two weeks.
Then Khan was just there one night at the Stillwater, throwing rocks at his windows.
Not to be a menace, but just to get Daniil’s attention. Nevermind the fact that he wasn’t even asleep; the lights in the hall should’ve alerted Khan of that, but at least his blatant ignorance of that fact meant he wasn’t nosy, like some of the other boys in the town. He could be thankful for that, at least. And that Khan was without his pesky little comrades.
“I need one of Eva’s spare rooms,” Khan said, more of a demand than a request. Like a prince returning to his castle, or one trying to stake a new claim.
Daniil wanted to reply that it wasn’t Eva’s anymore, but his, just like the rest of the Stillwater. Eva had left it all to him in her last will, and even without a Judge to sort out such business, the Town never questioned it.
But Daniil let him stay regardless, because what else was he supposed to do?
Later, a terse letter from Maria would indicate it was actually her will for Khan to stay with Daniil, so even though Khan thought he was running away again it was all a perfectly favorable arrangement for Maria (irregardless of the opinion of her supposedly dear Bachelor). It would seem that his services to the Kains would never cease.
But Khan wasn’t the worst of roommates, truly. He was polite most times, so long as Daniil kept unnecessary dialogue and snarking to a minimum. He was trained at the table and not a menace, besides his strange sleeping habits, of which Daniil could hardly judge considering his own (which were abysmal even prior to the plague).
The one issue, in Daniil’s opinion, was that he refused treatment for his obvious psychological symptoms. If there was anything deadly to the Kains, it was stagnation. Like sharks forced to swim even in sleep, Kains strive.
His condition was deteriorating, not helped by the starvation in the winter, or the earlier plague—which, yes, hit even the Town's ancien régime. It was just Maria managing their family finances, and while she could try to be Nina, she certainly was no Victor. Not that even Victor seemed to care much about finances in those final days, mind. But Daniil couldn’t remember the last time Khan slept, not since he first arrived many months ago.
Though time felt a bit bedraggled, now, for both of them. It pulled and snagged, longer in places where it shouldn’t be. And Daniil was sick of playing games with time.
During the plague, time was a precious resource. But now time existed in what felt like grotesque abundance. Forget Victor’s metaphors—he knew it was all about how you measure a thing. The size of the scope determined the magnification, and so on. So he fiddled with the clocks in the house, which each time buzzed unhappily in his unskilled fingers. No luck.
When he asked Khan if he could try his hand at it, assuming of course that the son was like his father in at least one other aspect, the boy only looked at him like he was an idiot, or worse, a blasphemer. What do you mean there's something wrong with the clocks? It was striking, really, the absolute faith Khan had in his father's inventions when Daniil remembered him speaking as if he had none of that same faith in the man himself.
Which seemed to form a pattern with the various adults in Khan's life. Despite Khan’s apparent willingness to ingest whatever herbal concoctions brewed with mystery mincemeat that Burakh cooked up in his warehouse, Khan refused to take any other kinds of drugs, aside from antibiotics (which were no longer necessary, in this case) or immunity boosters (which were helpful, considering his current unhealthful state, but had nothing to do with the core issue).
“I’ve heard things,” Khan says, rotating the bottle skeptically on the kitchen table. The glass on wood sounded like marbles being thrown. “Is this not what Katerina abuses?”
“I swear to you, it’s not,” Daniil replies, nearly snatching the bottle away.
“Then just what is it?”
“Lithium."
“Non-addictive, I hope?”
“You were able to guzzle bottles of twyrine concoctions from Burakh, but you’re concerned about becoming addicted to this?”
“That’s different. Those were non-alcoholic, anyway; they were tested. And my life was imperiled.”
“And what do you think about the state of your life now?”
Khan says nothing.
“I just don’t want to end up like Andrey, or Peter.”
“Addicts?”
“No, not—well, maybe. God.”
Daniil raised an eyebrow at Khan’s swear. “So? I can hardly see how your situation could be better than theirs, at this point.”
The boy meets his gaze, the unspoken acknowledgement flitting across his always dream-dazed expression.
Then Khan gingerly sticks the pill in his mouth without waiting for Daniil's instruction, his face flinching at the bite of bitterness.
"Water?" he speaks around it, as if it's Daniil's fault for being unprepared.
Daniil sighs, and extends to him a glass.
Before the architect brothers decided to build each other a funeral pyre and go out with a twyrine-loaded bang—figuratively, of course, but only just short of figurative—Daniil had asked them how the Stillwater worked. It was during the plague, and while neither of them were the most cooperative of conversationalists, they still said remarkably little about the structure except to say that it was a fascinating and incredible failure, and one of the few special buildings in town that was not their fault.
He asks Khan about it once over breakfast. Khan dismisses him with a wave of his hand, and continues digging at his porridge. His pills sit next to the bowl, waiting.
He was annoyed by this tendency of Khan's to trail off or wholly abandon a point if he didn't feel invested enough in proclaiming the other's stupidity to them. The worst fact was that Daniil had mentioned it to him before, all the way back during the plague, yet he still did it. He wasn't sure if it was an inherited Kain trait or just Khan's juvenile side showing its spiny back.
"The Stamatins told me Farkhad built this as a failed Focus. Its mechanism is like the rest—to stretch the soul, correct?" Daniil asked.
Khan's face soured. Due to the porridge or Daniil, he wasn't sure.
"You still talk about these buildings like they're no different from the factories across town."
"Then tell me how exactly I'm wrong. I understood the Polyhedron—and no, before you correct me, I know I could never truly understand it, I mean that I analyzed the basics of its operation, nothing more. But the Tower was a much different thing."
Khan spun his spoon in circles inside his bowl.
"I wasn't going to correct you. I suppose you understood it all well enough. But then again, I've nearly forgotten what it once looked like. So who knows?"
Daniil swallowed whatever concession that was, and shelved his questions for later. "Still."
"The Stillwater. You know how it works? Its effect on people?"
Daniil waited on Khan’s explanation to follow.
“It was certainly not made to observe the heavens. The observatory isn’t really an observatory, it’s really more of a mirror dome. ‘The abyss gazes also into you,’ and all that."
His gaze drifted away to some other plane.
“Just how do you expect any of this to work? Trying to fix me with drugs. With each stretch outwards, the more your own soul will be dug into.”
“Yet Eva could stand it.”
“Eva was, mercifully, blind. She loved blind, she dreamed blind. At least until you came along.”
There was no cruelty in Khan’s words—he spoke as if it were objective fact, which made it seem all the more spiteful. As objective as a thumb of lead pressing through the plates of the skull. His harshest words were always framed that way.
“Of all my family’s friends, Eva was the kindest to me.”
“Well, she was kind to everyone.”
“She was. You know—the thing my sister did to her, that made her take her own life—my sister could do that to anyone and wouldn’t bat an eye.”
“Is that why you ran from home? To safety?”
“I didn’t run. And this is hardly safety.”
“No. In the Tower. Is that why you barricaded yourself in, all those days, while the rest of the Town was left to die?”
And the snake uncoils to take a bite. He has enough poison to last a lifetime, but only one.
Khan stares at him like a much younger child.
They continued picking at their porridge together.
“Simon would’ve loved you, too, you know.”
He can see on Khan’s face, the pitiful addendum. More than he loved me.
On Daniil’s own: like Christ would have loved Pontius Pilate. He was a destroyer, nothing more.
“I remember the Stillwater being built,” Khan says, wiping spit and vomit from his mouth.
They are both in the master bathroom, together. Daniil alternates between attempting to take samples of his blood and making sure the boy doesn't spit on himself like an infant.
“I was probably five when it happened. I still lived back home, and every day I’d pass by where the workmen were breaking ground—I used to make up all sorts of stories just for my own entertainment. That they were reconstructing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or some other thing. So why can’t I remember the Polyhedron being built?”
Daniil washes his hands in the steaming water and replaces his gloves.
Khan wasn’t an easy patient. Despite being in charge of the most weaponized group of youths he’d met, where even babies would trade food and medicine for a needle; Khan acted as if he were almost allergically averse to them. And Daniil was a researcher, but not a very good nurse. Each time he tried to prick those troublesome veins the boy jerked in a way that led to him needing to get stabbed again, and then his growing phobia only made his stomach sicker.
“I don’t know why you don’t remember,” Daniil intones. “It could be due to a lack of sleep. Sleep deprivation leads to poor memory recall.”
Khan gives him a green-faced sneer.
“That’s your excuse for everything. If anything, I sleep too much. And dream too little.”
Daniil rolls his eyes so Khan can see, but the boy’s attention turns and is trapped by the hypnotic swirl of water inside the porcelain bowl.
Though Daniil has hardly any amount of work to do now in terms of research, he likes to at least feign at being busy, lest Burakh attempt to darken his doorstep with more tasks around the Town. It's while he's perusing the notes and articles left by the senior Kains that he hears the playing.
He's surprised to hear Khan at Eva’s piano, since he thought all the boy ever did these days was sleep in his room.
Or not sleep—he could hear him spinning like a top up there some nights and early mornings, pacing in the Bachelor’s old room during the Pest. It was easiest, safest, to put him on the top floor, which Daniil learned after catching him wandering out the door one night.
As for himself, he took Eva's, now. Perversely he wonders if it is some latent necrophilic urge. Perversely he wonders if the Kains would approve of such practices.
To be quite frank, he didn’t even know that Khan could play.
However, “play” was perhaps too generous a term. The stop-starting notes pulsed thinly through the round room and spilled out into the hallway like the sound of ocean waves out of a conch shell. Daniil approached him, if only to tell him off.
“Do you remember the song?” Khan asks first, as if there was any reason for Daniil to recognize it. Even if he knew the name of Khan's attempt at a tune, he couldn’t say he would even be able to.
“I don’t. What is it?”
Khan slams the keys down with a shocking ire.
“Pirouette, cacahuète,” Khan sings, his poorly accented voice too half-hearted to be truly in song, hardly suggesting any rhythm.
The ire fades into frustrated contemplation.
“Sa maison est en carton, pirouette, cacahuète, ah... Les escaliers sont en papier—”
Some memory of childhood resurfaces then, like a mermaid dipping her golden head from the water's surface.
“Ah—you might be in the wrong key, on that last one.”
Khan stops. His hands return to his lap.
“What last one?”
“On ‘carton,’ I think.”
His hands return to the keys, and Khan plays a few bars, his eyes drifting to the ceiling as he tries to chase the correct tune, like a mechanic searching for the right part, a magician rooting around for the bunny in the hat.
To his chagrin, Daniil feels himself humming the tune as well, despite himself.
Once he found it Khan fished around for the rest of the song, mumbling the lyrics below the threshold of hearing. But Daniil remembered. Eventually, he asks him a question, speaking over the hesitant piano. “Did you grow up with it?”
It wasn't too uncommon, he thinks, for noble children to be taught French ditties, though the scene was still quite odd to witness.
“Not this one, though I did—must have learnt it at some point. I just woke up thinking about it,” Khan casually replies, still tapping out notes.
Daniil’s throat takes a moment to unstick.
In the meantime, Khan’s adolescent self-consciousness catches up with him, after which he proceeds to slink off back to his room.
That night, while trying to drown out the noise of Khan’s heavy pacing upstairs, he lets himself drift to sleep with the thought of Eva there at the piano. He caught her there before she left for that last time, and had been so churlish, wondering why she would be playing a nursery rhyme at a time like this.
Joli fil doré, joli fil doré...
How stupid he'd been.
When the Polyhedron fell that night, the earth shook so hard that the very stars revolved around the dome of the Stillwater.
And Daniil can still see it, clear as day. The crack of the stem as a bullet leapt to its neck. The great collapse. He thought, what a masterstroke. The precision, the physics involved. They said blood seeped from the earth but no one told him if it was fresh. If it was, it had to come from the Tower.
He wonders if Burakh watched the Tower fall. He knows he couldn't. Like a child he thought if he turned away it wouldn't happen. Taking in the sight of its falling would be like taking in the bullet himself—Lot's wife came to mind. Nevertheless, his mouth flooded with salt and iron, and he only realized he bit it after the chaos, after the workmen began breaking doors down. They needed every able body to come collect for the panacea, and they moved like a swarm of bees, communicating not with words but pheromones, the smell of adrenaline and sweaty fear, cold excitement.
But now he wonders if he loved it enough, the Polyhedron. Or if the ghost of it was still following him, crawling up the stairs behind, waiting to be acknowledged. Playing the piano in the center of the room, coiled in the pit like a serpent named Charybdis.
There's a telescope in the topmost room, which Khan dragged out of some closet. How he knew where it was without Daniil himself knowing, he had no idea. He doesn't question it.
They’ve tried, together, to mark the passage of time through stellar movements—Khan tracing out a comet's curvatures on the walls of his room, with X's marking the movements like it was a treasure map.
He even invites him upstairs to watch its passage.
"My uncle compared souls to sound, sure, but they're also light. It's the light that carries the memory," Khan hummed, positioning the telescope to capture the comet in its eye. "But there's a distance it has to cross, first. It's not just a two dimensional wall—that's really rudimentary, to imagine life and death as a line, a point A and B, and not a three-dimensional space. Every star we see out there has already jumped the grave to reach us."
"A memory?"
"The same principle."
Daniil takes a moment to observe the changes within the room. Besides the damage to the wallpaper, there was little else in the way of decoration.
A sketchbook on Khan's desk was left carelessly open. He reaches for it while Khan is occupied in describing the minutiae of each visible constellation's history.
"Can you really not remember what the Polyhedron was like on the inside?"
"I can't." He pulls the telescope away from his face, sending it swiveling. And glares at Daniil once he sees the contents of his desk being meddled with. Otherwise, he doesn't protest.
"Not a thing? Not a feeling, a story, a half-remembered fairytale?" Upon seeing Khan's mouth part in readied protest, he barrells on. "What might happen if you only remembered it? It's what Simon wanted. Imagine—having the infinity of the Polyhedron for a mind. You could create anything. You could become a real human being."
Khan wavers. The telescope shook, tinkling like a bell in his hand.
"Don't make excuses. You could remember the words to that nursery rhyme, so why not this?"
"I'm not sure." Khan twists where he stands, his silhouette casting uncomfortable impressions into the dark. "I don't think I paid enough attention. I was too young to love her."
Daniil bridges the distance between them, taking Khan's place to peer out of the telescope.
When he was a boy, he had never taken an interest in astronomy like Khan. Even now, the outside world looks barren and lifeless—how uninteresting it is to watch space, lightyear by empty lightyear, for one ancient and dead movement or another. Primal plasmas, elements knocking together blindly. A picometer of cellular life contained more intelligent processes.
Khan seems to sense the dissatisfaction radiating off of him, and shrinks further away.
"Is this consolation? The Tower might be gone, but the stars are still here? Or better yet: with the Tower gone, at least you can now appreciate the stars' natural beauty." There is an ache in his throat from the awkward stretch of his vocal cords. It lingers when he stands.
"It's not," Khan replies sourly, somewhere beyond his shoulder. “And besides, I could see the stars better with the Polyhedron there. Back then you could see how they were connected, why they all meant something, at the end of the day—they were something new, something alive, all on their own. Now they’re all scattered and dead, like grains of sand in a desert.”
“Or a sandbox,” Daniil replies.
The whites of Khan’s eyes shine in the sliver of waxing moonlight. “Or a sandbox.”
Daniil doesn’t see Khan’s first fight with his girlfriend—or fiance, a term which Daniil still hesitates to use, for his own private objections to the arrangement of minors that nobody ever cared to hear. But he doesn’t need to see her to know about the fight. Enough is said by the slammed front door, the way the house shook like a bomb fell.
The Kains weren’t around to criticize his refusal to chaperone, so he didn't have to bother with seeing Capella for himself, even though he respects her enough to enjoy conversation with her. But he was loathe to watch an adolescent couple’s disputes.
Nevertheless, he checks in on Khan later, who is perplexedly calm. His legs are crossed on the bed, kicking the air lightly, laying on his arm for a pillow as if he were relaxing under a tree—and Daniil can imagine how Khan must have caused Capella to run out the way she did.
"I believe I've figured it all out. Love, memory, the lack of love and my memory."
Daniil lets loose the heavy air in his lungs as he drags the desk chair to Khan’s bedside. Incapable of resisting the urge of not taking this seriously, he reaches for Khan’s sketchbook and a stray pen. He flips it open to a blank page and mimes taking notes.
“I loved her. I was too young and stupid to love her properly, but I still loved her.”
“...Who, Capella?”
“No, I was talking about the Tower,” Khan sighs wearily, as if Daniil’s just ruined a game. “But I guess that applies to Capella, as well. But regardless, Capella will take care of it. She’ll come to protect of all of us, in the future. And she’ll keep Maria from hurting anyone, including herself.”
Daniil hides his scoff. He dusts his snakeskin jacket off. He jots down an actual note on the page— patient has sublimated latent (and necrophilic) desires for his mother onto a new, and equally distant, love object.
Khan pulls himself up by his elbows and sits up to face him.
“I know she’s still young and hardly what one might call a ‘Mistress’—she doesn’t have the command for it yet. And she can hardly fend off Maria herself, especially now. But that’s why we're together. The world we will create will be a better one—not perfect, but a better one. More human. I promise I’ll let you see it, someday.”
Burakh begins sending letters, at some point. He refuses to see him. But Burakh breaks through into his consciousness, anyway. Letters pile up at the door, bricking him in further. He did not need to go out and he did not want to.
Khan has begun drifting outside again—lucid and awake, this time. Daniil is not thankful. He’s begun taking these opportunities to pay visits to the new Burakh, and the three of them—Burakh, Khan, and Capella, as well, as the two were apparently now attached at the hip—were united in some plot to drag Daniil back into the world of the living. He will not be dragged.
I dreamt of you, emshen. You were at the bank of the Gorkhon, wading, looking for something. I called out for you, by name, but then I realized that I had forgotten your name, and you did not hear me. You walked in as if to be baptized, and then you submerged and drowned. Later I walked along the banks myself and I found you, dead, your face filled with ecstasy. I awoke and tasted salt—I’d bitten my tongue in my sleep, calling out for you, Sticky said. Did you find what you were looking for?
He thinks of Burakh’s dream in his own. He might as well; he has no dreams of his own now.
I dreamt of you, emshen. Did you come to love the Polyhedron? Did it come to love you? I want to believe that it wasn’t just hatred that drove you to make the decision you did. Love is bound in flesh, blood, and bone, not in glass, not in reflections. I want to believe it hasn't gone cold yet, that you still have a heart. Khan says you do. You can still choose love, emshen.
He can still choose love.
And what was love, to Burakh? The choice to let something die, so something else can live? It was against Daniil's nature, his very purpose.
“It’s only following one set of stairs to yet another stage,” Khan says. “That’s all that it is. Kains have known this for generations—my father, my uncles, even Maria. Taking nature's laws into our own hands means taking its ultimatums of life and death as the choices they actually are."
“Is that what Maria told you? Was it her who put this idea in your head?”
“No. And neither did Simon, at least not directly. The Rose showed me.”
The snake uncoils to take a bite. He has enough poison to last a lifetime, but only one. In Daniil’s stock of drugs were an assortment that could, theoretically—but he wouldn’t.
“We’re stuck, can’t you see? We spin in circles endlessly, over and over.”
“But that doesn’t mean—” Daniil chokes.
At Daniil's stubborn silence, Khan’s irises seem to split into split into fractals.
The request was for the kindest cut, but one he could not do.
He needs to breathe. He looks outside the window. Below him the pond of the Stillwater reflects a sea of never ending scarlet, and he cannot see beyond that pond.
Daniil opens his eyes. His body feels cool, the grains of sand clinging to his wet skin and hair, to his clothes.
Khan was already there on the bank, waiting. Drenched as well, he's busy wiping his forehead and pulling strands of his hair through his fingers, the sand leaving traces like stains.
"Welcome back to our little sea of air, fellow traveler."
Daniil catches his breath on the otherwise desolate beach. The only thing left in the world that meant anything at all.
“Thank you,” Daniil replies at last. “Thank you for letting me dream of that small corner of it, at least.”
Khan says nothing, only settling himself back down on the bank next to Daniil, on the eternal stretches of hot sand.
"Well, there's still a lot more I have to show you, you know," Khan says, dispirited, but resolute.
And Khan grabs Daniil and pulls him shakily up. After all, for an exile, all wanderers are brothers and countrymen in the Land of Nod.
The two of them stare at the expanse of quieting ripples, showing them a mirage of a Town Daniil cannot remember, until the river melts back into sky.