Adaline was shouting at the nurses to find Liam. They left the room, searching for him. Donggun followed them with slower steps. His mind was spinning, and his voice was barely heard. “It’s my fault… It’s my fault…” As he was walking, his head was down, and his eyes filled with guilt and pain. People were running to find Liam; Adaline’s angry screaming voice filled the hospital.
Donggun stopped in the center of the floor, right across from the nurses’ desks. A sudden voice called him. It felt as if the voice was inside his head. He looked in the voice’s direction and found a man standing at the end of the floor near the emergency stairs, staring at him.
In a few seconds, the man appeared before him. He looked deeply into his eyes. Donggun gazed; he saw those eyes before; clear empty eyes with a sharp icy stare. The man put his hand on Donggun’s shoulder, his touch awakened forgotten memories and mistakes. Donggun knew how it began and how it would end. He looked at his son’s room and stopped his tears from running down his face.
He touched Donggun’s shoulder, causing him to shiver and collapse to the ground. Donggun looked hopelessly at the man while his tears ran swiftly over his face. “I did it! How! How could I hurt them?!” Donggun said, sobbing.
“You chose this path… you destroyed their lives,” the man’s voice echoed in Donggun’s head.
“Don’t punish me, please,” Donggun begged.
“The first time you had a choice to walk away… but you didn’t… you chose your desire over anything,” the man’s voice echoed again in Donggun’s head as he grabbed his arm roughly from the floor.
“Please wait!” Donggun begged one more time before the whole place faded into darkness.
“Wow, what a mystery horror move you have,” Camellia said, standing behind the man. He flinched and looked back at her. “I like how mysterious you are here… very creative.” She tilted her head and looked at Donggun, who looked terrified. “Why do you keep picking him for power drain? He’s not the only one.”
She shifted her eyes to the man’s clear icy stare, his tight grasp on Donggun’s arm loosened. He shifted his body, facing Camellia, whose smirk was visible through the dim place. The man’s eyes locked on hers, his body shivered, and his eyes widened as they traced the mighty light coming from her left-hand lighting the whole place.
Donggun watched them quietly and slowly crawled away. Camellia grabbed Donggun’s head with her glowing left hand and said, “Sorry sir, it would hurt like a bitch.” The blue blinding light glowed her hand over his head, his body fazed into thin air along with his loud painful screams.
The man stepped back; He could no longer control his hands; they were shaking in an odd, trembling rhythm. His body was crippled, and his eyes filled with terror, his lips parted, whispering her name.
She looked at him, feeling anger boiling every calm nerve in her. “I killed your troop many times… the same way… the same moment, but the important question here is—” her sword formed between her hands, a quick thrust into the middle of his chest. His face and body glitched and changed. “Why did you get here, Mariat?” he groaned loudly as she twisted the sword inside his shaking chest. “How could you trust Harut? He is insane.”
A mighty light escaped from every cell of him. “You said we’re weak and deserve nothing but despair and pain… well, I think that means you’re wrong.” Her tenacity over the sword and with enough force, she leaped with the sword out of his body and slashed his head. In a tiny fraction of a second, the brilliant light of his body and the sword splashed over everything, swallowing it.
Cairo, Egypt, December 19, 2009, 3:20 pm.
Nadine sat alone in the investigation room, shuddering her legs, and rubbing her left balm with her right thumb. The room was small size with a big square mirror across from Nadine who kept looking at the door next to it.
She took a deep breath and rested her elbows on a metal rectangle table across from her chair. She impatiently waited for anyone to tell her what was happening, but from the moment she landed in Cairo, everyone she saw on her way to the investigation room eyed her with curious yet intimidating eyes.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
The door opened rapidly, causing Nadine’s breath to be suppressed inside her shaking lungs for a long second. A middle-aged prosecutor closed the door behind him. He locked eyes with Nadine, who stared back, then sat across from her.
A creepy smirk laid slowly on his face, making her breathe harshly. “I will ask you some questions and I want you to answer honestly” — she nodded her head and looked at his now steady poker face — “good, now, tell me your real name.”
“Nadine Azmi.” — what a dumb question, she thought — he was already holding her ID between his hands. A smile crawled into the right corner of her mouth. The prosecutor looked oddly familiar. He reminded her of someone. His bushy eyebrows pulled down together in an almost comedic way and the tips of his ears turned to a soft darker shade of red.
A whispered chuckle escaped her lips when her mind reminded her of his resemblances. It was a manga character who had identical reactions to the prosecutor. Both had bushy eyebrows and overgrown black mustache, and the same stating-the-obvious-type of questions. The character had a memorable name, yet she could only remember his last name, Mori.
The prosecutor sighed and his eyes shifted darkly with an impatient look and the creepy smirk appeared again on his lips, covered slightly with his black mustache. “I told you to answer honestly.”
“I did,” she said.
The prosecutor’s smile disappeared and said, “You need to stop before you get yourself in more trouble.”
“I don’t understand what you want me to say. That’s my real name.” She narrowed her eyes, truly bewildered by his meaningless question.
“No, it’s not. There is no one by this name,” he said firmly.
“I am!” Nadine said and felt a powerful sensation of anger rising inside her chest.
“We already checked your ID, your blood, and your fingerprint, you don’t exist in our system.”
“How is that even possible? So, what am I now? A ghost?” she shouted, not able to bottle up her angry sarcastic thoughts any longer. He looked at her sharply. She sighed and said, “I swear I don’t understand how I don’t exist in the system! Or why I’m even here!”
“You are accused of espionage,” he said calmly, which made Nadine even more furious.
“Espionage!” — she moved her hair behind her ears and looked at him — “a minute ago, you said I don’t even exist in the system! And now I’m a spy! That makes little sense,” she intoned as if she were talking to a five-year-old.
He didn’t even blink. “We’re investigating your partner in another room and apparently, neither of you want to admit the truth,” he said, sounding like a machine repeating a programmed message.
“Partner… Who!?” she was practically screaming.
“He called himself Adam Magdy,” he said, resting his back and looking antagonistically at Nadine’s confused face.
“Adam…” Nadine was shocked why the prosecutor was accusing her of spying, and what brought Adam into all of this. “You’re mistaken, prosecutor! We have nothing to do with spying!”
He got up and told someone outside to get him a laptop. In seconds, he brought it to him. “Explain this footage.” Security footage showed Nadine and Adam in the middle of the night receiving two bags full of money from a black-suited man for information.
Nadine’s eyes widened in shock and confusion; the deadly information that they said was like threatening-national-security-type of deadly. “That’s… not… me,” Nadine said, narrowing her eyes.
“Your face is pretty obvious.” he paused the video and pointed at her face on the screen.
“I’m telling you that’s not me,” Nadine said, looking at him, then at the screen. “I don’t know any of this… I don’t even know how a citizen like me would ever know this type of information.”
He took a long breath, closed his eyes, and clenched his jaw, then said, “I tried to be calm and asked you nicely, but what are you facing here could lead to the death penalty, be smart and confess.”
“Execution! But I did nothing wrong. Why I would be a spy!!?” Nadine said with widened eyes and an astonished face.
He stared motionlessly right into her eyes. “Where have you been on the 16th of December?!” he yelled suddenly.
She was startled, blinking fast at his sudden change of mood. “I went to Dubai for several hours, then got back.”
“There are no records of you leaving the country,” he said in a lower tone. “We have been following you and Adam for months and we have all the evidence to prove you guilty, but we need your confessions to finish the entire picture.”
“No offense, but you’re hallucinating,” she said.
He banged both his hands on the table. “You think it’s funny! You’re one call away from being dead!”