​Chapter 22. We Know Who You Are

Liza ran.

She ran across the wet concrete slabs; each step echoed as it had in that Pleasant Street tunnel. On her left — dim lamps swallowed in milky fog; on her right — a low railing above the invisible water of the canal. The girl in the white dress was the only landmark in this void — a small, retreating speck.

The fog thickened with every breath. It didn’t conceal the world — it erased it, layer by layer. The sound of her own steps grew muffled, her breath burst out in pale clouds that refused to disperse, hanging in the air behind her.

She ran, but the landscape no longer changed. The lamps repeated — one after another, like an endless, looping corridor. The girl ahead neither drew closer nor farther, holding the same distance: ten steps, maybe fifteen. Liza’s lungs burned, her legs grew heavier as her clothes grew soaked, but she couldn’t stop. This is a dream, the thought flashed through her mind, but the pain in her muscles was real — as real as the cold metal of the railing she grabbed to keep from falling.

Then, reluctantly, the fog ahead began to thin — as if it didn’t want to let her go. Something emerged through it, not the lights of the city, but dark, squat silhouettes. Two-story houses with black, hollow windows. Sharp roofs covered in moss and streaks of rust leaned over the street. Beyond them, the road sank into darkness.

Liza slowed, then stopped, gasping for air. Her chest heaved; each inhale rasped, and the fog finally receded. The girl had vanished — dissolved the moment the fog cleared fully, leaving behind an empty street. No flicker of a dress, no echo of footsteps. Silence pressed down, thick and heavy, like the instant after a shot.

She stood in the middle of a street that couldn’t possibly exist here. Rain poured — not the cold, slicing Boston rain. Warm, oily droplets fell from a black sky, clouds hanging low over the roofs. The air smelled of wet ash and ozone — like the air after a lightning strike. She turned — the bridge was gone; only this street remained, wedged between houses that felt older than the world.

Her footsteps echoed off the walls, but the sound was dull and thick. Darkness here wasn’t the absence of light — it was a substance. It flowed out of the empty windows and pooled in puddles that didn’t reflect light but devoured it. Dead tree branches jutted from cracked earth, clawing at the air. They didn’t move, not even in the rain — frozen, petrified, yet something shifted now and then in their shadows. Liza didn’t stop to look.

She was alone — completely alone — yet the solitude felt different here. In Boston, she got lost in crowds: in bars full of regulars, in the little park by the channel. There, loneliness hurt, pierced, burned like a bullet lodged in her chest. But here it was part of something larger, something all-encompassing. It didn’t weigh on her shoulders, didn’t tighten around her throat. It simply existed — like the rain, like the dark.

It accepted her.

With every step, she felt lighter. This dead, shadowed world accepted her as she was — a killer, an outcast, a broken thing. The world of people and rules had pushed her out, judged her, cursed her. But here... here the rain whispered without words:

We know who you are.

We don’t care.

Welcome home.

She studied the windows of the houses. Sometimes, deep behind the glass, something moved — jittery, shapeless silhouettes — but they didn’t frighten her. They were just residents of this place, like her. In this world, everything was a shadow: bodiless, nameless, free from judgment. No cops avoiding her eyes. No grieving mothers screaming “killer”. Only darkness wrapping its arms around her.

She walked, and for the first time in weeks the crushing weight in her chest began to ease. Not vanish — no, it was buried too deep — but loosen. The rain washed away everything except the truth, and she could finally breathe.

Liza wasn’t afraid. She walked, and the darkness walked with her.

Then a sound broke the silence of the dead city — sharp, unpleasant, utterly foreign to this place. The sputtering buzz of an old, dying neon transformer struggling to flare to life.

Liza looked around. On the street corner, above the window of an old shop, a sign flickered.

Green tubes hissed, stuttered, filling with uneven light. Finally, the glowing text trembled into clarity:

YOUR SHOP

The “S” was broken or burned out. It flickered weakly, barely visible in the warm rain. So the sign read something else entirely.

YOUR HOP.

Your jump. Your hope.

The sign, with its broken letter and mocking message, was the first sign of life in the city. The first invitation. Liza, without hesitation, walked toward it. A thick layer of dust and grime covered the glass storefront, making it look almost opaque. The neon above lived its own sickly life, buzzing and throwing trembling green reflections onto the wet asphalt. The old wooden door with a large brass handle, darkened with time, was unlocked.

Liza pushed it, and in response came a melodic, strangely out-of-place chime of a bell. She stepped inside. The shop was empty.

Tall shelves rose upward, disappearing into an unseen ceiling, but their boards held nothing but a thick, untouched layer of dust. The smell of an abandoned building lingered — cardboard, dust, and faint echoes of fluorescent light.

The only illumination came from that same neon sign outside. Its sickly green glow seeped through the dirty window, flooding the empty room with a ghostly, underwater radiance and casting her distorted shadow across the floor.

Liza walked deeper into the shop, carefully stepping across the dusty floor toward the counter hiding in the gloom. Behind it, in a high chair that resembled a throne, sat a figure in a dark hooded cloak, facing away from her.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said without turning. The quiet, feminine voice filled the entire space, every particle of this dead, empty silence.

Liza didn’t even manage to take another step. Space collapsed. A moment ago she had been several meters from the chair, and now she found herself right in front of it, close enough to touch the rough, dark fabric of the cloak. The shadow still sat with its back to her.

And everything around her exploded into whispering.

Voices were everywhere. They came from the shadows in the corners, from beneath the empty shelves, and were born in the very air around her. Dozens of voices — male, female, children’s — intertwined into one eerie, curious chorus.

“Liza... — Eliza... — Elizabeth...”

They repeated her full, long-forgotten name.

.“Why did you come?” a child’s voice whispered right by her ear. “What are you looking for?” asked another, old and creaking, from somewhere below. “Salvation? — Oblivion? — Power?”

The whispering faded just as abruptly as it had begun. The shadow in the chair rose. She didn’t stand — she grew, stretching upward until her dark silhouette blocked out all the ghostly green light spilling in from the window. The woman towered like a black pillar reaching the unseen ceiling, and at the same time leaned so close that Liza felt her breath.

“I will give you everything,” the woman said, her voice firm and commanding, ringing out right in front of Liza.

Liza tried to see the face beneath the hood, but there was only darkness, swallowing the light.

“I don’t know what I want...” Liza whispered the most honest words she had spoken in her entire life.

“Lies!” a voice rasped from the side.

“Is it?” the woman asked, with a hint of motherly indulgence. “You sought meaning — and I will give it to you. And strength, so no one can ever hurt you again. Power — to decide for yourself who is right. Wealth — to never think about money again. Everything you have been denied. Everything you deserve.”

Liza stared into the darkness beneath the hood, and the voice inside her — the one that whispered of guilt and justice — fell silent. The emptiness inside her craved to be filled. And the woman offered her exactly that. Meaning. A purpose.

“Yes,” she said firmly, without hesitation. “I’m looking for meaning.”

“Then we will seal our pact,” the figure said. “With blood.”

She extended her hand, and from her sleeve a thin ritual knife slid into her palm. The woman removed her glove, revealing a pale, elegant feminine hand. Then, without the slightest hesitation, she drew the blade across her own palm. Blood spurted. In the neon glow it shone with an alien, chemical sheen, as if it belonged to some fantastical, otherworldly creature.

This is a dream. Surely a dream. A nightmare.

“We always sleep, Elizabeth,” the woman replied. “But some of us know how to see other people’s dreams.”

She grabbed Liza’s hand. The strength of the grip was inhuman, as if steel vises clamped down on her bones. The blade cut through skin — pain slashed with a blinding burst. Their palms locked, wound to wound, and Liza felt foreign, cold blood flowing into her own hot blood. On the back of her hand, a sigil flared, burning the skin as though molten iron were being pressed into flesh.

The hood fell.

The woman’s face was disfigured by jagged, ugly scars crossing it from side to side. Long, curved horns grew from beneath hair black as tar, and her eyes were golden, serpentine. The face of a demon — and it was smiling at her.

“Now you are my daughter,” Lilith whispered, and her kiss was not the touch of lips but a seal. It burned away the old name and inscribed a new one. “And I name you Elizazdra, queen of demons.”

The world sank into darkness, and Eliza woke up in her own bed.

The rain had stopped. Through the grimy windows, faint, dusty rays of morning sunlight seeped into the room. Beside her, on the floor, lay an empty bottle of gin. So she’d gotten drunk and passed out last night. Everything that happened on the bridge, in that dead city — drunken delirium. A dream.

Eliza sat up in bed and, for the first time in many weeks, felt relief.

The heavy, deathlike weight of guilt was gone. The girl’s voice in her head was silent. Inside — emptiness, light and painless. They had taken not only her soul, but all the pain along with it. She was free.

She stood up and, swaying slightly, walked to the bathroom. Approaching the mirror, she paused. At first, she didn’t understand what was wrong, and then she realized.

Her right pupil had turned black; the shine was gone. On her temple — a small, long-healed scar. Then she looked closer at her face and, with a slow, nauseating horror, realized that it was no longer symmetrical. The right side — the eyebrow, the corner of her mouth — was lowered just a little, maybe half a centimeter, as if the muscles on that side had forgotten how to smile.

She remembered the cold muzzle of the gun pressed to her right temple.

She had gotten drunk and dreamed. After all, she was alive — here she was, standing right in front of the mirror. Her body was not sinking in the murky water of the canal. Psychosomatic symptoms — that’s what they called them in the psychology lectures at the academy. It appeared in victims of violence, in soldiers after the war. A brain that had endured unbearable trauma would create physical symptoms on its own: hysterical blindness, facial paralysis.

She ran her fingers along her asymmetrical face and touched the skin under the darkened eye. Just a glitch in her head. Convincing, terrifyingly real.

She looked at her reflection — at those strange, slightly alien eyes. The pain was gone. The guilt was gone. And in their place there were only these... symptoms. If this was the price for relief, for silence in her head, then so be it.

Eliza was willing to pay it.