Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Drifting Towards The Unknown - Gaze Of Someone
Pain, then nothing.
Antonio had taken plenty of hits in his life, the kind that came with knives and bullets and one memorable encounter with a baseball bat, but nothing had prepared him for the specific flavor of pain that came with hitting concrete from thirty-seven floors up.
It was almost impressive, in a clinical sort of way, right up until it wasn’t anything at all.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
For a while, no time he could measure, he felt nothing.
Not cold, not warm, not even the absence of those things.
Then a tug.
Somewhere deep, somewhere he hadn’t known existed inside himself, something pulled.
He started drifting.
’Okay. So I’m definitely not in the ground anymore. Progress, I guess.’
He turned the question over, mostly out of professional habit.
What even was he right now?
Consciousness?
Some leftover spiritual residue, the kind every two-bit mystic on late-night television swore existed?
Was this the soul, then, the actual thing, not the metaphor people threw around at funerals?
He couldn’t find an answer.
He couldn’t even properly define the question.
What was a soul supposed to feel like, exactly?
Was there a manual somewhere?
He’d have appreciated a manual.
’Guess I’ll find out. Hopefully I get the good afterlife. I did, after all, donate to three different children’s hospitals. Anonymously. That’s got to count for something with whoever’s running this place.’
The drift went on.
Long enough that boredom, of all things, started creeping in at the edges, which struck him as deeply unfair.
A man dies in a blaze of grenades and decent style and the universe’s idea of punishment is making him wait in line.
Then, a familiar feeling.
The same one from when the substance had first crawled up his arm, except this version was enormous, total, wrapping around him like a cocoon with opinions.
And then he felt That.
A Gaze descended on the whole of him, and he went still the way water goes still right before it freezes.
The Gaze didn’t move.
It didn’t need to.
It simply was, the way gravity is, the way the dark between stars is, present in a manner that made the entire concept of "direction" feel embarrassingly small.
It hadn’t arrived from anywhere.
It was just upon him, all at once.
’Wh-’
The thought didn’t survive long enough to finish.
He’d stood on a rooftop with six grenades and a clean view of the pavement thirty-seven floors down and felt nothing close to this.
He’d put a fork through a man’s throat in a building and watched the light leave his eyes without so much as a flinch.
He felt it now.
Whatever this drifting, formless thing was that he’d been half-jokingly calling a soul because admitting total ignorance felt unprofessional, it felt seen.
Completely.
Down to corners he’d never bothered checking on himself.
’Okay. Okay. Deep breaths. Except I apparently don’t have lungs right now, so. Figuratively. Deep figurative breaths.’
The Gaze hadn’t moved an inch, and somehow that was worse.
Hostility he could’ve worked with.
Hostility had angles, weak points, things a man could push against.
This was just observation, vast and absolute and so far beyond caring whether he lived or died that the word indifferent felt generous.
’Like a kid watching an ant cross the sidewalk. Possibly deciding whether to step on it. Possibly not even deciding that, because why would you decide anything about an ant.’
The thought landed with the flat humor of a man recognizing his own irrelevance and finding the whole situation, on some level, genuinely funny.
He’d been the most dangerous man in the country.
He’d killed before most men learned what the word meant.
He’d built an empire out of nothing but nerve and the specific brand of intelligence that only shows up once you’ve got nothing left to lose, and then he’d ended it all on his own terms rather than become someone’s lab specimen.
And somewhere in whatever waiting room existed between one life and the next, something ancient had glanced his way the same way you’d glance at slightly unusual weather.
’...Ha. Humbling. Truly humbling.’
The cocoon held him in place.
Not probing.
Not judging exactly, though it was hard to be sure what judgment would even feel like from something this size.
Just watching, the specific patient way of something that had clearly seen ten thousand souls pass through this exact spot and found them, by the end, all more or less the same.
Him, though, it watched a moment longer than the others.
’What, do I have something on my face? Is there a face? Genuinely unclear at this point.’
Then, nothing.
The Gaze withdrew, or maybe it had never technically left at all, just stopped making itself felt the way.
’It’s like the way you stop noticing the weight of air the second you stop thinking about breathing.’
There.
Then gone.
And then he was moving again, pulled, poured, compressed into something with edges and weight and sensation and cold.
Cold.
He hadn’t felt actual cold since before the grenades.
The cold pulling through him now was enormous and specific, the kind that arrives ahead of a storm, dragging through whatever he was becoming, deeper, further—
’Wait, is this actually—’
Light.
Blinding.
Everywhere.
No source he could point to.
Sound hit him like a wall.
And then.
The first thing Alexander Abyss did, in this brand-new life, was scream.
It was not a dignified entrance.
There would be no song written about it.
He screamed because his lungs, impossibly small and impossibly new, suddenly had air shoved into them for the first time, and his body, running entirely on instinct several full seconds ahead of his mind, did the only thing it currently knew how to do with that air.
His vision was chaos. Shapes, light, more light, warmth, noise, none of it organized into anything resembling sense.
’Oh no.’
That was the first genuinely coherent thought to show up in the new accommodations.
Not where am I.
Not what happened.
Definitely nothing poetic about second chances or the weight of rebirth, the kind of thing he’d have rolled his eyes at if some philosopher had pitched it to him over drinks.
Just: ’Oh no.’
Because Antonio Moretti, formerly the head of the largest criminal organization in the country, a man who’d personally talked three foreign governments into terrible deals and ordered the removal of anyone foolish enough to threaten what he’d built from scratch, had just registered, with total and humiliating clarity, that he could not move his own arms.
He tried anyway.
One arm flew sideways into something soft, entirely without his input.
’...I can’t control this thing.’
He tried the other one. It rose, shook violently for no apparent reason, and flopped back down.
’I can’t control anything. Wonderful. Fantastic start.’
Something warm and enormous, by current standards, settled around him. Hands.
He was lifted, pressed against something soft and steady, and a sound cut clean through the noise of everything else.
Three notes.
Low, lower, back to the first.
Repeated, unhurried, the way someone hums when they’ve got nowhere else they’d rather be and no intention of going there.
He couldn’t see her yet.
Not properly.
But he could feel her hands.
And something in whatever was left of the man who’d sent his second-in-command down a stairwell and stepped off a rooftop rather than let anyone else decide what he became, that something went very, very quiet.
’...Huh. Alright then.’
He filed the feeling away, mostly because he didn’t know what else to do with it yet.
Then he started listening.
Closely.
He had, after all, absolutely nowhere better to be.
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