Lina
I dream of water.
Dark, unmoving. No shore. No horizon. Just the feeling that my body is heavy and won't surface.
I see something floating in the water – a white uniform jacket.
Mine.
I wake up before I drown.
Or before I want not to surface again.
"You were with S. unusually long yesterday," Ellen says in the coffee kitchen.
I nod. "He spoke."
"They all talk eventually. The question is: with whom."
She half-smiles, but her eyes stay cold. Distrust is professional ethics here.
I go back to the ward, check door sensors, open patient files, tick off rounds.
Routine saves. Routine numbs. You can't have both.
Cell 43.
Valentin.
He stands at the glass wall as if he was expecting me.
"I know the place from your dream," he says.
I stop.
He continues:
"The pool was in the old buildings. In the basement. Twenty years ago. Your mother worked there."
I could dismiss it. Suggestion, file knowledge, coincidence.
But he says her name.
Marlene.
And he says it as if he hadn't read it – but felt it.
I cut the visit short.
Ten more steps to the exit.
But something in me stays behind.
Valentin
She wavers.
I see it in the way she breathes when she thinks no one is watching. In the tiny pause between my words and her retreat.
She doesn't want to believe I know more than I should.
But a part of her… remembers.
What she doesn't know:
I was there.
Not as me. Not as I am now – but I was there.
I heard the sound of the water. I saw what was hidden in the basement. I was one of them. A protocol carrier.
The mistake was disconnecting me before they were sure.
I didn't come back.
At least not completely.
I need her to go back.
But first I have to get inside her.
And the crack is open.