How does blood flow? When does the human body give up, like a galley slave bound in shackles? How do the lungs drown? When does a bird fold its wings? When does blood continue to circulate in a devastated body? How do you live when there is no one to lift the burden from your back the moment you want to say, "Wait a second, I am dying"? Right there, in that tiny fragment of time, I saw the language emerging from the lips of death.
The wave of heat wrapping around my neck merged with the sensation of numbness in my legs. I was afraid. I was cold. And the worst part was, I could hear everything. Despite this, everything I heard consisted only of the ringing of silence. I wanted to open my eyes, to touch the wound bleeding from my chest. That way, my death would transform into the only felt reality of a single moment.
But my eyes... they suddenly flickered. Breath continued to pass into my lungs. My temples were burning, my wrists were numb.
I thought I was in darkness, but my eyes... they began to show me the tips of my feet. A spectrum of light entered my field of vision. With great effort, I tried to pull my gaze from my feet and move it up to my chest. My hand moved involuntarily, touching my breast. I thought I would see blood on my fingers.
Whatever happened in that moment, it was as if I saw a rainbow with my own eyes. And then, the dark mist dissipated.
I looked at my hands. Blood? There was none.
I tried to remember what had happened by rewinding time. I failed. And what about the barrel? Was it still a sword pointed at me? My lost sense of body returned. I... nothing had happened to me. But how? Gasping for air, I scanned my body.
Sis (Mist) stood before me with all his coldness.
I heard the agonizing screams of people.
It was a terrifying realization. "What is happening?" I said to myself, my entire body shaking with a fit of tremors. Amidst the shivers, I found the courage to turn around. That was when reality came to light. Someone was lying on the ground, covered in blood. The person who died was not me. It was the group leader.
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I had intertwined my hands with his. My husband's. Our breaths were in a matchless rhythm. I felt fear like water overflowing from somewhere in my heart. I thought for a moment then, why I couldn't pass a single second without fear. The stress accumulating in my stomach was dripping from the ends of my fallen hair strands like rainwater. Still, looking into his eyes, sleeping with him, waking up with him had felt like an exit door to me.
I thought I loved him, but perhaps the thing between us stemmed from my need for him.
I loved him, but maybe I was wrong. I was looking at what I saw of myself in him. Then why did my sentences become so distorted? If I saw myself in the mirror of those magnificent eyes, I should have hated him.
These were the sharp, vague thoughts passing through my mind as I looked at my bare ring finger. The people leaning their backs against the wall were staring at the dead body lying there. They were looking at Sis, the owner of the gun standing behind me, without taking their eyes off him, as if they were attending an important ceremony. There was nothing of life in their eyes. They were here because they, like me, had been severed from life. I felt a fear that I would dive into those indifferent, focused eyes and forget everything.
The coldness spreading from the dry ground to my feet grew as it merged with the shiver descending from my neck, and my voice tore through the veil in my throat and came out. "W-why?" I asked; who was this question for? To me, or to the killer? Or to the other people watching this movie?
A blood clot frozen on the group leader's temples, closed eyes, bloodstains painting the floor, and the feeling of coldness dominating everywhere more than any of these. Was every detail part of a ritual performed to sanctify this death?
I realized I was still turned away from Sis. Was the gun still in the same hand, held with the same indifference? In that silence, I expected a small sound like a spark of fire, a breath, or an intervention by the mechanism system. But there was none. Death had turned into something ordinary here. As I looked at the crimson stain on the ground, I felt a bullet entering my brain. I surrendered to the numbness in my hands and feet. I, like the others, merely approached the wall and leaned my back against it. The coldness of the wall spread from my spine to my entire body. I could find no logical justification for what was happening.
Only my eyes slid to the blonde woman standing to my right. I searched for a clue in her gaze. While her pale eyes looked at the barrel in the distance, she only bit her lip and looked at Sis as if she were about to say something.
There was a silent game between them.
"The balance has changed," the blonde woman spoke, catching everyone by surprise.
I waited for a change in people's faces, thinking maybe now something would happen.
But the same expressionlessness continued.
Sis slowly lowered the gun to waist level. His movements were slowed as if suspended in time. His movement betrayed that he was unaware of what he was doing. With the scar on his face, he now proved that he had stolen someone's life. My chin trembled. Suddenly I sprang to my feet. My legs threw me forward.
The distance I thought was an infinite expanse between us decreased.
With the strength of the monster inside me, I suddenly threw myself at his neck. He wasn't expecting this move. Entirely out of reflex, I pulled violently at his collar and said with a trembling voice, "You," I said. His pupils did not move. My voice was buried deep in my throat. "You are a killer..." I said. "You killed someone..." While my fingers shook with a fit of tremors, he looked certain that I could never take the gun from his hand.
"Because you... you stole the hope of someone who returned from the brink of death and suicide, wanting to return to life. Because you took away the look of pity in the eyes of all those... all those people. Because you wanted to change everything, but you wanted to do it with death." My strength faded. "You are a killer because you showed no mercy."
A storm of a kind I had never felt before had broken out inside me. "Go on," I said; "Go on, kill me too."
I wasn't even aware of how much my voice had risen.
The sound waves echoing on the walls were my echoes.
I was afraid of my own echoes.
Sis's face had turned to stone, his features did not move. But without looking away for even a second, "There are no humans here," he said with a voice like ice. "Those who remain are the scraps of life. Look at them." He turned his eyes to the people lined up like a string in front of the walls. "They are literally ghosts. They do not deserve a gift as sacred as life."
"You cannot decide that," I said, as if I could take everything back. "It is God who gave them this life." It was that God who filled my heart with these words. As my heart beat rapidly, it put pressure on my veins.
He still guarded the gun with a firm security.
He raised it a little higher, and this time he pointed it directly at me.
My hands on his collar fell, the gun moved away from my forehead. I was seeing everything in gray. Even death wasn't bad at that moment.
The mechanism was a savage dueling ground.
"Give me the letter," he spoke in a low voice.
Then the presence of the letter in my pocket spoke as if finding its voice again.
"You're going to kill me too..." I said, my eyes stinging.
Even though I knew it was my duty never to cry, that slippery liquid under my eyes wanted to overflow, to flow to my lips with its salt. In a state of trance, I was burning under a high fever. He was going to take the letter from me, so I had to give it first. Slowly I put my hand in my pocket and took out the envelope I had folded in two. He still didn't want to lose his gun, staying in contact with me.
"There is only one bullet," he said; "There was only one bullet."
He snatched the letter from my hand and threw the gun to the right.
The piece of metal made a clack sound as it hit the ground.
Why had he chosen to kill him? What did he know about the group leader?
With the regret of giving the letter inside me, I watched him open the envelope and read it, digging my nails into my palms. The silence was turned to stone. The sky no longer meant anything.
As he held the letter in his hands, his fingers were twitching slightly.
And I was quietly looking at the gun thrown on the ground.
That piece of metal had returned to its true identity after taking someone's life.
The darkness of the air was filtering through the strands of my hair. I wrapped my arms around myself with a feeling of cold, pulled my knees to my chest and felt only the thick, rough texture of the walls. I had struggled with nightmares during the time I slept. That's why, as soon as I woke up, I wanted to touch my heart to make sure nothing had pierced through me.
I felt the sense of strangeness created by the flickering fluorescents, piercing the darkness like a drop of light falling into the ocean, deep into my skin. While inspecting the surroundings with half-blurred eyes, I saw someone else sitting to my right, maybe a meter or two away from me. He was standing silently just like me. I leaned my head forward to see if he was asleep or awake, then leaned back and looked out of the corner of my eye. His chest was rising and falling with slow movements. In the distance, I seemed to sense the smell of dried bloodstains on the ground. But there was no corpse. Perhaps they had thrown it under the grate the leader had shown me at first. This was just a guess, but the games were now writing their own rules.
"You slept too much," I heard a woman's voice. From the timbre of the voice, I quickly realized it was the blonde woman helping the leader. However, the thin light falling on her face had wrapped the other side of her cheeks like a black veil. "I thought you wouldn't wake up," she continued. I still wasn't giving her any answer. The moment I believed I would find a few sentences, she gradually added, "You really are an unlucky person." I could see her eyes narrowing, sinking into her eye sockets like weights.
"We used to get along with him," she said as best as she could. "I think we shared the same worldview..."
She must have been talking about the group leader.
"Did you meet here?" I asked.
Then she released a breath into the silence like blowing cigarette smoke. "We had to meet him," she murmured. "Because he would warn us to... dare to be ourselves... in every condition of life, even if we are here." She shifted her gaze and turned to me.
"One day when we were ourselves, when we truly lived our angers, desires, pains, and joys, we were going to become someone new. But that new person..." The agony shining in her gaze was touching me as if it were real. "A new person that no one would like," she finished her sentence. The wave shining in her eyes was now no different from a building collapsing upon itself. Her voice trembled, following the rhythm of her eyelashes.
"He died because he found that new person," she murmured. "Because if he hadn't, the new person would have killed the old one. He saw the world as huge and complex, but he always..." Her voice faltered, the large drops falling under her eyes were hard to notice in the dark. "He believed in a plan. This plan might seem ridiculous to you, but it was a hope for him."
Yes, she was talking to me.
For the first time since I came here, someone was treating me like a human being.
"Hope?" I said with all the strength I could muster. "Didn't they want us to leave it at the door when we entered here?"
"It's as if you're seeing the truths for the first time," she said, and I realized she meant it seriously.
"Maybe..." I said, "The things I see are not light."
"They never were," she said as she pulled up one of her knees. "But do you know what I felt? Along with him, I lost the ability to hope and make plans. The bloodstains on the ground are perhaps a different perspective to never forget him. When I gained that perspective, I realized I had lost him completely..."
While my neck shivered and perspired, I replied, "He seemed like someone different and hard to understand. I thought he was lying about the food when he sent me to the tunnel."
"People thought so at first sight," she said immediately after. She gave a slow breath. "But he was more than what he appeared to be. Just like every human being." As if walking past a funeral without caring, "It was painful," she said. "My heart is burning and I'm telling you this... Don't you want to ask why? Have you ever thought why I'm telling you these things? These tall tales, the suffocating darkness of thoughts, the most helpless part of my feelings..." She slowly moved her hand towards her heart. "Because the balances will change here now. In fact... it has already started."