Karel obeyed. From beneath the thick wooden workbench, he watched his father’s feet move toward the front door, heard the hinges creak, then heard other voices—more than one stranger, speaking in tones that tried to sound polite but failed to conceal something sharper underneath. Karel couldn’t see their faces. He could only see glimpses of polished leather shoes that had no place in the muddy ground of Karangbraja, and long shadows spilling across the workshop floor—shadows that, for an instant, seemed to move on their own, detached from the footsteps that cast them.
“...it’s not our business to wait any longer, Sastro.” One of the voices was flat, almost bored. “You’ve been given time. Now it’s time to pay—or hand over something else.”
“I told you I’m finished with you.” His father’s voice was calm but firm, like a man who had made his decision long before tonight. “I won’t make any more. Not for you, not for anyone who tortures them for profit.”
A long pause. Too long.
Then came the voice Karel could never forget—not a shout, not a scream, but something quieter and therefore more terrifying: the sound of fabric tearing, the sound of something heavy hitting the floor, and above it all, a low hum that seemed to come from nowhere human.
Karel curled deeper beneath the workbench, his small hands clutching the prototype frame he had unconsciously carried into his hiding place, as though the cold object could serve as a shield. He heard footsteps moving, something being dragged, the door creaking again—and then silence. A silence louder than any sound that had come before.
He didn’t come out until the sun was nearly up.
When he finally crawled out from beneath the workbench, his legs were stiff, and his hands still gripped the prototype frame so tightly that its edges had left red marks in his palms. The workshop was wrecked—shelves toppled, shards of unfinished heirlooms scattered across the floor among broken lantern glass. But what he remembered most wasn’t the disorder. What he remembered most was how silent the place was, silent in a way he had never felt before in the house that was usually filled with the sound of chisels striking metal or his father’s muttering as he worked.
He didn’t find his father there. No body, no clear clue where he had gone—only drag marks across the dusty floor, leading toward the back door, which stood wide open toward the forest. Little Karel stood in that doorway for a long time, too afraid to follow the trail, too afraid not to.
All he had left was the empty frame in his hands, and a question that would stay with him for the rest of his life: who had come that night, and why.
Back in the present, in a cramped rented room in a dark corner of Murniarta, Karel sat on the edge of the bed with a fragment of the sigil from last night’s crime scene clenched in his palm. The Waskitha Glasses—the prototype that had long since stopped being a prototype—hung around his neck, their dark-amethyst lenses reflecting the neon glow outside the window.
His face was impassive, as usual. But his fingers, trained over the years never to tremble while wrapping corpses or infiltrating mafia dens, were trembling now—subtly, almost imperceptibly, but they were.
He stared at the tiny engraving on the sigil fragment. The style of its lines was familiar in a way that hurt.
“Dad’s handiwork,” he murmured to the empty room, which offered no reply.
He got up and opened a small wooden box he always kept beneath the floorboards of his room—the only place in the world that truly belonged to him, far from anyone’s eyes. Inside were the remnants he had managed to save from the ruins of his old life: rough sketches on yellowing paper, a half-burned notebook, and several other sigil fragments he had collected over the past several years, each from a different crime scene, each leaving behind the same question.
He placed the new fragment beside the others, arranging them as though reconstructing a face from shards of a broken mirror. It wasn’t complete. Maybe it never would be. But tonight, for the first time in a long while, he felt the image move a little closer to taking shape.
Outside the window, Murniarta throbbed on as usual—distant horns, the hum of neon, the sound of acid rain beginning to fall again. The world didn’t care about anyone’s memories. Karel had learned that much earlier than most people.
He closed the box, returned it to its hiding place, and lay down on the narrow bed without truly intending to sleep. Tomorrow he had to go back to work as though nothing had happened. Tomorrow, as always, he had to be someone no one would ever think to suspect.
It was the only role he truly knew how to play.