Turning away from the unhelpful darkness, I found myself staring into the glowing silvery liquid in the bottom of the Bowl. I had the distant thought that either the Bowl wasn’t quite as tall as Luka had said, or I had gotten taller. I almost laughed at the idea. Then I saw my reflection in the liquid.

I looked strange. Something…wasn’t right. In my addled state, I found myself suddenly obsessed with seeing my reflection closer, trying to figure out what exactly had changed about me. Using strength I shouldn’t have had, I pulled myself up on the lip of the Bowl. The next moment I was overbalanced and plunging face-first into the shining depths that lay at its center.

But I didn’t hit the bottom or die from whatever that liquid might be. I may have gone mad, however, for I suddenly found myself lying on thick carpet in a darkened room. I barely had time to sit up when the lights of twin crystal chandeliers blazed to life overhead and I saw there was a painfully thin woman wearing a business suit and a serious expression walking toward me from the edge of the room.

She came within a few feet before stopping and giving what I supposed was her version of a warm smile. Looking down at me, she spoke English with a strange accent I didn’t recognize. I understood the words well-enough, though they made little sense to me at the time.

"Welcome to the Imago Hotel, Alexi. I hope you enjoy your stay."

The Bowl of Pripyat:  If you run with wolves, you learn to howl.

The sensation of reading the journal of my twin-self, this other mixture of Brian and Alexi, was strange. It reminded me of finding something I had written years earlier—it was unfamiliar until I read it, and then I remembered it again. As I sat on the train trundling its way from Kiev toward Pripyat, I remembered these events from this other life as I read them, and it shook me to my core.

The smell of fear and uncertainty as we rode the bus up to the reactor. The terror of watching some of our co-workers be killed. The growing certainty that we would never be allowed to leave the plant once they were finished with us because we knew too much. The cold smell of the tunnel that led down deep into the earth where the Bowl lay waiting in its cave like a coiled, subterranean serpent. The sound of the guard’s body being crumpled up like a piece of paper by the creature that lay in the shadows, apparently in an attempt to save my…Brian’s…life.

The touch of the liquid as I fell over the lip into the bottom of the Bowl…and then nothing.