The night had softened into a pale pre-dawn glow, the kind that barely kissed the tops of buildings and dipped everything else in cool grey. The sidewalks of Warsaw were mostly empty, damp with dew, the shuttered shops and cafés asleep behind drawn gates. Street lamps flickered as if uncertain whether to stay lit or surrender to the coming day.

  Kazou walked steadily, his coat draped over Hannah’s shoulders. She clung to his side, one hand wrapped tightly around his fingers, the other pressed against her bruised ribs beneath the fabric.

  Her feet were bare — he hadn’t had time to grab shoes for her.

  They passed a bakery, the scent of rising dough wafting faintly through the small vent window. A neon sign buzzed overhead. Then came a pawn shop, a shuttered newsstand, a convenience store already lit inside with a tired old clerk stocking shelves.

  Kazou glanced down at her.

  She wasn’t crying anymore. But her face was pale, her mouth a thin line of effort. The bruises on her stomach hadn’t looked fresh. Some were older. Some were new.

  “You’re doing okay?” he asked gently.

  Hannah nodded.

  But after a moment, she spoke — her voice small.

  “It hurts.”

  Kazou stopped walking.

  He crouched beside her and met her eyes, the dim orange streetlight pooling in the space between them.

  “I know,” he said. “I saw.”

  Hannah looked down at her feet. “Sometimes I think it’s my fault. That I was too slow or not good enough. So she hit me. And I thought… maybe if I just worked harder—”

  “No,” Kazou interrupted, firm but soft. “It’s never your fault. Do you understand?”

  Her lip trembled. She nodded. But he could tell the belief hadn't fully reached her yet. It would take time.

  She looked up at him, her voice shaking. “Will they take me back?”

  Kazou stood and gently placed a hand on her back.

  “No,” he said. “They won’t. I’ll make sure of that.”

  They continued walking in silence, their shadows cast long and strange on the sidewalk.

  A few blocks later, Kazou slowed in front of a narrow alley and looked at his reflection in a shop window. His hood was still up. His glasses hung from the collar of his shirt. His hair had grown just past his ears now, no longer sharp and clean like in the photo on the newspapers.

  He didn’t recognize himself.

  Hannah tugged on his sleeve. “Are you okay?”

  Kazou gave her a tired smile. “I was just thinking how strange life is.”

  She tilted her head. “You talk weird sometimes.”

  He laughed quietly. “I suppose I do.”

  “Are you a doctor?” she asked suddenly.

  Kazou looked down at her, surprised.

  “Why?”

  “You sound like one. You act like one,” she said simply.

  "I told you, I was a scientist." He smiled.

  “Did you save people?”

  He didn’t answer right away. “I tried.”

  She seemed to think about this.

  Then, softly, “You saved me.”

  Kazou looked away, swallowing the knot in his throat. He placed a hand on her head and gently ruffled her hair.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  “A little,” she admitted.

  He looked down the street. The sun was just beginning to rise — faint streaks of gold and pink smearing across the sky like watercolors. The city was waking up.

  But Kazou’s concern wasn’t food anymore.

  Her ribs. The bruises. The way she winced when walking.

  He turned abruptly and flagged a taxi across the street.

  The driver slowed. Kazou opened the door and helped Hannah inside.

  “Szpital dzieci?cy, prosz?,” Kazou said, his accent a bit clumsy. “Children’s hospital.”

  The driver nodded and pulled into the street.

  Inside the cab, Hannah leaned against Kazou’s side. Her body, small and tired, rested easily against him. The streetlights passed over their faces like ghosts. Neither of them spoke. But it was the kind of silence that wrapped around them like a blanket, not a void.

  Kazou looked out the window, jaw tight.

  For a moment, just a moment, he let himself forget the demon named Casimir. The shadow of war. The papers branding him as a killer.

  He had one purpose now.

  To protect the girl beside him.

  Just like once, long ago, he’d tried to protect other children. Experiment Four... One he couldn’t save.

  He closed his eyes.

  This time would be different.

  ***

  The children’s hospital was quiet in the early hours. A nurse with soft eyes took Hannah gently from Kazou’s arms, her expression changing subtly as she lifted the hem of the girl’s shirt and saw the bruises. She didn’t ask many questions — just gave Kazou a tight, meaningful nod and ushered Hannah away down a long hallway, promising she’d be safe.

  Kazou remained in the waiting room.

  The chairs were hard. The lights gave everything a washed-out color. A vending machine hummed in the corner. Plastic plants lined the windowsill. From behind a wall, the low beep of heart monitors echoed.

  Kazou sat alone, his coat bunched beside him, his duffel bag at his feet. He stared at his hands.

  They were trembling.

  Not from fear. Or even adrenaline.

  But from the weight of too many decisions.

  Hannah’s bruised ribs haunted him.

  The way she hadn’t flinched when Beata struck her — that haunted him more.

  Kazou folded his hands together and pressed them to his lips.

  What would he do now?

  He’d escaped the castle. Evaded the police — for now. The map was still folded in his coat pocket. The name Casimir Bielska still burned behind his eyes like an afterimage. But for the first time in days — maybe weeks — the next step wasn’t clear.

  He didn’t want to leave Hannah.

  Not after seeing her like that. Not after the way she looked at him in the taxi, as if he were the only adult in the world who’d ever actually listened.

  The receptionist came over quietly, tapping a clipboard against her leg. She was middle-aged, dirty blonde, with kind lines on her face. She crouched a little to speak gently.

  “Mr…?”

  Kazou hesitated. “K-Kaz… Kazimierz,” he said. A half-lie. Close enough.

  She nodded, not commenting on his stammer. “They’re running a few scans. But your daughter is stable.”

  He blinked. “She’s not my—”

  But the woman smiled kindly. “Sometimes family isn’t just blood,” she said and walked away.

  Kazou looked down at the floor. His reflection stared back from the tile: tired eyes, mussed hair. He wore a baggy white shirt with a baggy unbuttoned blue denim chorecoat jacket over it. His extra coat was beside him, rolled up.

  He reached for the folded map in his rolled-up coat and slowly opened it.

  Somewhere in Poland… Casimir was still watching.

  Kazou could feel it in his bones.

  A faint shuffle of slippers echoed from the hallway. He looked up sharply.

  Hannah was there.

  Her face was paler now, but her hair had been brushed back, and she wore a fresh shirt. An oversized hospital hoodie. There was a bandage on her temple and a dull IV line in her arm. But she was smiling.

  Kazou stood slowly.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  She walked over and quietly reached for his hand.

  He took it.

  The receptionist watched them from the desk, then turned back to her papers, saying nothing.

  “Can we go?” Hannah asked.

  Kazou raised his eyebrows. “You… want to leave?”

  “I don’t like hospitals,” she whispered. “They keep saying they’ll find a guardian, but… I don’t want to go back to some other place. Not again.”

  Kazou’s chest tightened.

  He looked down at her, this small, hurt girl with bright, youthful eyes that hadn’t dimmed yet. Despite everything.

  “You know what I am, don’t you?” he said softly. “They’re looking for me. If you stay with me, it’s not safe.”

  “You saved me,” she said, not missing a beat.

  “And I might not be able to do it again.”

  Hannah shrugged. “I trust you. Plus, if someone is looking for you, they have to get through me first!"

  Kazou closed his eyes for a long moment. The decision, in the end, wasn’t a decision at all. It was already made.

  "Uh! Excuse me! She has to stay the night!" The nurse exclaimed, rushing over.

  ***

  The pediatric room was small but warm. A single hospital bed stood beneath the window, framed by soft pink curtains with faded cartoon ducks along the hem. A nightlight glowed gently in the corner. The IV stand beeped now and then, the only rhythm to mark the hours passing.

  Hannah lay curled up in the bed, her face half-lit by the orange glow of the hallway light outside. She had refused stronger painkillers, even though the nurses had offered. Said they made her feel weird. Instead, she clutched the stuffed bear one of them had given her and stared at the ceiling tiles in silence.

  Kazou sat on the pull-out couch beside her bed, still in the same shirt, sleeves rolled up, his glasses resting on the edge of the blanket he had pulled around his legs.

  He was tired — not just physically, but bone-deep. The kind of tired that years of science and clean laboratories could never prepare him for. His back ached from days of running, and his mind wouldn’t stop chewing on the same name:

  Casimir.

  He closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Dr. Kuroda?”

  Hannah’s voice was soft. She hadn’t called him that before—not out loud. Not since the receptionist had assumed they were family.

  Kazou opened his eyes and turned to her.

  “Yeah?”

  She turned on her side, clutching the bear closer. “Why are you still here?”

  He blinked. “I told you. I’m not leaving you alone.”

  She was quiet for a second. Then:

  “You don’t have to.”

  Kazou smiled faintly. “Yeah, I do.”

  Hannah looked down at the bear. “Are you scared?”

  He tilted his head. “Of what?”

  “Of what happens next.”

  The question hung in the air between them like a breath not yet released.

  Kazou took a while to answer.

  “Every day,” he said. “But not of staying. I’m scared of not doing the right thing.”

  She nodded, sleepy but awake.

  Then she reached out her hand across the gap between the bed and the couch, fingers extended.

  Kazou looked at it.

  And gently, wordlessly, he took it.

  Her fingers were small in his palm. Warm. Trusting. Too trusting, maybe. But there was no fear in them. No hesitation.

  “I’m glad you were there,” she said softly, closing her eyes.

  He didn’t know what to say to that.

  So he just stayed.

  The hallway light dimmed as the nurses passed for their last check. Outside the window, the sounds of Warsaw slowed to a lull — no trams, no horns, just the steady breath of a sleeping city.

  Hannah let go of his hand eventually, her breathing softening, deepening into sleep.

  Kazou remained where he was. Watching over her like a silent guardian.

  He didn’t feel like a scientist anymore.

  He didn’t feel like a man on the run.

  He felt something closer to human. Not whole. But not hollow either.

  Somewhere out there, Casimir was preparing for something unspeakable. The end. The unraveling of whatever fabric kept their world sane.

  But tonight… in this room, he didn’t need to chase it.

  He just needed to stay.

  The night deepened. The room dimmed.

  Kazou leaned back slowly on the couch, one arm behind his head, the other resting on the edge of the blanket, within reach of the small girl in the bed beside him.

  His eyes closed, finally.

  And for a few fragile hours, there was peace.

  ***

  They exited through the side doors, stepping out into the pale morning sun. The air was crisp. The city buzzed faintly now — trams clattering, pigeons flapping overhead, morning workers pacing with paper cups.

  Kazou held Hannah’s hand as they walked down the quiet street.

  She asked softly, “Where are we going now?”

  Kazou didn’t answer at first. He looked up at the sky — Warsaw’s old buildings rising around them like concrete sentinels. Somewhere among them, Casimir was waiting. The demon hadn’t left Poland. Not yet.

  “To find someone,” he said at last. “A man who’s hiding in plain sight.”

  Hannah tilted her head. “Is he bad?”

  Kazou’s mouth twisted faintly. “The worst.”

  She nodded.

  “Then let’s go get him.”

  Kazou smiled — only a little — and squeezed her hand.

  They walked into the rising day together.

  Not fast. Not fearfully.

  But like people with a purpose.

  Warsaw opened up before them, not as a monument or mystery, but as something alive. The wind pushed through alleyways. Cars rushed by. A woman on a balcony poured water into flower boxes. A dog barked behind a fence and fell silent again.

  Kazou and Hannah walked along the sidewalk near Plac Unii Lubelskiej, where the roads curled around modern office buildings, brushing up against pre-war architecture. The clash of eras mirrored the feeling in Kazou’s chest, the past and present clashing, indistinct, unresolved.

  Kazou adjusted his coat, glanced around. He’d chosen this route for a reason. Close enough to the city center, but not obvious. Public enough to feel safe, but still unpredictable. Every face he passed — a possible informant. A curious eye. A uniform just out of sight.

  Hannah held his hand tight, her grip small but firm. She looked up at the passing faces, reading them like stories. Curious, alert. But not afraid.

  She was bruised, still healing, but already stronger.

  Kazou couldn't help but wonder what kind of girl she might've been — if she'd had a normal childhood. If there were no demons. No basements. No Casimir.

  But they weren’t in that world.

  They turned onto a smaller street, a quiet place lined with trees beginning to green for the season. There, Kazou stopped outside a gray, five-story apartment building with a rust-streaked buzzer and metal doors that hadn’t been painted since the Soviet era.

  Hannah looked up at it. “Does he live here?”

  Kazou shook his head, then suddenly, he saw something. A nameplate.Tomasz Kwiatkowski. He had seen that name in Dr. Fujino's office years ago.

  “No,” Kazou said. “But someone who might know where he is does.”

  Kazou didn’t know the man. Not personally. Not through any official connection. But he had a name — Tomasz Kwiatkowski — found scrawled on a note buried deep in Ten's drawings at the lab, Kazou hadn't thought anything of it until now. What a coincidence...

  But that name had stuck with him.

  And now, standing outside the peeling five-story apartment block, the address from the note clutched in his hand, Kazou couldn’t shake the feeling that it was pointing him toward something.

  He adjusted his hood, pressing the corners tighter around his face. Hannah stood beside him, arms tucked into her jacket sleeves, eyes scanning the windows overhead. Neither of them spoke.

  The stairwell inside was dim and narrow. Concrete walls, ancient paint peeling in curling strips. The type of place that hadn’t been renovated since before the Wall fell. They climbed slowly, every step creaking under their weight. As they reached the top floor, Kazou paused outside apartment 5C, heart thudding.

  He knocked once.

  No answer.

  Then twice, slower.

  The door opened barely an inch, and a chain caught it mid-swing. A single bloodshot eye stared out from the gap.

  “Yes?”

  Kazou kept his voice steady. “I’m looking for someone. I found your name in an old file. I think you used to know someone named Casimir Bielska."

  A pause.

  “I don’t know you,” the man replied gruffly.

  “Do you know someone named Casimir Bielska?”

  The door didn’t open further. But the silence changed.

  Stillness, then.

  The man’s voice, quieter now: “You should leave.”

  "Well, I-" Kazou hesitated. "I think he’s planning something.”

  A longer silence.

  Kazou felt Hannah’s fingers wrap tightly around his.

  Then the door unlatched. Slowly. Reluctantly.

  The man stood in the shadows of the apartment — thin, with unkempt hair and a sweater that looked slept-in. His eyes darted between Kazou and the girl. He looked to be in his 80s.

  “You brought a child?”

  Kazou didn’t reply.

  “Come in,” the man muttered, then turned and walked inside without waiting for confirmation.

  They entered. The apartment was musty and cluttered — stacks of yellowed papers and floppy disks, surveillance photos pinned to corkboards, VHS tapes labeled in Sharpie. An old Soviet radio crackled faintly in the corner.

  Kwiatkowski gestured to the sagging couch. “Sit.”

  Kazou sat. Hannah sat beside him, quiet.

  “I don’t know where he is,” the man said before Kazou could speak. “I haven’t seen him in 50 years. And I never used his real name. That wasn’t allowed. You see, we were both soldiers in the war. 1940s. He was young, a couple of years younger than me."

  Kazou leaned forward. “So you did know him.”

  “Not directly. I wasn't close with him. He was just part of the Polish division in the war. I met him, though, once. He introduced himself as Casimir Bielska. But told me to call him 'Dziesi??'. Ten in Polish. I never asked why or what that number meant to him. He was a brave soldier, though.”

  Kazou's eyes widened at the name. His father had left behind the DNA and information for 'Experiment 0.1.0. ' Kazou had guessed it was because Ten was the tenth experiment, but could his father have known something deeper?

  Kwiatkowski reached for a file on the shelf and tossed it onto the coffee table. Inside were grainy photographs from the war. Black-and-white shots of Polish resistance soldiers, war-torn Europe, the hollow eyes of children peering out from ruins. Dust floated like ash in the shaft of sunlight coming through the window.

  Kazou sat stiffly on the worn couch. Hannah sat beside him cross-legged, a blanket over her shoulders, still watching everything.

  Kazou sat with his hands folded tightly in his lap, a stack of yellowed black-and-white photographs laid out on the table in front of him.

  Most of the photos were war shots — soldiers in snow-covered trenches, makeshift hospitals in barns, faces gaunt with frost and hunger. Others were group photos of young men in uniform, blurred and smudged by time.

  Tomasz stood behind the table, carefully laying another photo on the worn surface. His hand trembled, not from age, but memory.

  “That one’s from '44,” he said. “Right before the Vistula offensive. We thought Warsaw would fall before we even got there.”

  Kazou leaned forward, eyes scanning the photo. Then he spotted it — a face near the edge. Faint. Young. Tired eyes under a soldier’s cap.

  “Is that him?” Kazou asked quietly.

  Tomasz nodded. “Casimir Bielska. The boy didn’t even have a proper uniform.”

  Kazou blinked. “What happened to him?”

  Tomasz’s eyes flicked to him. He slowly sat down in the creaking chair across the table, the shadows of the late afternoon stretching across the walls.

  “He didn’t last long,” Tomasz said. “Frostbite got one of his feet. We buried him in a ditch outside Baranów. Just before the snow started again. Legends surfaced about him dying alone... In the mountains... But no.”

  Kazou absorbed the words in silence. But Tomasz wasn’t finished.

  “I was the last one who remembered his name. Everyone else who knew him… died or forgot. It sat on my conscience for years. After the war, I tried to find his mother.”

  Kazou’s heart froze in his chest.

  “She was already spiraling by then,” Tomasz continued. “Neighbors said she wandered the fields at night, talking to someone who wasn’t there. They said she’d forgotten everything. Even her own son’s name. War does that to some people.”

  He looked down at his own hands, and then at the grain of the wooden table.

  “I was going to bring it back to her. His name. His face. Something to hold on to. But before I could reach her…” He hesitated.

  Kazou whispered, “What happened?”

  Tomasz glanced up, his face hollow. “She ended her life.”

  A long silence settled between them.

  Kazou stared down at the photo again. At the barely visible boy on the edge. A soldier. Forgotten. Buried in a ditch. No grave. No name.

  Only this moment. Only this faint story is left behind.

  Kazou stood slowly. The name was repeating in his head like a dull, tolling bell.

  The Forgotten Soldier had died, but Kazou had resurrected him as the devil...

  Kazou walked and stood still at the door.

  Hannah had already stepped out into the cold stairwell, her fingers tucked into her coat sleeves. But Kazou lingered — something gnawed at him, pulling like a loose thread in his thoughts.

  He turned back to Tomasz, whose hand hovered over a box of old clippings, his face half-lit in the dull afternoon light.

  “Wait,” Kazou said softly. “The boy… Casimir. What was his mother’s name?”

  Tomasz looked up. His brow furrowed.

  “The mother?”

  Kazou nodded once, slowly. His throat was dry.

  Tomasz exhaled, almost as if he hadn’t said the name aloud in decades. “Sasha Bielska,” he replied. "A Beautiful woman she was."

  Kazou didn’t react right away.

  But inside, something shattered.

  He stepped back into the hall, the photo of Casimir still burning in his pocket like a brand.

  “Sasha…” he whispered under his breath.

  Behind him, Tomasz turned off the lights, then faced Kazou once more. "Go to the Marriott at the city center. Behind it, Mr. Nowak, Casimir's disciple, you can learn a lot from him. But be careful. They don't like your kind there. Then, go to Wroclaw."

  Kazou looked down the stairwell, where Hannah waited patiently.

  "Right..." Kazou replied.

  But his mind had already left the building.

  Sasha.

  Natalie.

  His heartbeat stuttered.

  No…

  Couldn’t be.

  But it was.

  The name wasn’t a coincidence.

  Not anymore.

  Could that little girl all those years ago, Experiment Nine, the clone of a mother... Is Natalie and her... The same person?