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A human being has no instincts. Evolution cut them out of us. Man is more reasonable than beast.
The contents of his consciousness are regulated by society and the conditions of his existence. His reactions are the product of experience — the product of a life lived among his own kind. Reflexes still live in a human being, but instincts will never live again. And so the instinct of self-preservation does not exist either.
The whole world is built on deception; every word carries several meanings. Every gesture hides an ulterior motive behind it: profit. Desire. The craving for quick enrichment — people are ruled by nothing but the egoism everyone knows so well. Fear is dulled, carried along by adrenaline and self-assurance, and — bang!
You're here. On the social floor.
The Snezhnaya doesn't love the weak, and the market at the port was no exception to that rule — it was its quintessence. No silk was traded here, no spices praised. Instead of the smell of vegetables and fresh bread, there stood a sharp dampness and mustiness. Here they traded in what was left of people once their names had been stripped away and only a price remained.
The voices blend together. The world turns into a cacophony of sound. Oh, he'd lost. He'd lost! Businessmen know how to lose; it's only that in this particular loss, the penalty is certain death.
The voices double. The outlines of the existing world tremble, as if some clumsy editor had layered a 3D effect over them, and now red, blue, and green stripes shakily trace the edges of every object.
Feofan was twenty. It seemed to him that he ought to be afraid, but the shivering that racked his body had long since driven out anything resembling fear — all that remained was a dull, viscous exhaustion and a caustic anger, smoldering in his chest and burning straight through it with a furious will to live.
He looked at his hands — frostbitten fingers, cracked skin, wrists hidden beneath heavy shackles — and thought that the gods, if they existed at all, certainly didn't consider it necessary to look in on this part of the city.
They say the human brain stays active for a short while after the heart stops, running the memories of an entire life before the eyes. Now, as a whole crowd of people of every race, sex, and age was chained and lined up like prisoners before a firing squad, Feofan was surely living through exactly that.
All his life this sickly, rotten vindictiveness had hidden inside him; he took it out on the table he'd bumped into, he took it out on the man who kept ignoring him, and in the end he took it out on himself — and every single time he became convinced anew that his revenge was petty and empty. A man with no idea who he was; strangled by his own thoughts; buried, beaten down — or maybe, in truth, just another pseudo-sufferer, elevating his own problems to the rank of the deep and insurmountable.
Now it was no longer his character or his tone that spoke for him, but a thick medical file and an extensive list of accomplishments: forgery, fraud, deceit. The cold was progressing, and Feofan didn't have long left, to judge by the purulent phlegm and the red stains left on his palm after every roll of coughing. Nothing was expected of him anymore, nothing demanded — they were ready, right here and now, to take him apart alive for his organs.
The world, like a mother who never loved him, and God, like a father he never knew.
Oh... he remembers his mother. Her sorrowful gaze. Pale hands, scattered with moles. A dimmed look in her eyes. A hard fist and a demanding voice. Long eyelashes, trembling sadly every evening — if Feofan could make out her face in the dark, or if he managed to wait up for her at all.
He remembers his stepfather. A vile man. Thin arms strewn with blue bruises. Protruding ribs. A slack, foul-smelling jaw hanging open. Greasy, filthy clothes. The reek of alcohol.
And his father...
"A batch for medical needs," the trader said, sharply knocking Vexel out of his thoughts as a man in a long coat walked into the warehouse, trailing a cold of an entirely different kind behind him — not the cold of frost, but something sterile, as if straight out of an operating room. Feofan couldn't find the strength to lift his eyes, didn't react at all, feeling utterly humiliated. "There are only about fifteen people here, my lord Harbingers, forgive me! Your preference, if I may say so, is rather... narrow. We prefer to sell the healthy ones—"
"I'm sure we can come to an arrangement about this stock as well," the man interrupted, his voice low and pleasantly hoarse, an active smile running through it: he clearly wasn't as downcast as the crowd of people put up for display before him. Undoubtedly an important figure — no small face at the Tsaritsa's court.
Feofan raised his head: the last thing he expected was for his gaze to be caught instantly by the man in white. Into heavenly eyes stared the eyes of a true underworld. Vexel didn't know why, but he was suddenly washed over by an apathy strange in its own particular way...
Appearance reflects the biological component of a person. It ignores the social one (since a human being is, after all, a biosocial creature) — but through what shows in the mirror, one can, to some degree, come to know the personality as well. It's expressed in small things: in how a person stands, how they look at themselves, what they examine first, and what they pay no attention to at all. The man in the coat studied him not the way a buyer would — weighing use or price — but the way one studies a rarity behind glass: with a cold, almost tender attention, devoid of even a drop of pity, but devoid of malice too. That absence of any emotion at all was more frightening than open cruelty would have been.
Feofan was ready to answer that gaze, to snap back without a single word spoken — real businessmen were far better at speaking the language of the body — but he was cut off by a fit of coughing, from which the woman to his right recoiled as sharply as the shackles binding them allowed, while the man to his left pressed his lips together in indifference.
"For the records I need five units," the man said to the trader a couple of seconds after their eye contact broke. "Men. Yes, men, I think. Aand..." Feofan went still for a moment, not seeing but feeling the gaze all over his body. "I like that fellow in black. Who's that?"
A quiet, almost musical chuckle came from the warehouse doors — a man in a mask, who had been standing there so silently the whole time that Feofan hadn't even noticed his presence, stepped closer.
"Five," he said, sweeping the prisoners with a quick, almost absent-minded glance that nonetheless missed no detail. "No. Six? Isn't that a bit much for one 'advanced trial,' Dottore? Her Majesty's treasury is generous, but not boundless — even where your favorite pastime is concerned." Wait — "Her Majesty"?
"Five is the minimum sample size for statistical validity, Pierro," the man — Dottore — answered without turning around, clearly not explaining this point for the first time. "Fewer, and the result can be written off as chance. More, and all of you will accuse me of extravagance. I chose the golden mean."
"I accuse you of extravagance regardless of the number," Pierro remarked, without much reproach in his voice — more with the tone of someone stating a long-established fact. "But since Her Majesty wishes for your research to continue, I see no point in arguing."
He cast one last glance over the row of prisoners — lingering for a moment on Feofan, whether by chance or not — and added, already turning away: "Just spare me the trouble of explaining to Her Majesty why yet another batch of 'material' cost more than our entire last convoy from Liyue. I expect the results report by the end of the week."
"As always," Dottore replied, with a light, barely noticeable sarcasm, "purely for the sake of the budget, never for the sake of science."
***
The laboratory turned out to be nothing like what Feofan's imagination had painted on the way there. No damp basement, no rusted chains — instead, high pale vaults, whitewashed walls, rows of glass cabinets in which instruments gleamed, laid out with almost obsessive neatness. The light here was even, cold, a kind of sterile white — the sort of light usually associated with cleanliness and care, if one could forget what exactly this room was meant for. It was precisely that mismatch — the blinding, almost cozy cleanliness mixed with what was supposed to happen here — that frightened more than any deliberate gloom could have.
And, it's worth stressing — yes, his ears hadn't deceived him. Right now he was in the clutches of the Harbingers, their toy for whatever purposes they saw fit. Perhaps out of sheer desperation and spite, but right now, in the doctor's hands, Feofan didn't feel a drop of anxiety about that fact.
What almost genuinely pleased Vexel was that he didn't seem to be facing the sorry fate that had befallen his less fortunate "cellmates." They'd been separated in a huge, multi-story building — and it had been two days now since Feofan had last seen them. Granted, he'd spent that whole time in absolute solitude, occasionally crossing paths only with the maids. They would politely leave him food, exchange a few courteous words with Vexel, and go on their way, leaving him alone with himself. The solitude gnawed at him. He'd had plenty to think about, those days.
On the third day, Il Dottore paid him a visit.
The day began like all the others — with a grey sky outside the windows and an icy draft slipping through the cracks of the old window frames. Outside, rain drummed dully, as if trying to drown out the breathing of a house too empty for that drumming to mean anything more than mere noise. At around ten in the morning there came a knock — Feofan had only just managed to start sleeping longer than five hours, though he still fell asleep near dawn, when he was woken by an insistent knocking.
"Still asleep? You know, from what your owner told me about you, I expected rather more composure." Feofan rubbed his eyes helplessly, seeing only a bright blur, peering out from under the blanket in nothing but a shirt and underwear — because, it should be noted, Her Majesty hadn't bothered to lend the new guest any new clothes.
"What? Oh, Il Dottore, right? My apologies for my poor manners," Feofan answered hastily, sitting up at least, rather than lying there helplessly: sitting in nothing but a shirt and underwear across from the Second Harbinger of the Fatui was an experience he had no wish to repeat. He pulled on a professional smile and quickly tried to comb his tangled black hair with his fingers. "I wasn't expecting your visit," he rephrased the obvious complaint more gently, trying, through his exhaustion and apathy, to project the last remnants of professionalism.
"Well, I really did take my time," Dottore said with a chuckle, not looking the least bit troubled.
"And on top of that, you still haven't explained to me the purpose of my purchase," Feofan reminded him, in the same courteous tone, which drew an agreeing nod from the other man.
Dottore seemed to think it over. Thought about what to answer, as if two days hadn't been enough to foresee this whole exchange from start to finish. That irritated Feofan somewhat, though he carefully hid it behind a mask of helpless formality.
"You have a certain charm to you, Feofan," Dottore answered after a brief pause, smiling. That answer didn't strike the man as satisfactory. "As well as an obvious talent. Though, looking at your list of accomplishments, one might say you didn't manage it very professionally," the doctor smirked, which only stirred greater irritation in his captive.
"Hunger teaches you to count other people's pockets fast," he said at last, "even when you've got none of your own left."
"Precisely," Dottore confirmed, with an almost satisfied look. "And that's a far rarer and more valuable skill than sturdy arms for carrying crates. I needed five people to test a few interesting hypotheses" — Feofan felt uneasy at the toothy smile that accompanied this phrase — "but you don't suit them. Oh, no, a different task awaits you. I'll give you the chance to resume working, under my leadership," he turned away, with the air of a man who had already decided everything himself.
"So you're offering me a job," Feofan clarified, still not quite believing the conversation was headed in this direction — more from the fever running through his whole body and the ache in his chest than from any doubt in his own worth.
"I'm offering you an opportunity," Dottore corrected. "The Fatui are growing faster than the bureaucracy can keep up with, and I, besides running my experiments, also have to make sure my laboratory's resources aren't pilfered by the quartermasters faster than I can spend them on something useful. I need a man capable of counting quickly, lying convincingly, and feeling no pangs of conscience over either. You give the impression of a man who's quite in order on both counts."
"And if I refuse?" Feofan asked, though his voice made clear the question was asked more out of principle than any real intention to refuse.
"Then you'll become the sixth," Dottore shrugged, "which, given the alternative of the port and the snow, is still a far better position than the one I found you in. But I don't think you'll refuse. There's too much unsatisfied anger at the world in your eyes, Feofan, for you to choose backbreaking labor over the chance to one day prove to it that it miscalculated."
Feofan looked at his hands — no longer as frostbitten as they'd been two days ago — and thought the irony was almost funny: the world that had judged him worthless had, in the end, brought him to the one person for whom his worthlessness turned out valuable enough to offer him something more than mere survival.
He opened his mouth to answer — his tongue had already shaped the words of agreement, which Feofan meant to wrap in feigned nonchalance, as though he were agreeing out of magnanimity rather than desperation — but instead of a voice, his throat produced a short, dry rasp, as if something inside him had finally given way under its own weight, having pretended to be whole for far too long.
The body doesn't ask permission. It keeps its accounts in silence — hunger, cold, sleeplessness, fear — and then presents them all at once, without warning, without courtesy, without any right of postponement. The cough hit him like a shot fired point-blank: once, dully, as if testing its own voice, then again, and again, with no pauses now, doubling him over, wringing out his ribcage from the inside until it felt like just a little more and his ribs simply wouldn't hold their shape. Feofan clutched the edge of the blanket with both hands, his knuckles white, his lungs burning with that particular, familiar fury he'd long since stopped attributing to plain cold.
When he finally pulled his palm away from his mouth, a stain darkened on it — not the kind he'd grown used to over the past weeks, but something far more generous, far more telling.
Dottore stayed silent exactly as long as it took to watch the fit through to its end — he didn't rush over, didn't fuss, only tilted his head slightly to one side, with the exact expression of someone examining an unexpectedly interesting page in an otherwise dull book.
"Well, would you look at that," he said at last, with no sympathy whatsoever in his voice, but with unmistakable professional satisfaction, betrayed by the predatory smile of interest on his face. "And here I thought you were embellishing your modest biography for pity's sake. Turns out not. Come along. Since you've decided to paint my sheets in artistic crimson right in the middle of a business conversation, it would be a crime not to take advantage of it."
He caught Feofan by the forearm — not roughly, but leaving no room for refusal either — and dragged him, still wheezing, in nothing but a shirt and no shoes, down a corridor where the drumming of rain outside the windows suddenly seemed far less significant than the pounding of his own heart in his ears. It only dawned on the man in passing that racing through enormous corridors decorated with state ornaments without any trousers on was the height of disrespect, but judging by the fact that no one so much as glanced at the two men passing by one after another, this wasn't such a rare practice after all.
He never got a proper look at the enormous medical office he was hauled into, before the doctor quite literally flung him onto the operating table like some gravely ill patient.
"Open your mouth," Dottore ordered, pressing a handkerchief into his hands, "and breathe through it while I listen to what's been going on in your chest for, I'd guess, the past several months."
Feofan didn't even have time to think — he simply did as he was told, and given how fast everything was spinning for a disoriented, sick man, he didn't even register any irritation at these high-handed commands.
The cold metal bell of the instrument settled against his skin, and Dottore went still, eyes closed — calculating something that, judging by his expression, was considerably more complex than a patient's simple breathing.
"Rales in the upper lobe of the right lung," he said at last, addressing not so much Feofan as the notebook that had immediately materialized from his inner pocket. "Given the conditions at the port, the duration of malnutrition, and that characteristic cough you've, I imagine, been blaming on the cold right up until now — I'd say tuberculosis, developed but not yet at its most advanced stage. The hemoptysis you just so vividly demonstrated only confirms it, in any case."
"Wonderful," Feofan rasped, wiping his mouth with the handkerchief, with what bitter sarcasm he still had strength for. "I've managed to interest the Second Harbinger of the Fatui before I've even agreed to the job, and all it took was catching tuberculosis."
"Could've been worse," Dottore answered indifferently. He clearly wasn't planning to dwell on that point alone, as though he'd already spotted, back at their first meeting, a couple of traits in the sick man that interested him and that he could finally examine properly. Dottore set the instrument aside and, without changing his tone, held up a thin metal plate in front of Feofan's face, bearing rows of symbols shrinking in size. "Read the bottom line."
Feofan squinted. The line blurred into a grey smudge, as did everything beyond arm's length — a habit he'd long since chalked up to exhaustion and lack of sleep, rather than to anything deserving its own diagnosis.
"I can't," he admitted, seeing no point in lying to a man who clearly already knew the answer before he'd asked the question.
"Of course you can't," Dottore remarked, with an almost satisfied air, making another note. "You're nearsighted, Fenya" — Feofan winced but didn't comment on the nickname — "quite markedly, and, from the looks of it, long uncorrected — unsurprising for a man who only ever had the choice between food and eyeglasses. I'll put it in the file. You'll need lenses, if you want your future usefulness not to be confined to arm's length — and given your line of work, I suspect you'll have to read a good deal more fine print than you'd like."
He fell briefly silent, studying Feofan with the same attention he'd given the coughing fit earlier — only now there was something in that gaze beyond pure clinical curiosity.
"I'll draw up a new medical file for you," he said, stepping sharply away from the man, so that the bright light that had until then been hidden behind the doctor's back struck Feofan straight in the eyes. "And I'll write you a couple of interesting recommendations. Have you ever taken antidepressants before?" he asked, and Feofan (for what felt like the hundredth time!) was thrown off by the bluntness of the question: this man clearly had no brakes and no notion of etiquette whatsoever. "I know you haven't. You'll take one pill every morning. Understood?"
"I understand, but... you've reached that conclusion after a single conversation with me?" — now he made no effort to hide his mild irritation, knitting his thick brows together.
"And glasses. I'll prescribe you glasses," he began writing something on a sheet of paper with even greater absorption. "Though I'd advise you to put on some trousers. Then again, I suppose it's not my place to interfere with other people's design choices," he smirked. Feofan felt his ears warm with dismay.
Outside the laboratory windows the rain still drummed on, dully, indifferent to everything happening inside — just as indifferent as the market had been, and the warehouse, and the whole rest of the world, which saw no need to notice whether one particular man, with rotting lungs and blind eyes, was still alive. Only now, sitting in this unfamiliar, sterile white chair, with an unfamiliar vial in his cold fingers, did Feofan think, for the first time in a long while, that the world might have to start noticing after all.