​Chapter 13. The Ninth Circle

Winter came to the Ring reluctantly — dragging itself in like a dying animal. It didn’t cover the place with a white shroud; it merely dusted its wounds with a thin, ashen film of snow that melted at once, turning the streets into gray slush. Wind howled through empty window frames and moaned in rusted pipes. Cold lived on the streets, in the apartments, in other people’s beds — and inside him. It soaked into concrete walls and the perpetually crumpled sheets he slept in. Even his blood crawled through his veins slowly, like molten lead.

He was having the same dream again.

In it, he wakes in that empty, lifeless room. In the middle of it stands a plain wooden table, and behind it sits a little girl with braids, drawing something in a sketchbook. In the dream, Mark knows he must get up. He rises from the bed, his legs moving on their own.

He walks toward the table, and the girl lifts her head. Where her eyes should be are two raw, bloody hollows. A dark stain of blood spreads across her chest.

She holds out a plate to him, and on it, like two pale eggs, lie a pair of eyes. One is light — nearly translucent. The other is dark, ink-black.

“She left you her eyes,” the girl says. “Eat.”

And she laughs. A child’s bright, piercing laughter — the same he’d heard back then, in that empty hallway of the abandoned house. That laugh snapped Mark awake for real.

He stared at the ceiling for several minutes, watching shadows dissolve in the grim morning light. The dream brought no relief. Not rest, but another turn of the same infernal cycle — and he surfaced from it with that familiar pulsing headache behind his eyes.

In the apartment — dead silence.

Mark was no one now. A former cop, dismissed for absenteeism, erased from the system. The only thing he’d managed to do in that chaos right after Eliza’s abduction was transfer what remained of his City savings into Ring credits. Enough to rent Eliza’s empty apartment and buy cheap whiskey. Enough to slowly rot.

Every day became a copy of the last — a blurred, indistinguishable imprint on the melting snow of days. He no longer woke to an alarm clock, but to the cold that crept through the thin blanket and bit straight into his bones. Time had stopped mattering altogether. No work shifts, no reports, not even hunger to divide the day into “before” and “after.”

His cuff had gone dark long ago. One morning, tired of that silent green light — the mockery, the reminder of the system that had crossed him out — Mark took it off. That piece of metal felt foreign on his skin. He tossed it into an empty drawer of the dresser — the same one where he had once found Eliza’s graveyard of cuffs. Let it lie there among the rest of the dead.

The only ritual separating sleep from waking was the first swig. He reached for the bottle standing by the bed on the floor. Cheap whiskey that reeked of varnish. A swallow instead of coffee, instead of breakfast — to jump-start the body. Fuel for his muscles instead of living.

Then he had to step outside. Not because there was anywhere to go, but because the silence of this apartment, saturated with memories, suffocated him worse than the cold. He pulled on his jacket, opened the door, descended the creaking stairs, and stepped into his personal, recurring hell.

Before beginning his aimless rounds, he always turned into the neighboring alley where the car stood under a layer of snow and grime. Invisible to the system, erased from every registry — just like him — and disconnected from the network. He brushed the snow from the windshield, peered into the cabin where his world had collapsed. Sometimes he sat inside for a few minutes, inhaling the smell of frozen plastic. The only place that remembered everything exactly as he did.

He followed the same roads leading nowhere, like a pilgrim visiting ruined shrines. The Center’s office had been here once; now it was a boarded-up warehouse with a sun-bleached, cracked sign. He would stand across from it for long stretches, trying to glimpse the ghost of the old reality beneath the new one, but saw only dusty glass and his own reflection.

He went to the bar where he used to drink with Barry. Behind the counter stood a sullen kid, who, when asked about a detective with stubble, only shrugged and muttered through clenched teeth: “Don’t know him.”

He scanned the blank, tired faces in the market crowd, hoping for a spark of recognition, for a familiar silhouette that his sinking, half-mad memory could cling to. No luck.

He carefully avoided the Legion patrols — black jackets, white cross — and they, in turn, didn’t notice him. They had a perfect nose for City cops. Even if he wasn’t one anymore.

He wasn’t searching for evidence — there was none. What he was hunting now were ghosts. A shadow himself, he was stalking other shadows in a city that had erased their names from its memory, searching for proof of his own existence.

By evening, when the cold became unbearable and the futility of wandering weighed heavier than fatigue, instinct always carried him to the same place — Babylon. Here, at least, his personal past still had weight, crude as its currency was: a corpse and a pool of blood.

The bar greeted him with its usual dim lighting and the smell of cheap perfume that clung to everything. The music blared loudly, yet it felt distant, as if coming from another world. Every evening he sat at the same table, ordered the same bourbon — and the scene came alive again: the reflection in the polished surface of the counter, and for a moment he imagined that any second now he would see that impeccably dressed, inhumanly calm borg.

He nodded to familiar faces — the regulars — but never started conversations. No one sat with him, either. In Babylon, everyone respected boundaries. His solitude had become a ritual. A swallow of whiskey — not an attempt to forget, but a challenge: I’m still here. I remember everything.

But the bar never answered.

People don’t drink to forget — they drink to see what they want to see.

And Mark drank.

That evening went the same way as always: the same table, the same glass, the same dull roar of drunken voices. Whiskey no longer had any taste or smell for him — only warmth, spreading through his body, blunting the jagged edges of memory. He drank so that in the reflection of the glass or the counter a familiar silhouette might flicker, so that from the murky shimmer a face might emerge — the face he was searching for.

But instead of a familiar face, he saw someone who did not belong to this place at all.

The girl walked as though the suffocating haze existed for everyone except her. Smooth, precise movements — alien in a world of jerking, exhausted bodies.

She sat down in the chair opposite him. Mark caught a faint, utterly out-of-place trace of sterile cleanliness. Too young, too beautiful, and above all too clean for this place. No signs of fatigue, none of the grayness that seeped into the faces of the bar’s regulars. She was from the City.

“Is this seat taken?” she asked — bold, unconcerned, without even a shadow of fear.

“It is,” he muttered, continuing to stare at his glass.

She ignored the answer. A soft rustle of expensive fabric — and her hands rested on the sticky surface of the table. Graceful, immaculate, as if sculpted from ivory. On the back of her hand — drawn in thin, almost invisible bio-ink — a mark.

The alcoholic numbness vanished at once, as if he’d been plunged into ice water.

A message. A taunt. Lily Thorne, sitting in her white tower, was toying with him, pulling invisible strings as if he were her puppet. She knew exactly where he was — and she wanted him to know that she knew.

Instincts dulled by alcohol and exhaustion stirred for a moment. This little doll was just another scalpel in Lily’s hands. She was cutting a nerve and watching to see how he would twitch. Why did she still need him? Was she still playing with him?

In the haze of smoke thickening the bar’s air, the facts aligned into a single, inevitable conclusion.

The answer was simple — and monstrous. Lily had brought him and Eliza together. Allowed them to grow close, let him feel — for the first time in years — that he wasn’t alone. Then she created the perfect circumstances for him to betray her. For Eliza to be arrested. Their entire story — from the first meeting on the rooftop to that last silence in the car — had been staged. He had played the lead without ever knowing it.

In the role of Judas — citizen Kane.

Something didn’t add up in that chain of thought. It had been Eliza who sent him to Lily. Eliza, who drew the mark on the wall. Why?

But alcohol and fatigue did their work — thinking became impossible. So he cast the thought aside.

The girl sat across from him, waiting for an answer, the same empty, rehearsed smile frozen on her lips.

“I’m looking for someone. I was told you could help,” she said, in a friendly tone so false it made his teeth ache. “They say you’re a former cop.”

Lily was showing him he couldn’t hide. They could reach him whenever they pleased.

“I’ll pay well,” the girl went on, ignoring his silence. “Maybe we should go somewhere private? It’s too loud here.”

An empty, stupid doll. His stomach twisted. At her lies, at his life, at the reach of BioTech — long enough to grab him even here, at the bottom of the Ring.

No. Not tonight.

“Screw it,” he muttered and stood up.

He let her walk ahead toward the exit. But the moment she pushed open the main door, he slipped away — turning sharply into the dim corridor leading toward the bathrooms and the back door. He moved quickly and silently — a habit built over years. He shoved the heavy, rusted door and spilled out into the alley.

Into a wall of blinding, white snow.

The street met him with a howl of wind and shards of ice that clawed at his face like a swarm of crystal needles tipped with steel. The Ring was gone. Streetlights, neighboring buildings — all dissolved into a blinding, white storm. Sound itself drowned in that chaos; only the low, guttural moan of the blizzard remained.

Mark took a few unsteady steps, shielding himself from the wind. Drunk, disoriented, he felt like this snowstorm was part of the dream as well, just another layer of it. He stumbled forward, seeing nothing, until he collided with something soft — too soft for this white hell.

A muffled thud, a woman’s startled cry, and the scatter of objects spilling across the snow. Snow slapped his face and everything blurred. In front of him, a girl was kneeling, trying to gather books from the drifts. She was wrapped in a heavy coat and scarf, and the only thing Mark could make out was her visor — an old model — glowing faintly white in the blizzard.

“Damn,” she exhaled, and the storm ripped the word to shreds.

Mark dropped to his knees, and his fingers — stiff with cold — brushed against a soaked spine. A book. Old, bound in leather. He lifted it, and snow slid from it like white ash. The title was embossed in worn, unfamiliar letters. Beside it lay another, and another. All of them ancient, heavy — completely out of place here in the Ring, in the middle of a storm.

“Thank you!” she shouted over the wind, taking the books from him and trying to hold the slippery stack together. “An icy hell — like the traitors’ circle in Cocytus. You’re very kind.”

Mark gave a crooked smirk, and she caught it. She lifted her head, and in her lenses his distorted reflection flickered.

“You should find shelter somewhere, in your... condition. You’ll freeze out here,” she added. “My name is Mari. I have a little shop around the corner. Come on — we’ll be buried alive if we stay.”

She pointed into the darkness where nothing existed except the spiraling snow, and without waiting for an answer walked ahead, moving with a confidence that seemed impossible in this chaos. Mark, frozen through and utterly lost, trudged after her. Any place was better than this white, spinning void. There was no other path.

Mari led him to a heavy wooden door beneath a faded, nearly erased sign. Through the worn Gothic lettering one could just make out the word “Bookshop,” and below it — the name: Threshold.

Maybe the same shop Barry had shown him on the terminal screen in another life? Another sting of illusion. Another proof of his own madness.

Inside, it was warm, and the air smelled of long-forgotten things — old paper, binding glue, and a faint, elusive spice foreign to this world. The scent of history and rest. Two shelves along the walls, an aisle, and a door — presumably leading to her room. A staircase to the second floor. A separate universe, fallen out of the blizzard and the chaos of the Ring.

“The storm will pass soon,” Mari said, placing her heavy burden on the counter. “But you should stay until then. My apartment’s here.”

She nodded toward the door.

“I’ve got tea. And whiskey, if you prefer.”

He was far too worn out to refuse.

Her apartment — or rather, her room — turned out to be just like the shop: quiet, cozy, and utterly unlike anything he’d seen in the Ring. Walls buried entirely under bookshelves. An old, worn-out sofa. The soft crackle of an electric heater. It all looked like a stage set for a play about the world before the war.

She took off her coat and scarf, and he could finally see her better. Painfully thin — sharp bones jutting beneath her skin; translucent ash-blond hair falling onto her shoulders. She didn’t remove the visor, even here. A narrow strip of metal covering her eyes glowed faintly in the dim room — a gaze hidden behind an electronic mirror.

“Do you always wear it?” Mark asked.

“Yes,” she answered softly, placing two cups on the table. “During the war, we lived on the coast. They shelled us with phosphorus rockets. Since then, I can’t stand bright light.”

She said it calmly, stating a fact, without self-pity. And in that calm there was something that cut into him. He remembered the war too. He knew what it meant to live with something that would never truly leave you.

In this small room, beside a half-blind girl who saw the world through a strip of dark glass, for the first time since his exile began, he wanted to open his mouth not to curse, but to actually speak. To say something that mattered.

A sip of hot tea burned his tongue, but the taste was real. Mari settled across from him, her hands wrapped around her cup.

“I’ve seen you many times here, in the Old City,” she said quietly. “But you... you’ve never seen me. You always look for someone. You walk the same routes, stare at empty buildings. Drink at the bar. And then it all repeats itself.”

She took a sip and added, almost casually:

“Maybe tonight you should try something different? Let’s pretend you found me. People say I’m good at sorting out other people’s problems.”

So she hadn’t been watching him — she had seen him. Seen his ritual, his despair. And Mari wasn’t pressing him, wasn’t demanding anything — she was... offering. Leaving him a way out.

“I...” he began, and the words he’d held inside for so long tore loose, bursting out of him like an abscess breaking open — broken, desperate.

“I don’t know if I’ve lost my mind. I think I have. People disappear. Places where I was yesterday — today they’re empty. I remember colleagues, friends... and they’re gone too. The Center is gone. Eliza...” He choked on the name, swallowing it with effort. “Maybe she never existed either.”

He gripped the cup so hard his knuckles whitened.

“I walk the streets and I don’t recognize them. Yesterday it was the Center, today a warehouse. I’ve seen signs... the same ones. On walls, on people. It all forms a pattern, but the moment I try to focus — it vanishes. Maybe I just started drinking myself into a hole back then... before Eliza.”

Outside, snow kept falling — steady, stubborn, knowing neither time nor fatigue.

“And now all of this is my reality. A reality I can’t escape. Madness.” He let out a bitter laugh. “I don’t know what scares me more: that I’ve gone insane, or that all of this is real.”

With every word, he felt both lighter and more terrified. Lighter because he was letting the poison out. More terrified because believing his own words was impossible. Mari listened silently, sipping her tea.

“And now here I am,” he finished, staring into the empty cup. “No job, no past. Just memories of a world that never existed.”

He waited for pity or fear. For her to say something like you need a doctor. To ask him to leave. The room was lit by the trembling reflection of snowfall outside — alive, flickering, scattering a million sparks.

“What’s real is whatever feels real to you, Mark,” Mari said suddenly.

It sounded as if she were revealing some ancient, universal law. Then she leaned forward a little.

“Tell me about Eliza. What is she like? Do you love her?”

Only later did he realize that Mari could not have known his name.