Chapter 6
You would think that after crossing an ocean and leaving an entire nightmare behind me, I would have been content to stop looking back.
For a while, I tried.
I rented a bright apartment near the sea.
I bought clothes Dana would have hated—light, loose, unstructured things that did not mark me as anyone’s possession.
I let my hair grow out.
I stopped checking over my shoulder every five seconds.
I even learned how to sleep with the curtains open.
Freedom turned out to be quieter than I imagined.
Not dramatic. Not triumphant. Just soft.
A kind of stillness I had never been allowed before.
The system lingered beside me through all of it.
At first, it checked in often, almost nervously, as if expecting me to collapse the moment the mission ended.
But I didn’t.
I healed in strange, uneven ways.
I started cooking for myself again, only simple meals, but it felt good to decide what I ate and when.
I walked into stores without permission.
I got on trains just because I wanted to see where they went.
Sometimes I spent entire afternoons sitting in parks and watching other people live ordinary lives.
That was the thing I treasured most.
Ordinary.
No chains. No cameras hidden in corners. No calculating every expression before it crossed my face.
Just ordinary.
One evening, while I lay on the couch half-asleep with a travel magazine on my lap, I asked the system a question that had been waiting in the back of my mind for a long time.
“Why me?”
The system was quiet for a while.
Then it said, “Because the world you were in had collapsed around one unstable fixation. You were the center of that fixation. To correct the distortion, the canary had to leave the cage.”
“That sounds very official.”
“It is.”
I smiled faintly.
“So I was chosen because I was unlucky.”
“In part,” it admitted.
“And what happens to you now?”
Another pause.
“My task is complete. I’ll remain a while longer to ensure stabilization. After that, I return.”
“Return where?”
“I can’t explain it in terms your world would fully understand.”
I stared at the ceiling.
“Convenient.”
“You may think of it that way.”
For all its mechanical tone, I had grown oddly used to its presence.
It had been with me through all four lives. Through every failure. Every death. Every time I thought I could not bear another beginning.
I sat up slowly.
“When you go,” I asked, “will you just disappear?”
“Yes.”
“That’s cruel.”
This time, the silence felt softer.
“I was not designed for sentiment.”
“Too bad. I developed some anyway.”
The system did not answer.
But later that night, when I was half asleep, it quietly projected a small box onto the screen of my tablet.
Inside were records.
Fragments. Permissions. Redacted notes.
Not enough to reveal everything, but enough for me to understand one thing:
It had argued for me.
Repeatedly.
Each time I failed, it had requested more time, more allowances, more resources.
That final privilege—the temporary erasure of my trail—had not come easily.
It had fought for that.
The realization settled warmly and painfully in my chest.
A week later, I contacted Evan.
I had the system route the message in a way no one could trace.
He replied hours later with exactly one line.
So you’re alive.
I laughed when I read it.
I answered:
Obviously.
He wrote back slower after that.
He told me the bruises had faded. That Dana’s people had scared him more than they had truly harmed him. That he still regretted giving me that card, though less now that he knew I’d made it.
I wired him money anyway.
A lot of it.
He called the next day, furious.
“What is this?”
“Compensation.”
“I only drove you.”
“You got beaten.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“You were still useful.”
He went quiet.
Then, grumbling, “You really haven’t changed much from childhood.”
That made me smile.
Maybe I hadn’t.
Maybe Dana hadn’t destroyed everything after all.
I kept in loose contact after that.
Not close. Not intimate. Just enough to know there was at least one person in my old world who connected me to something that wasn’t pain.
Now and then, I still asked the system about Dana.
Less and less as time went on.
At first, the updates were always bleak.
She was working without pause. Sleeping almost never. Searching constantly.
Then she stopped searching publicly.
Then privately.
Then the searches became quieter, stranger.
She began checking things that had nothing to do with me. Old clubs. Old schools. Old records from my first life.
As if she had finally realized that losing me wasn’t just about one escape.
It was about every version of me she had failed to understand.
One afternoon, months after my disappearance, the system showed me another image.
Dana standing alone in a private room somewhere, looking down at a bottle of wine.
The same label as the one we had argued over the first night we met.
Her expression was unreadable.
I stared at the image longer than I meant to.
Then I closed it.
“Does she know I’ll never come back?” I asked.
The system answered immediately.
“Yes.”
I breathed in.
Breathed out.
Good, I wanted to say.
Instead what came out was, “Then maybe now she’ll finally stop.”
But some part of me already knew better.
Dana Cenyue was not the kind of woman who stopped.
She was the kind who learned to live with the knife still in her chest.
And maybe that was the only punishment severe enough for someone like her.
As for me, I kept living.
I took language classes. Started traveling farther inland. Let strangers flirt with me and chose, for once, whether I wanted to smile back.
The future opened slowly. Not like a miracle. Like a door no one was holding shut anymore.
And each time I stepped through it, I felt lighter.
More myself.
More like someone who had finally earned the right to exist without being watched.
Still, sometimes, especially in the deep quiet of the night, I would think about Dana’s question.
Is there truly not even a little love in your hatred?
Every time, my answer stayed the same.
No.
Not because nothing human had ever existed between us.
But because whatever I might have once mistaken for love had long ago been burned hollow by fear.
What remained was not longing.
Just memory.
And memory, I had learned, could not follow where freedom lived.