"Natalie..."

  Natalie’s name left his lips, and something in her softened, as if the sound of it slid like a key into a lock.

  For a second, her features relaxed; the taut line at her mouth uncurled, but she didn’t answer with words. She watched the water, and the night kept moving them away from the burned city.

  Then she spoke in a smaller, younger tone as if it had to climb up through layers of someone else first.

  “Hi, Dr. Kazou Kuroda… or should I say, Father,” she said, and the syllables landed between them with an impossible casualness. “It’s me. Experiment 0.0.9. One of your clone children.”

  The ferry engine receded. The sentence thudded in him like a misfired pulse. 0.0.9. The designation felt wrong in that quiet moment.

  He remembered. He had to remember: Nine. The child who had been close to Ten, to Casimir, the one who’d disappeared from the lab, and was never found. How — why — Natalie?

  Her mouth trembled; she let out a hollow laugh that meant nothing. “I didn’t… I didn’t understand for a long time. Little pieces, sometimes. Dreams. Then the pieces started fitting. Faces. Voices. The lab. Dr. Fujino… the night.”

  Kazou drew in a breath, and the memory came in a rush, not cleanly but in ragged shivers, like scratches on an old tape.

  —Detective Lisa’s voice, clipped and official: Dr. Sota Fujino was murdered at your lab at approximately 1:37 a.m. A boy was found in critical condition; a seven-year-old girl was missing. Gunshot wounds. No weapon located.

  The ferry rocked, and Kazou felt the past as a pressure in his chest — the smell of the lab. It felt so long ago... The Kazou Kuroda back then was such a different man.

  Natalie’s voice came back, rawer. “Remember when we met in that taxi and when they took us to the castle? It was an invitation in a letter for me to visit. The handwriting. Ten… Casimir wrote to me. And then things started to slowly come back.

  Kazou’s fingers found Natalie’s hand without thinking. The contact was tentative, like a Father would. “Natalie,” he said. “Start where you remember.”

  She closed her eyes, and the ferry’s light cut across her lashes. “I woke up in a home,” she said. “A normal one. I was with the Chmiel family. They called me Natalie Chmiel. I grew up there, raised like a normal kid. But pieces would slip in — smells, flashes, Ten's voice. Then, months ago, it came back. The castle. The letters. I tracked the handwriting, and it led me to the castle and to Mr Nowak.” Her lips parted, and a sound escaped that could have been a laugh or a sob. “I thought I escaped it. But... Ten decided to come back as Casimir."

  Kazou remembered the investigation from years ago: reports from Dr Hanasaki and he rest of the clones.

  “What happened at the lab?” he asked. He did not want the answer, but he needed it.

  The flash arrived then — not a single vision but a sequence of images that hit Natalie like blows. She spoke them in fragments: she remembered, a body on the floor, the horrible metallic sweetness of blood. A gun. The sound of a shot was like a punctuation mark that erased everything after it.

  “Ten killed Dr. Fujino,” she said. The words were thin. “He found a gun in storage. He shot. I heard it. He… he said the demon came. The demon — the Polish soldier — came to visit. He said the world would end. He said he and I were going to see it happen.”

  Kazou closed his eyes. The image of Ten — the composed charisma, the cold, the uncanny stillness. The worst part was how convincingly Ten could make a child believe in a myth.

  Natalie’s hands clenched into the shape of a gun. "Good... Now point it at me..." her voice dropped to a whimper.

  "What?" Kazou muttered.

  ***

  "You heard me," Ten had said, his voice colder now, more insistent. "Point it at me. End it all. You can stop the demon Nine. The Mother wanted to see the end with her son. She wanted him to live. But what is the end? Death? The rip?”

  He pointed at his head, the gesture casual, as if it were nothing more than a game.

  Nine’s hands were shaking uncontrollably, her legs weak beneath her, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of him. This isn’t real. But it was. The gun was real. His voice was real. And then, slowly, she realized—he wasn’t playing. He wasn’t joking. He wanted her to do it. She was the one who had to pull the trigger. She glanced down at the gun in her hands, her fingers twitching, not sure if she could even hold it steady. Ten was watching her, his gaze unwavering.

  "Don’t be scared," he whispered. "Once the demon is killed, the soldier can see the end. Run for him. Run away from here. Take the gun, and run.”

  Nine felt a tear slip down her cheek. Her entire body trembled. She squeezed her eyes shut, the cold barrel of the gun still pressed to her hand.

  ***

  Natalie lifted her clenched hands higher, as if she were aiming.

  “Point it at me. End it all.” Natalie’s voice, in the memory, had been small and cracking. “He told me, "Good girl. Now pull the trigger." And so..."

  ***

  Trembling, Nine pointed the gun at Ten's head, the cold metal searing against her palm.

  “Good girl,” Ten whispered, his voice like a dark lullaby. “Now pull the trigger.”

  ***

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  “He made me point it at him,” she whispered. “He told me to kill the demon. He said the Mother wanted to see the end with her son. He said running was better than staying. He said Pull the trigger and run.”

  Kazou felt the deck tilt beneath him, as if he were suddenly on a ledge.

  Kazou felt guilty. Incredibly guilty... Here was a child who’d been made into an instrument... A girl who has seen way too much for her age, a girl who has to battle awful memories... And Casimir... a monster.

  She stopped..

  ***

  Nine couldn’t stop herself. With one final, gut-wrenching cry, her finger tightened on the trigger. Her eyes narrowed, losing their sparkly ocean blue.

  BAM!

  The sound of the shot was deafening.

  The echoes of the gunshot still ring in her ears.

  ***

  “And you pulled it?” Kazou asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “I did. Because I thought it would end the demon. Because I didn’t know what else to do. Because Ten’s presence was manipulating itself, he didn't need to say much to make me, and it was easier to obey than to breathe. I… I thought I helped him. I thought it would protect him. I thought—” She broke off, hands covering her face. Her shoulders shook with a sob. “I thought I was saving the only person who ever loved me.”

  The memory reeked with the taste of guilt. Kazou’s hands went numb at the edges. He had to remind himself, again and again, to breathe as if a wound demanded the most ordinary of ministrations.

  But deep down, Kazou knew that this was his fault. He himself deserves to die.

  Natalie’s voice came back, raw and urgent. “He told me to take the gun and run. To run away. To leave his body behind. He wanted to die that night... But he lived."

  The soft night around them felt suddenly crowded with ghosts. Kazou thought of the morning he’d first seen Ten: a small, pale baby with eyes too old for his face. The clone of a Polish soldier.

  “You think he wanted you to disappear to protect you?” Kazou said, voice small. He could taste the carefulness of his words, precise cadence. “Or to make you disappear because you were a witness. Which would you say, Natalie?”

  She opened her eyes. They were glassy; a tiny light inside them flickered, then steadied. “I'm not sure,” she said. “He doesn't care about his life... But now, that he lives... He must have a different goal. He is charismatic enough to convince himself of any narrative... But back then... His goal was different... He thought that he was possessed by a demon and wanted me to kill that demon... But now..."

  The ferry dipped. In the distance, the city was a smear of orange and charcoal, the living details undone by smoke.

  Kazou reached for his coat and wrapped it tighter around Hannah, as if warmth could hold meaning in place. “You should have told someone sooner,” he said, the reprimand soft and broken.

  Natalie’s laugh was a small, sharp thing. “Which someone? The police? The institute? No—who do you tell when the person who orders the chorus is a child with a voice like glass? Who do you trust when the only grownups who looked like they cared turned away?” She pressed her palms flat to her knees. “For years, I thought I’d imagined it. Then the letters came again. And I saw his handwriting in a margin, and my stomach flipped. My memories returned.”

  She swallowed. The ferry cut a slow, steady line through black water, and the fact of being afloat made the world feel both far away and uncomfortably close.

  “What do you want?” Kazou asked quietly. “Now that you remember. What do you need from me?”

  Natalie’s gaze locked on his. For a moment, she looked almost like the girl in the lab recollections — younger, bewildered, lit by an internal shock.

  “I want to know if Ten is still Ten,” she said. “If he is still that boy who hugged me, who held my hand. Or if everything he touched turned into the thing he wanted it to be. I want to know what he is now. And I… I want him to stop.”

  He swallowed. The words came out huskier than he expected, but they were steady in their smallness. “We will find him,” he said. “We will find out what he is.”

  Natalie’s laugh this time was almost human, a shuddered sound. “You sound like that scientist I used to know.” Her face creased. “Like Dr. Kuroda. Our Father.”

  He did not correct her. There were worse comparisons to make.

  She folded her hands small in her lap. “There are other things, too,” she said, voice dropping. “There are letters. People were watching us before the fire. Nowak… he called himself a follower. He said Casimir would come when the city burned. He… he thinks the flames are a sacrament.”

  Kazou held the word Casimir like a stone his shoe had kicked up. Kazou felt again the memory of Nowak leaning over him, the cue stick like a scepter, the grin stitched too wide — the man made cult from thirst.

  Natalie’s hands went white on her knees. She inhaled the night as if pulling in the shape of memory and exhaled something soft and terrible.

  “He told me the Mother was me,” she said suddenly. “That I was the one who wanted the end with the soldier. They called me Sasha. They whispered that name into his ears... Casimirs' men.”

  “Natalie—”

  She began to cry then, small, unembarrassed tears that cut clean tracks through the grime on her cheeks.

  “I’m the reason he turned into a killer,” she said, and the assertion shattered the night between them. “The Mother who wanted to see the end — they said that was me. They called me Sasha. They made me the center of a story he believed in. That’s why he killed! He thinks I want this!"

  “You’re not responsible for what others made of you,” he said, slowly, “You were made to be a certain thing. That does not mean you wanted to be it. That does not make you culpable for their choices.”

  Her laugh broke into sobs, but it was quieter now, less raw. She leaned her forehead to her knees for a moment as if to hold the world steady. When she looked up, her face had settled into something steadier, a woman who had been broken and was learning to reassemble the pieces.

  “Tell me about Ten,” Kazou said. “Tell me the things you remember about him as a child in the lab — the small ones. Not the big moments. The details. We’ll start there.”

  She blinked and then nodded, as if the task were a map she could follow. “He liked the sound of the clock at night,” she said after a pause. “He always made sure I was safe, he was always there comforting me if I was upset, He… he taught me to tie a knot the same way every time. He liked to read a book... A kids' book. I can't recall the name..." Her voice softened. “And then,” she added, “there were nights he whispered that he wanted to see the end of the world. He sounded… eager.”

  Kazou closed his eyes. The image of Ten reading — childish, domestic — sat like a relic amid the accusations. It was the ordinary detail that tethered horror to the human. He had to hold both truths at once: the child who needed a candy split and the man who later learned to say words that made others burn.

  Natalie reached out and put her hand on Kazou’s sleeve, small and tentative. “You… you helped me when I was little,” she murmured, as if testing whether memory and gratitude could occupy the same space. “I remember a scientist who looked at me like I was a person, not a project. I remember being an equal life. You said that our lives were all equal!" Natalie smiled.

  Kazou smiled.

  The night deepened. The city behind them was a raw wound of orange and ash. Ahead, the river held them, indifferent and constant.

  Natalie watched him for a long time with something like curiosity and a terrible gratitude. “You’re not the kind who gives up,” she said finally, almost to herself.

  He gave a short, tired smile. “I’m bad at giving up,” he said. “And I’m good at refusing the things people tell me are impossible just because they’re hard.”

  Natalie’s hand squeezed his sleeve, hard. “I don’t want to drag you in,” she whispered. “You helped me once — you didn’t deserve this.”

  "It's my responsibility, Natalie. I created that demon. I have to fix this."

  She exhaled, a long, wire-bare sound, and for a moment they sat together knowing two things: the past could not be undone; and they would try, with patient cruelty, to make the future less like it.

  Hannah shifted in her sleep and made a small sound; Kazou tucked the jacket a little more snugly around her shoulders. Natalie watched them both, and for once the ferocity in her seemed tempered with something like hope.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, voice threaded with resolution, “We will go to Wroclaw and figure this out.”