I think the whole truth is that I am both less and more than these men. As they travel this strange path that has led them to a creaking train ride across the Ukraine in a passenger compartment that smells of cigarette smoke and too many years of use, I feel a phantom third trailing them, us. Sometimes behind, sometimes ahead, but always there as a terrible constant—the discordant beat of a corrupted heart.

I can’t see that third face yet, but I can sense it. It’s pushing up from some darker depth, carrying the weight of truth and the inertia of inevitability.

It terrifies me for many reasons. Most of all, because I’m beginning to fear it may be my truest face.

****

It took me nine hours to fly from New York to Kiev. Before that, the longest flight I had ever taken had been to Arizona to visit my cousin when I was nineteen. This was a wholly different experience. The plane was larger, but also older, and while the passenger compartment was only half-full, the seats seemed cramped for such a long flight. The blessing was that the trip was relatively quiet, and after a few minutes of listening to the low rumbling hum of the engines, I found myself drifting off to sleep.

I had gotten used to the strange dreams by that point, but the dream I had on that flight was different somehow. In it, I was in a town square, though I couldn’t have said where. People were all around me, hurrying to and fro, ordering food from a local stand, clustering up to have conversations here and there before moving on. I was looking around, trying to find some point of reference that might trigger some sense of familiarity in either Brian or Alexi’s memories, but there was nothing.

The architecture of the place was strange, and I saw no signs or engravings that gave any indication of a particular language or nationality. Just a large stone square bordered on all sides by buildings that towered over everything like the upreaching ornate fingers of some subterranean stone god. This was set against a sky that was a deep blue I would normally associate with twilight, but everything seemed too bright and well-defined for that. I could see far too much. And as the people crowding the square began to turn toward me, I could see the burn scars and keloids that traced fine lines of lightning across everyone’s flesh.

And they were turning to me now, all of them. First with curiosity, and then with joyful recognition. A few of them came towards me—men and women reaching out to touch me as they echoed out greetings to a long-lost friend. At my sides I felt my coat being tugged as children turned their twisted and charred faces up to me with gap-toothed smiles and shining eyes wild with excitement.