The Isdïra Complex

Room of elevation

Evan opened the door to the other room where a dozen Isdrad had gathered for a meeting. One of them spoke, but interrupted himself after seeing who had entered the room a few seconds ago.
"Good to have you here with us, Evan," the man said and stood up. He had a bald head and a black beard covering only his chin, as it was usual for the male Isdrad. "Have you succeeded at bringing her life to this place?"
Evan nodded. "Yes, I have. I sat in a school bus and ran her over, then stepped outside to see her bloody corpse dissolving to dust on the floor. Something didn't feel right though." He paused. His memories flooded his mind and he tried to get the picture back of what he had visualized at the school where he'd killed Miranda.
"What's the problem?" the other man asked when the pause took too long for him.
Evan shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. I'm afraid to say she isn't the one we're searching for."
The leader of the Isdrad laughed. "Of course she is. We searched for her for years and had to capture tons of identities in order to find the person that would keep the same personality after the point of resurrection."
This time Evan shook his head. "No, you don't understand! When I was there at her school everything was fine. Only in the moment after that when I shifted myself back to the Complex I saw her dead body again, lying in front of the school bus where it should have fallen apart already. And still, it was there. No one seemed to look at me. Even friends of hers didn't care about her death. They just realized what happened and that was it."
The others around the table hadn't talked at all so far, but that changed as a fat man in his sixties raised his voice. "You're not telling me that you're trusting the images in your head, are ye? Miranda and Charles died only a couple hundred feet apart from one another as we had planned."
Evan looked in the fat man's eyes in a way that he couldn't believe what he had been told. "I want to check on them anyway. Something's wrong, that's for sure."
The Isdrad's leader jangled keys which he had pulled out of his pocket. "Do whatever you want to do. If she's the wrong one we'd have to send her back as we did with Kady. But when you look after them, please be more careful about Charles, alright? He's the one who we can trust the least. Give them some food to eat, if they haven't found anything by themselves by now."
Evan took the keys, left the room and the other Isdrad went on with their meeting.
★★★
They now sat at a table in a room next to the kitchen they had discovered a few days ago. Not that you could find a lot to eat here, but they took everything they found: old bread, meat and some fruits which had been kept in a freezer.
Charles chewed on a small piece of the bread he knew he could barely swallow. They had already roasted the meat in a pan and had eaten it, but Charles wasn't full yet. "I wonder when I'll find out more about my past."
Miranda sat on the other side of the small table. "Are you really looking forward to it, having in mind what I've been through?" she asked. "It didn't feel completely real, but watching myself die was horrible."
"I'm not talking about the moment of death," Charles countered. "I'm talking about those brothers and sisters I have. Whenever I try to get a memory of when I've seen them last time, I see us sitting at a dining table. It was like this one, just a bit bigger. I see them laughing and wish I was with them."
"Maybe you had a life which separated you from the one when you killed descendents of the Isdrad. That would explain why I felt that you were at the college next to my school and were going to die there," Miranda thought out loud. "I don't even know, if I should believe what Jessa and Cobb told us. I don't believe we'll ever see them again."
They went on talking just to figure that their conversations started to be repeated because of missing clues to their past and the Isdrad, Jessa and Cobb...
That's when someone knocked on the door and opened it. The man that stood there looked like a young father and he smiled at Miranda and Charles as his eyes caught them. "You'd have to come along with me."
"No, we won't." Miranda didn't waste a second to think of the words she spoke.
"Do you want to know why you are here and how you can possibly survive?"
"You won't be the one who will tell us about it," Charles believed.
The man sighed. "You better listen to my orders, young man."
The one referred to as young man raised his eyebrows. "What would you do to us if we don't? You won't kill us."
The man nodded. "That's right: You have nothing to lose when you come along with me."
"That's not what I..."
The man entered the room, put his arms around Miranda's waist and dragged her through the door to the nearest hallway. The girl tried to loosen the grip around her, but couldn't.
Charles had sat at the table, not knowing how he was supposed to behave in this situation. When the other two were outside, he got up and followed them.
"Now come along with me!" the man repeated for the third time now.
"Couldn't you tell us at least who you are?" Miranda asked.
The man looked at her and sighed. "I could." He paused for a second. "And I will: My name's Evan Kalics. You'll find out more about me in the library." He kept walking and they took about a dozen turns to the left and right before reaching a room where Evan stopped. He searched for something in his pockets. "In the end I'm almost in your position: I'm also just following orders and the only difference between us is that you're at the lowest end of the food chain while I'm at the second lowest."
"What are you talking about?" Miranda wanted to know.
"You'll see," Evan replied, found some keys and opened the room.
It was too dark to see anything though.
Miranda turned to the man who brought them here. "Give me a reason why we should trust you."
Evan shook his head. "I can't and that's why I won't. But if I were you, I'd watch out."
The claws of a bird grabbed Miranda at her shoulders and it flew back into the room.
Evan slammed the door shut. "Now to you, Charles. Follow me."