There's a smell before thought, before fear, before pain.
Metallic. Wet. Too sweet.
It fills the air until it becomes the air, and I breathe it because I don't know how not to. The first thing inside me isn't a memory or a word, it's that iron taste on my tongue, thick enough to make my stomach complain, thin enough to slip into my lungs without asking.
I try to open my eyes. Light hurts. Not bright, just wrong. It presses against my skull and makes a noise out of the color. I close them again, breathe out slowly, and feel grit under my cheek. My palm slides along the floor. Fine sanded dust. Tiny bites of glass or plaster.
Cold.
I try again.
This time the ceiling resolves into a mosaic of hairline cracks and soft mold, the off-white gone the color of old teeth. Something drips somewhere far away. The drip doesn't reach this room.
"I don't know where I am. I don't know who I am."
The knowledge should arrive like panic, but it comes like weather: a change in the pressure, a cool shift in my chest. My heart ticks along, a steady metronome that doesn't match the situation.
My head is heavy, the way it is after you fall asleep with your face too close to a book. I push up slowly. The floor wobbles. The room thins and thickens at the edges, then holds.
BODIES.
I don't count them right away. My mind refuses to put a number on it, the way you refuse to think the last sentences of bad news. One near the wall: seated, but wrong, chin tilted too far back, mouth parted in an unfinished word. One facedown beside a toppled chair, arms swallowed under the torso. Two others collapsed in a corner like dropped laundry that bled.
My throat tightens, not from grief something simpler. Thirst. The air is dry despite the smell. My tongue feels like paper.
I sit. Try my voice. Nothing comes out the first time. The second time, there's a rasp.
"Hello?"
It sinks into the room and disappears. No answer. No echo. The noise feels embarrassing and curls back into my chest.
I look down at myself. Dark jeans, scuffed boots, black shirt—clothes that belong to a life with places to go and a reason to be late. They fit. They don't feel like mine.
"How do I know that? I don't. I just do."
On the floor by my knee: paper, half stuck to the grit. I peel it up carefully. Blood has drowned most of the ink into a rusty blur, but one word stands there, untouched, black and sharp as a cut: Martyna.
The sound it makes in my head is clearer than the room. It draws the space into a smaller box and pulls me toward it. I say it, because the room isn't giving me any other language.
"Martyna." My voice is a stranger trying my mouth. The name sits there, not soft, not hard present. Wrong and right at once. I press it again, quieter. "Martyna."
"Is that me?" The question opens to a trapdoor.
Beneath it there's nothing. Not darkness, just absence. A blank sheet where you can hear the scratch of the pencil but see no line. I wait for a memory to lift out of the flatness: a face, a place, a sound. The floor doesn't give anything back.
I fold the paper and put it in my pocket because not having it feels worse than having it. The pocket welcomes it like it was always meant to hold something. The thought makes me dull and sad in a way I can't name.
The seated body by the wall watches the ceiling with glass eyes. I crawl closer on my knees, the floor cool against bone. His shirt is stiff where it's dark. He looks surprised, not afraid. I don't want to touch him; I do anyway. Fingers to the neck, the thing you're supposed to do. His skin is the temperature of the room. He doesn't mind.
I should look away.
But I don't. Instead, I stare at the small things: the nick on his earlobe, the faint dent in the cartilage where a ring used to live, the grain of dust stuck in one eyelash. I tell myself to remember these details as if remembering them will explain the rest.
On the floor near the toppled chair sits a gun.
I see it the way you see a word in a different language and know what it means before you know why. I reached for it and stopped halfway, wristed shaking. I don't want to pick it up; I am afraid that I will do. The fear is fresh; the want is old.
I fold my hand around it. Heat travels from my palm to the metal and back. It's not heavy; it's correct, and that correctness makes my chest tighten. My thumb drifts to a switch at the slide without asking me first. I move it back deliberately, like teaching a muscle to be honest. My stomach gives a small, mean twist. I put the gun back down and wipe my hand on my thigh even though it left nothing there.
A drip. Another drip. Not water thicker. Somewhere out of the room. The doorway yawns like a throat an inch from swallowing.
I stand too fast. The world edges blur and then return with a soft click. My knees hum. I step around the facedown body. I don't trip. My feet know where to go without telling me they do.
In the doorway, the hallway is slender and tired. A single light at the end has decided to be unreliable and buzzes its threats into the silence. The wallpaper used to be cream; now it's a story of hands and stains and shoulder scrapes. The air is a little cooler. It smells like old metal and less like blood.
Halfway down lies a woman on her side, her jacket torn open like a mouth. Blonde hair has matted itself to cheek and mouth. Her hands are fists. Something glints between her fingers. I kneel, and the bones in my knees speak to the floor. I pry my fingers open gently. They argue but not fiercely. Inside is a thin silver chain looped through a small metal tag, the kind you slip into a bootlace or keep flat against the skin to remember who you are.
There's no number. There's just the same word: Martyna.
It's too much like a coincidence, and coincidence is a lazy explanation. I slide it into my other pocket, away from the paper, as if putting them together will start a fire.
The buzzing light at the end of the hall hiccups and throws the corridor into stuttered frames. In between flashes, things look wrong, then okay, then wrong again. I touch the wall with my glove and feel the damp nip of a leak behind plaster. I keep walking.
A door ahead is half off its hinges. Someone broke it carefully: the wood splinters clean, like teeth.
Beyond it, the room has tile. White and cracked, spiderwebbed with hairline fractures dark with grime. Something burned here. The air has the bitter aftertaste of scorched fabric. Two more bodies: one propped badly against a counter, head back, mouth open; one reaching for a bare piece of wall as if the wall was a ladder to a place with air.
On the wall, written with a hand that cared more about pressure than penmanship: MARTYNA.
This time the letters drag like weight. I reached up and lay a finger on the M. The black flakes are like a scab. It's dry. The message wasn't for the moment, it's for whoever stands where I stand. It's for me, or it's for someone who decides to be me when they read it.
Heat crawls behind my eyes and then recedes, leaving iced glass. I blink and see nothing else.
Something comes not as a picture but as an echo: the hard twitch of a trigger on the pad of a finger; the animal cough of a suppressed shot; the heat-pollen of smoke in the back of a throat; a voice I think is mine, low and clean around the words: This is what happens.
I grip the counter and wait for the sound to stop being inside me. When it does, I'm still holding on. I let go.
The room with tile has a door of its own. The handle is tacky with something I don't name. Beyond it is a shorter hall, bare concrete, a seam of damp running along the floor where the wall doesn't exactly meet. The hum I thought was in my head is under the floor—machinery, distant and indifferent, spinning itself into usefulness far below.
A man lies facedown just before the next door. My boot sole slides an inch before catching; the blood has skinned over, slick with a stubborn surface. I stare at the print my heel almost leaves and then keep moving.
There's a padlock on the last door. Open. It hangs like a question that already knows the answer. I push the door.
Inside there's almost nothing. The air is colder on purpose. A chair sits in the center of the floor as if it grew there. The floor around it is too clean. Clean is not the same thing as safe, but sometimes it pretends.
On the far wall: a piece of paper pinned with a single silver tack. White. Unbloodied. Crisp. Careful.
MARTYNA.
Beneath it a date that means nothing to me. It feels like it should. I touch the number, and the paper bites my fingertip the way winter air does.
The memory doesn't arrive like a scene or a person. It arrives like a temperature change. The body falling forward this time belongs to no one and everyone. The breath that cuts off is not mine and is. The sentence that follows is a rhythm I know with the part of my brain that knows how to walk in the dark without hitting furniture.
I say nothing aloud.
I take the paper. I fold it. I put it with the first paper, not with the tag. The separation matters and I don't know why.
As I leave that room, I notice the absence more than the presence: no flies; no rot; no insect hum; no betrayal of time. These bodies haven't been here long. The clock is ticking but it isn't a clock I can see.
I go back to the way I came, and the rooms are the same rooms but smaller. The air is heavier, which means I am breathing differently, or I am thinking differently or both. My hands shake now, and the shake is honest; they have remembered that bodies aren't furniture. When I reach the first room, I make myself look at each face. I tell myself to catalogue. It feels like studying without a test.
At the door outside, I pause. The handle is clean and cold, a colder circle on a cool hand. I push.
Night isn't bright, but it's relief. The air is wet the way a cloth is damp before it becomes soaked. The street outside is the color of graphite under a thin sheet of water. A streetlamp across the way blinks its eyelids once, twice, and then decides to stay awake. There's no traffic. Somewhere a long way off a siren unspools, then thinks better of it and winds itself back up.
I step onto the slick, cracked pavement and tilt my head back. The sky is anonymous. The buildings don't know me, and I don't know them. A wind wakes, asks a question, and dies. I try to be a person in this weather. I can't find the edges of one yet.
The name floats up again. Not the way a memory floats, the way a buoy does when you test how deep the water is.
"Martyna. Maybe it came with me. Maybe I brought it. Maybe it is the only thing that agreed to stay when everything else left. Is it mine? If I say yes now, I am choosing more than one word. I am choosing the weight of everything that leads to a room where bodies don't talk anymore and a wall that learned to spell with someone else's blood. If I say no, then I am no one, and no one can't move. No one freezes in doorways and asks the night to introduce itself."
I put my hand in my pocket and close my fingers around the first folded paper. The edges dig. The press of it is proof. I take the tag in my other hand. The metal is colder than the air.
"Martyna," I try again, this time speaking to the street, to the moisture, to the breath that fogs and then disappears. The syllables land. They don't bounce. They don't echo. They stand there and look at me.
Maybe it's mine for now.
I tuck the tag under my shirt and the metal kisses bone. It's both an answer and a question. I step away from the doorway because the doorway is a place for people waiting to be chosen. I don't want to be chosen. I want to choose.
I start walking.
I don't know which direction is out or in or toward. The city makes a suggestion with a slope in the street, and I accept it. Water collects along a shallow gutter and races past as if it knows where it's going. I follow because not following is staying still and staying still is what the bodies do.
The sound of my footsteps belongs to someone else for a while. Then they begin to belong to me. The boots are too quiet, and the quiet makes me think of a place before this and after this and outside this where quiet is a tool. I shook my head to let the idea fall out. It stays.