The plastic cracked with a sound like a bone splintering in a quiet room.
Damien let the broken halves fall into the dust. They disappeared into the grime as though the photograph had never existed.
"How many?" I asked.
The silence that followed was heavy, pressing against my eardrums. I didn't need to specify what I was talking about. We both knew.
"How many photographs have you destroyed?"
He turned to me, the movement slow and deliberate, his face unreadable in the dim emergency lighting. "Enough," he said.
He didn't offer a count. He didn't offer a history. He just turned toward the corridor that would lead us back to the surface, leaving the fragments of the impossible image behind in the dark.
I listened for the tiny pieces of plastic to strike the concrete.
I never heard the
