VI. SLEEP PARALYSIS.

The night sky began to move above them, and suddenly Lana knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she had failed. That she was failed: a failed child who grew into a failed woman who became and was always meant to become a failed human. That there was no point of no return, no plunge through an invisible event horizon. Stillborn. But still, as she stared at the sky at the end of the world, she wondered, because there was nothing else left to do: was she born that way? She never knew much about her father's line of work, but after she'd left Novokuznetsk for good, she thought every once in a while about the possibility of some kind of contamination. The original failure, the original sin. What had her father exposed her to? Not just in the field in the shadow of the radio tower – was she merely a vessel for the horrors that father had been so obsessed with since her conception? Was there a reason why she had no memory of her mother?

It was something she hadn't considered in any serious capacity for a long, long time. Mrs. Lopatin – her name was unknown to Lana, and she preferred that it stayed that way – was the Great Unknown, so irrevocably lost to time that, to Lana, she had simply never existed at all. Her father made no effort to fill the gap in her memory because there was no gap to begin with, and with that being the case, Lana was free to draw her own conclusions. Dead during childbirth. Affair. Killed by her husband's employers. But whether she was dead or lost or forever missing made no difference: she was merely a ghost haunting a house Lana would never visit.

A ghost that glowed with radioactivity. The incubator laced with carcinogens.

A fist came down on her hard, so hard that, for a moment, it was almost impossible to tell where the hit had actually landed, where the damage had occurred. Lana's head rolled to the side, her cheek resuming its process of soaking up the saltwater on the wooden deck. Milan's men were gone, as far as she could tell, but she was in no position to make a move. The entrance to the ship – that small, terrible door that she would never walk through again – which they had been guarding was open, wide open. Glowing white with such ferocity that it almost seemed as though someone had erected an invisible, indestructible barrier between the deck and the ship's interior. The light rolled and pressed against the doorframe like a sentient fog, unable to spill onto the deck. Onto her.

Milan was still above her, screaming now. A broken alarm. She had not registered any change in the intensity of his voice and did not know why. His face was so close to hers. His breath was stale and cold, and she did not dare look into his eyes.

"WHY DID YOU BRING IT WITH YOU?!"

How it ached, the pit that was once hidden in her stomach. It had moved at some point during her time in the theater, but she had passed it off as a symptom of being near the light for so long. She could feel it crawl through her chest like a mouse in the throat of a python if the entire sequence was put in reverse. The light was so close, and the pit knew. Closer than it would ever be, because this was the end, and there was nothing after. No other chance. It had slid through her ribcage and burrowed underneath her left lung, opposite to her heart. Now, it pulsed.

Knowing what was about to happen, what she needed to do, Lana began to sob.

Milan stopped screaming but kept his body pressed on hers. She couldn't move. Good.

"You can get it out," she choked, hoping that she didn't sound unsure of herself. "You can get it out."

God, let this be quick. Let this kill me.

Milan eyes – she stared back at him now – glistened in light that no longer existed. They were blank with fear, with pain, with acknowledgement, and Lana realized how ultimate her betrayal had been, as unintentional as it might've been and despite how undeserving of redemption Milan was. As they both were.

"Get it out," she pleaded, staring at the creature above them. "Please."

Milan tilted his head, his expression now completely unreadable, full of what looked like every emotion he'd experienced for the past few weeks. "It's inside you?"

In between large gasps – it had been a long time since she really cried, so long that going through all the motions associated with it actually made it hard for her to breathe – she managed to eke out what she'd been wanting to say since she entered the laboratory. Since that night in the field. A confession so obvious that it was almost pitiful.

"I don't know what it is." she whispered.

That was as close to the truth as she was going to get, and vague enough that Milan would – hopefully – not assume that she was talking about the light, which, as far as she was aware, had not colonized her body in the same way the pit had. Yet. She didn't know how Milan would react if he believed she was some kind of host for the light. But, once she was able to take a few seconds to calm herself down as much as she could, Lana realized that she didn't even know if she and Milan were thinking of the same it. Fuck, did that even matter? No, of course not. The light was the pit was the night sky was the pale creature was the crumbling radio tower was her father was her spectre of a mother. She knew nothing, and she would never know anything.

"Where is it?" Milan asked.

The creature in the sky was all she could see above her. It'd wrapped itself around the immobile ship like the glass around a snowglobe, perfectly camouflaged and warping like it was melting in heat they couldn't feel. There is no light here.

Lana tried to lift her arm, but Milan's boot was pressed firmly against her wrist. But felt the change in pressure, got the message, and relented. Her hand was purple and limp, but she still managed to tap gently below her right breast.

"How deep?"

Trying to hide her desperate elation – he would get it out! He would help her! – Lana turned her attention to the open door. The pit was tugging at her skin, and she wondered if Milan could see it. But with that simple question of his, she realized what was about to happen. It resonated in her bones. She began to cry again, lifting her numb hand and draping it across her face as her body shook from the effort it was putting in to simply stop crying, stop crying, stop crying.

She was a failure. Elina Shishkin was dead, her father was dead, and her mother might as well have vanished in a flash of white light the second Lana came out of her womb. And now the creature once named Lana Lopatin would die, too, at the hands of the man who was hired to kill her in the first place. The man she so foolishly thought she had a chance of escaping. But Milan wasn't the endgame – not by any stretch of her declining imagination. It had always been the light, which she knew in her heart she could never run far enough from. But then the question presented itself: was it simply dormant for all this time, waiting for the moment she was meant to die, waiting to reclaim her? Or had it always existed in those forgotten corners of the world, and she had just been unlucky enough to stumble upon it twice?

"I'm going to die, Milan. It's going to kill me," Lana mumbled, but she wasn't sure if he heard her.

He didn't. Instead, Milan was fumbling absentmindedly with something in the inside pocket of his jacket. Had he always been wearing a jacket?

But there was one thing that she needed him to hear more than anything. Against the growing thunder and the rain around them, and with all the energy she had left, Lana cried, "Why are we here, Milan?"

Lana watched as Milan delicately removed a knife from his jacket. God, it was beautiful. So dark that it looked like it was carved out of obsidian. She'd never used knives before and never had any sort of special interest in them, but now, during those last minutes of her life, she felt indebted to its elegance. How lucky she was, given the circumstances, to be killed with a butterfly knife.

Milan paused, tapping the handle of the knife with his index finger, and Lana realized he was left-handed. Between the rain and the creature in the sky slowly closing in on the both of them, Lana couldn't see his face and could barely make out his silhouette, but she knew he was staring directly at the sky. Did he see the creature, too? Or were his horrors unique to him?

"Your father killed my father that night," he said, speaking to the sky but addressing Lana. He didn't need to go into detail; they both knew which night he was referring to. "We were traitors." Then he turned down to face Lana. He was smiling coldly at her. "Like you."

With that, Lana prepared for the knife to enter her chest, for it to rip across her throat. A moment past, and then a few seconds, but she was still alive. Above her, Milan had begun to sway gently like a redwood tree in a gale.

At that moment, Lana knew that he had abandoned any notion of saving her.

"But we became new people after that, you and I," he continued, still staring directly at her, "and found our places in their world." Milan began to laugh, but he didn't break eye contact. "When your father's associates found you, did you ever tell them how he died? Did you ever tell anyone?"

Lana's stomach twisted. She knew that answering was unnecessary.

Milan's laugh cut off so suddenly that if Lana didn't know any better, she would have assumed that someone had shot him in the head. "How about this. Why do you think that we're here?"

Lana knew the answer to that question but made sure to phrase everything as delicately as possible. "The article. This is punishment for the article in the Gazeta, but they needed me to finish the deal with Helius Meditech before they– you, I mean, killed me."

Milan was silent, and Lana felt the need to fill the void between them. "I don't know why you're here, Milan. This isn't what you do, I think."

He nodded as though he agreed. "Do you know what's funny?" he said, and again, Lana knew better than to respond. "I thought the same thing. When I read the article, I was so angry at you, and I knew you'd pay for it. I thought I'd be the one to kill you."

"Are you?"

When Milan replied that he wasn't, it sounded utterly pained, as if by admitting it out loud, he was denying some crucial aspect of his being. "I met with somebody before Saint Petersburg, the guy who put me in charge of you and your car and all your shit. He said he wanted you alive."

Motion in the corner of her eye, right at the edge of the glowing door. Nothing that Milan had said so far made any sense, and by the way he was telling his story, that seemed to be what he was trying to articulate. "At first, I didn't know why they put me in charge of anything after Saint Petersburg. I begged Konstantin to let me bring you back to Moscow. But he insisted. And so I had to drive to Murmansk, get the money, take care of the car."

Lana thought back to her time in the Dining Hall. With Lincoln. Milan's awful smile. With dread building in her chest, she shot: "What happened after dinner?"

"That's the stupidest question you could've asked."

"What happened after dinner, Milan?"

Milan grabbed Lana's free hand and slammed it to the ground, pinning it with his boot once more. "My God, are you fucking dense?! Are you blind?!" he roared. "The lab! The fucking lab! The light! What isn't connecting? Do you think it's just some kind of cosmic fucking coincidence that for your final mission, you ended up on an isolated ship with the same light that, dear God, I pray you haven't seen since that night? Your father, who worked with the same group of people who you've worked with up until this point?"

Milan's rage was so sudden that it inspired a wave of nausea in Lana, one that she had to choke down in order to avoid vomiting directly onto his face. What the fuck was he trying to say? Why was he making her struggle for the answer?

But Milan, so it seemed, was sick of the role he was playing, too. He fell off of Lana and kneeled on the deck, teasing the underside of his chin with the tip of the knife, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. "There was no mission. The hospital was fake. And I think they know about Novokuznetsk."

Lana propped herself up on her shoulders and slowly pushed herself until she was standing above Milan, who did not react in the way she expected. In fact, he didn't react at all. He kept the knife against his chin, but Lana knew it wasn't a threat of suicide. But she also didn't know what else it could've been.

"They liiiiiiiied," Milan hummed, his eyes shut. "They lied about wanting you alive. They lied about the article and the money and the reason why they really wanted us dead. I think they were just waiting for you to fuck up, honestly. You gave them the perfect excuse to get rid of both of us. And I actually fell for it. I thought they were punishing me for my pride by sending me with you. Maybe they were, actually."

The pit was thumping with such force that Lana knew that if she took off her dress, she'd be able to see it moving under her skin.

"Are we sick, Milan?" asked, unsure of what she wanted the answer to be.

Milan hummed.

"You were going to kill me a few minutes ago."

"I was." His words were slurred.

"Your men are gone."

"I know."

"Are we sick?" Lana asked again.

"Maybe."

She took a step back, acutely aware, all of a sudden, of a presence behind her. At the door. As the creature in the sky shattered into nothing above her, Lana turned around and saw only white.

^^^

The man dies instantly. Before he has time to plunge his knife into his throat, he vanishes, and is gone forever. The woman does not seem to notice. Her eyes have adjusted; she sees you, but cannot comprehend. She will, in time.

You offer your arms. Your awful, broken arms. The woman might not yet understand, but this gesture is simple, and she knows.

Curled against your chest, the woman shakes as you step through the door and enter the ship. Your ship. Little has changed – for you. For her, too, most likely. You travel through an orange hallway adorned with oak doors that open to nothing. The woman begins to cry as you near the destroyed elevator shaft.

You are both almost home.