Chapter Text
You wake up with soil in your mouth.
It crunches between your teeth. Cold, bitter, like dried blood and rust. You spit and gag, rolling onto your side, and that’s when you notice two things.
First, you’re in the woods again. Second, you’re holding a gun.
It’s heavy in your hand, familiar in a way that makes your stomach twist. Your fingers are curled around it with the ease of habit. Muscle memory, or maybe training.
What training?
You were a student. You were in Moscow. You were reading Chekhov in a cramped hostel bunk and complaining about the heater. You were—
The snow hisses around you, even though it isn’t winter. It hasn’t been winter for months.
The first time you woke up like this, you laughed.
You thought you’d sleepwalked. Weird, sure, but you’d read somewhere it was common under stress. Maybe the time zone shift, the cold, the late-night black tea with sugar cubes like glass. But the second time, you weren’t laughing. Not when you found footprints, that weren't your own, leading deep into the trees with your socks that were damp with something that wasn’t snowmelt.
And definitely not when you looked down and saw the knife. It was clean. Too clean.
You brought it home, and you don’t know why.
People have started avoiding you.
You sit across from classmates who smile too wide, blinking too slowly, like they’re waiting for you to say something. But you don’t know what. One of them—Sarah, maybe?—mouthed a word to you once during a lecture. No sound. Just movement. Something sharp in her eyes. She mouthed it again. You couldn’t read her lips.
You asked her afterward.
She swore she hadn’t been there.
But she had. You remembered her red coat. You remembered her pencil tapping the desk in fives. Tap-tap-tap-tap-pause. Like Morse code, or a countdown.
There are conversations you never had echoing in your mind.
Whole hours lost to static, mornings where your body ached like you’d been running all night. The way the professor started looking at you too long, too often. Like they knew something.
A man with a scar like a lightning bolt across his cheek leaned toward you in a café in Moscow—one you’re sure doesn’t exist—and whispered, “You’re coming along beautifully.”
That emblem he wore, it’s stitched in your memory now. A black-and-silver symbol with too many limbs, all coiling out from a dead center. It appears in the corner of your vision sometimes. On subway ads that change when you blink. On TV screens that fuzz out just before the weather report. You saw it carved into your dorm desk last week, but you didn’t tell anyone.
You don’t think you’re supposed to.
You also dream in another voice.
It speaks your thoughts before you think them, humming beneath your skull like a radio tuned slightly off. In your sleep, you count backwards in Russian. In your waking hours, you forget what day it is. You forget if you’ve eaten, you forget whether the memory of your professor’s hand on your shoulder was comfort, or command.
Sometimes your phone rings, and there’s only silence on the other end.
Sometimes, you answer before it rings, only to never recall picking up a phone at all.
Your body is doing things you don’t remember learning.
Snapping to attention when someone knocks at your door. Ducking reflexively when a car backfires. Your roommate left in the middle of the night and never came back. You don’t remember their name anymore. Did you even have a roommate?
You found a gun in your closet last night, and you picked it up like you’d done it a thousand times.
The trigger felt warm, but not literally. It felt warm because it felt natural to have your finger on it.
The scariest part isn’t the snow that comes when it shouldn’t or the bruises shaped like fingerprints on your wrists and temples.
It’s the part where this all feels… normal.
You don’t cry anymore, you don’t panic, you catalog the anomalies in a journal you hide inside an old textbook, and you’ve started writing in a language you don’t recognize.
Sometimes, you don’t remember writing at all. Sometimes you do.
This morning, you woke up in the forest again.
Gun in your hand, whilst being barefoot with your pajamas soaked. No pain, just static.
A faint sound like whispering behind a wall. You turned to look and for just a second, you weren’t you.
Something else blinked behind your eyes. Something smooth. Obedient.
The wind whispered a word. You’re not sure if you heard it or remembered it. Maybe both, maybe neither.
It sounded like "Soldier.”
And something inside you, something small and breaking, whispered back.
“Ready to comply.”
You don’t know what’s happening to you.
But part of you doesn’t want to stop it.
And that terrifies you most of all.