Black Eyes

Chapter 6

As if sucked away by a dream so vivid it could almost have been touched, Nakir opened his eyes and what he found in front of him was a switched off neon lamp. He was still on Demy's chair, but he felt disoriented, as if had lost a piece of his life and was now in a strange place. How had he gotten there? When he tried to get up he felt the stitches pull at the back of his neck. He tried to touch it with his fingers, but a patch had been applied, but Nakir no longer felt any foreign protrusions beneath it. At that moment he allowed himself to breathe and the first thing that came to him was the smell of disinfectant. Suddenly he remembered everything. The hunter, the android, the filthy surgeon and the suspicious SPA he had found in a large hidden alley that had a slimy drain on the right cobblestone wall.

He sat up and saw Demetra's back. She was sitting at her desk and scribbling something in a sheet of paper she then stacked on top of all the other neat ones she kept on the desk and with a stapler she attached it to the others. As if she had heard Nakir move, even though the boy was naturally as silent as a cat, she turned the chair on wheels and smiled at Nakir before approaching him still sitting on the wheeled chair. The boy was staring at her with his wide black eyes. He was still thinking about the dream. What had it been? How had the memory of Evelyn, his mother, transported itself to him?

Now she finally had a face. The girl who was twenty-two in the dream was now thirty-six and Nakir tried to imagine how she might have changed. What neither Riza nor Nakir knew was that, as she was giving birth, Evelyn through clenched teeth had recited a phrase, a ritual, to bind their souls with a tight knot.

The girl knew that the newborn would have had some malformations and had a premonition that they would have taken him away from her. So between one push and another, amidst the greatest suffering she had ever felt, after the evocation of Xalitphi, she had recited.

"Mywua sonwy dae ma one kanne ti wia ia jam, singulji streat daa ta."

My son, no matter what, you'll come back to me.

Only now did Nakir realise it. Only now that he had had a taste of that contact was he now almost ravenous for it. He would escape from Zraegan and find her again. His thoughts were distracted by Demy's high-pitched voice.

"Are you hungry?" the girl smiled, moving one blue tuft from one eye.

"Not much" Nakir admitted. All those situations, fast as a train, had destroyed his peaceful life and had filled him with so much adrenaline that he only felt a little peckish.

"You were asleep for almost six hours. You have to eat if you want to keep walking" Demy smiled, then stood up from the chair and kicked it towards the desk, then approached a small fridge.

"A sandwich?" she asked Nakir without looking at him. She didn't give him the time to reply and she threw the package in his direction. Nakir caught it mid-air. It contained a ham sandwich that Nakir drowned in three bites. Only after the first bite did he realise how actually hungry he was.

"Thank you Demy" he replied, then pointed to the door which he guessed was a bedroom "Do you happen to have a hoodie that's too big for you?" he asked and she turned to Nakir with a raised eyebrow.

"It'll be night out there and I only have a t-shirt..." Nakir admitted.

The girl sprinted smiling towards the supposed bedroom which revealed itself for what Nakir believed to be and after searching the wardrobe for a bit, the girl made a noise of approval.

"This is huge to me. It's a gift from Lily so I'm particularly fond of it, but it's been there untouched for almost a year" said the girl, a note of bitterness in her voice, handing Nakir a black hoodie with a logo he had never seen. A circle with two stripes inside, one straight and one leaning to the right, red, and a dash between the two lines.