OBSIDIAN

Fracture

Chapter 4

The room is white.

Not just white. Aggressively, blindingly white. Walls, ceiling, floor. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to distinguish reality from the space around it. I've been in this room for hours. Or minutes. Or years. Time has become negotiable.

They strapped me to the chair after they dragged me in here. Leather cuffs on my wrists and ankles, tight enough to cut off circulation. Tight enough to cause pain but not damage. Professional. Practiced.

"Stay with me," a voice says.

I recognize it immediately. Sienna.

She's standing in front of me now, or she's always been standing in front of me. I can't remember when she arrived. She's holding a syringe filled with something clear, and her expression is tenderness incarnate. It's the same expression she wore when we were on the couch, when she was straddling me, when she was destroying everything.

"Where am I?" My voice sounds like it's coming from very far away.

"You're home," she says. "You've always been here."

"That's not true."

"Isn't it?" She moves the syringe closer, and I can see the liquid inside it catches the light. "Tell me your first memory."

I try. I open my mouth to speak, and there's nothing there. No memory. No image. Just a void.

"Your name?"

I know this. I know my name. It's Dante. It's... it's...

The name evaporates before I can hold onto it.

"That's right," she whispers. She injects the syringe into my arm, and the sensation is ice spreading through my veins. "You don't have a name anymore. You're just the man who belongs to me."

Everything goes soft at the edges.

"The man in your apartment," she continues, sitting on my lap like we're having a casual conversation. "The one who wore your brother's face. Do you remember him?"

"Yes."

"Do you? Or are you just saying yes because you think that's what I want to hear?"

I don't know. I genuinely don't know. The memories are there, but they feel borrowed. Like I'm remembering something someone else told me happened.

"Your brother is dead," she says. "But he's not dead. But he is. But he's not. Does that make sense?"

"No."

"Good." She kisses me, and her mouth tastes like copper. Like blood. "That means the drug is working."

"What drug?"

"Something to help you see clearly. Something to strip away all the lies you've been telling yourself about who you are." She traces her finger down my face. "In twelve hours, you won't remember me. In twenty-four hours, you won't remember yourself. In forty-eight hours, you'll be a blank slate, and I can write whatever I want onto you."

"Why?" The word comes out broken.

"Because I need you to be mine completely. Not in pieces. Not with parts of yourself still clinging to some ghost of a past that might not be real. Completely. Entirely. Irrevocably."

The white room starts spinning.

"The videos your brother showed you," she says. "Of you shooting him. Three times. Do you want to know which one actually happened?"

"Which one?"

"All of them. None of them. The one you haven't seen yet." She gets off my lap and walks to a table I didn't see before. There's a camera there. A screen. She turns it on.

The video starts playing. It's me, but it's not me. The man on the screen looks like me, moves like me, but his eyes are empty. He's in a room with three other men. My brother is there. The man with my brother's face is there. And there's a third man, someone I should recognize.

Oh.

Oh god.

It's me. The version of me on the screen is standing next to a real version of me. We're twins, except I don't have a twin. Except I do. Except I never did. The memories shift and reform and I can't grab onto any of them.

On the screen, one of the versions shoots the other. I watch myself die. I watch myself kill myself.

"That's the version you needed to see," Sienna says. "The one where you understand that you've been fragmenting for years. That the person sitting in this chair is actually the fourth version, or the fifth, or maybe the first. You're so broken that you don't even know which piece is the original anymore."

"Stop," I plead.

"Stop what? The truth?"

"The lies. Please stop the lies."

She leans down and whispers in my ear. "But you love the lies. You've been living inside them for so long that you don't know how to exist without them."

The white room tilts. I'm falling, or the floor is rising, or gravity has decided I don't deserve to exist in its normal configuration anymore.

"There's someone coming," Sienna says. "Someone who wants to meet you. The real you. Or a version of you. I can never keep track."

The door opens.

A man walks in. He's wearing a suit. He's carrying a briefcase. He has my father's face, and my father has been dead for ten years.

"Hello, son," my father says. "We have so much to discuss."

I start screaming. Or I start laughing. The sounds come out the same, and I realize I don't know the difference anymore.

Sienna sits down and watches like she's at the theater.

"Your father has a proposition," she explains. "He thinks you might be interested in a new line of work. Something that requires someone as fractured as you are. Someone who can exist in multiple states of consciousness simultaneously. Someone who can be whatever needs to be, whenever it needs to be."

"My father is dead," I say.

"Is he?" My father sits across from me. He looks exactly how I remember him, which is to say he looks nothing like I remember him because I'm no longer sure what I remember. "I'm standing right in front of you."

"You're not real."

"Neither are you," Sienna says. "That's what makes this so beautiful. We're building something that doesn't exist. A man made of lies. A man made of obsession. A man who will do anything because he doesn't know who he is or what he's capable of."

My father opens the briefcase. Inside are photographs. Images of me. Hundreds of images of me, in different states, different places, different times. Some of them I recognize. Some of them I've never seen. Some of them are of a man who looks like me but isn't.

"These are your options," my father says. "Each one is a different path. Each one is a different version of the person you could become."

"I don't want to choose."

"You already have," Sienna says. "That's the thing about obsession. It's not a choice. It's an inevitability. You were always going to end up here, strapped to a chair in a white room, looking at pictures of people you might be."

The drug is hitting harder now. The edges of my vision are blurring. Sounds are distorting. My heartbeat sounds like someone knocking on a door. Someone trying to get in. Someone trying to get out.

"I want you to remember something," Sienna says, kneeling in front of me. "When this is over. When you wake up tomorrow or next week or in five years. I want you to remember that I did this to you because I love you."

"You don't love me."

"I know," she agrees. "But you love me. And that's going to be enough."

She injects me again. This time the liquid is darker. Thicker. It spreads through my body like ink in water.

"Sleep," she whispers.

But I don't sleep. I exist in the space between sleeping and waking, watching myself from somewhere outside my body. I watch my father show Sienna something from the briefcase. I watch them smile at each other. I watch Sienna touch his face in a way she's touched mine.

In that moment, I understand.

There is no brother. There is no father. There is only her, and there is only me, and there is only the space between us that keeps getting smaller and smaller until eventually there's no difference between us anymore.

I am Sienna.

Sienna is me.

We are the same person fractured across two bodies, and we've been chasing each other through mirrors our entire lives.

And when I finally catch her, or when she finally catches me, there's going to be nothing left but obsession and the beautiful, terrible certainty that I was never real to begin with.

The white room fades to black.

And in the darkness, I hear Sienna's voice: "Welcome home."