Flashes Of Light

Past - Sveta

The first time I met my friends again, the world had already changed.

"Hello, again," I winced. I couldn't remember anything about them from before, and it was likely they felt the same way about me. "The Anti found me sleeping in a warehouse yesterday. He told me who I was, and who you were."

"He told us the same thing," Logar drawled. "But I do not remember you, per se. Of course, you look oddly familiar."

"He says we've been drugged with a new medicine from North Korea," Percie said. "And that we'll get our memories back in a few weeks' time. They wanted to get us alone after Lix' death. This is why he protected us."

We were in the centre of Silkton, the place with the fancy shops where we had never been in our whole life, and were shocked to find a market stand selling t-shirts with our faces on it.

"The Anti," Logar grumbled.

"Now, don't be paranoid," I said, though I felt a weird sensation in my gut. "He was with us almost the whole time. He could have never..."

"Does it remind you of something?" Logar asked me unkindly, pointing at a t-shirt with Lix' picture on it.

I did remember that, now. It was exactly the way The Anti had said he would have wanted it to be. There was the picture of Lix pointing her rifle at the IMF, seconds before her death, with 'Where's our money?!' written above.

In most of the pictures, the colours were exaggerated. Logar's hair was almost painted over in neon yellow. I understood why. His dyed hair never looked the same in pictures as it did in real life.

In real life, it was the kind of yellow of a chemical reaction gone wrong, the kind that made old men scrunch up their nose and middle-aged women looked away. The kind that made people of various ages blink twice when they looked at him, as if they were expecting there was something wrong with their vision.

In pictures, it looked only... yellow.

I couldn't just stare at them and pretend I hadn't talked to them for two weeks, as if I didn't know them. I couldn't just lie about everything, after Logar had told me many times he liked me for my honesty.

And I couldn't help but think of the Logar under the mask, the sweet and charming young man who made me laugh at every joke just because I'd had amnesia.

I excused myself and ran away to the nearest toilet.

"Excuse me sir? I'll buy the whole stand," I told the man selling the merch. I had pills to make my voice a bit lower, and I'd been wearing a wig when I posed as Sveta, to make sure my friends wouldn't see my new haircut. Short hair and peroxide.

Jonath was their new addition. No, he wasn't part of the group. No, he wasn't a real help to anyone. But I'd never faked being him, I just faked being a boy to convince the monks to let me in. And during those weeks, I found out the truth about my childhood, and about myself. In another life, without all the poison people had spewed on me, I would have been a positive and different person. I'd never been faking any of that.

It was just impossible to think things could go back to being what they were. Logar expected Sveta to be cold and difficult, and I didn't want to be that.

I sent a message to The Anti from Jonath's number, asking him if I could crash with the Power of Sight. He said yes, but as a one-time thing. I said that for me, nothing was a one-time thing.

"With what money?" Logar scolded me, as if he was my wiser older brother or something.

"The monks have tons of gold," I said. "When you live in there, it's not like living in the world. I didn't have anything. But I was planning my escape, so I stole something for the outside world."