Poland, Gdansk, 01.03.2248
The boy tripped over his laces numerous times, hands scuffed and bleeding from catching himself. His small frame made easy to him the accessibility of tight spaces and short entry ways, but it seemed no matter how quickly he moved, restlessly squatting and jumping under and over inconvenient obstructions, he couldn’t elude his pursuer.
Cobblestone traced the streets beneath the collapsing, white buffer he sprinted over. Layers of sediment and broken patches of ice were kicked up as the arch of his feet suffered overtop the thin sole of his unraveling boots which loosely hugged his ankles. Tiny orbs populated his vision. A gentle but cold slurry of snow dodged his fingers and blistered his face. The Baltic Sea lobbed its atmosphere overtop the city, irreplicable by all other bodies of water. A pitch only the arm of the Atlantic Ocean could manage. The cycle of water which created clouds like the efforts of a 3-D printer tasked with creating ambiguous designs--the conversion of one thing to another--blessed numerous cities that outlined nearby Nordic countries. The faint sound of agitated waves crooned as the Bay of Gdansk traded water through currents with a number of bays and gulfs that made up the Baltic Sea, the framed body of blue diverting through the Danish Straits.
The boy, likely considered a young adult, became overwhelmed by his heavy breathing, trapped by the tall and colorful buildings pressed together like squished sponges. Gdansk's relatively new architecture constructed post World War II had once again been revamped by the city’s reconstruction post Reconstruction–an effort to return Gdansk to what it once was before the war despite the postwar disagreements on modernizing the city, which was effectively entirely destroyed considering its inability to remain habitable. Remnants of both styles existed.
The routes he fled through were usually gorged with locals recovering from the winter season. With it being three days prior to the Three Kings Day celebration, the streets and sidewalks, especially at this time of night, were famished--void of the mass of people who would soon satiate Gdansk when morning came like an expected breakfast.
The pursued, Bozydar, continued to run, compelled with irrelevant thinking of the open window on the second floor of the five-story building he was held up in, the one he escaped through, and how the frigid winter breeze rustled the drapes of his room, cooling his bigos. Kapusta kiszona was in season and hunter’s soup was his favorite. Sauerkraut was the key ingredient to a better soup, but Bozydar had once added dried plum at the suggestion of his assigned guardian whose mother made “the best kapusta.” He hadn’t had the soup without that ingredient since.
Just as he thought he escaped the stalk of his mysterious pursuer to the fantasy of peacefully returning to his room just as his soup had cooled the right amount, he turned his last corner at an edge where land met water to see a pair of glowing rings suspended just shy of six feet above the ground. A menacing silhouette threatened the space ahead; small steps backwards flipped him onto his backside after having slipped in a shallow puddle that had splashed onto the stone walkway near the waters. One so fresh it hadn’t yet frozen. The moon was full, thus the tides were high and untamed.
“Get away,” Bozydar pleaded in his native tongue. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”
The night was far beyond the hours of when most slept, many hours before the sun rose. The boy's words echoed across the dock and over the water, waves flipped and caught his vocal vibrations, dragging them under, drowning them for no one to hear. Not even the one who loomed. An extended concrete overhang which shielded the walkway leading to the dock, chipped and aged, separated the two of them from mostly unused and abandoned buildings that stood over them as if they watched. Gdansk made an effort to maintain its traditional composition with both the design of the city and its culture, though they weren’t unwilling to implement technological advancements that would benefit the economy and quality of life. This was an obvious departure from the direction most self-sustaining cities chose. It was typical to adopt all of the progressions of the forward movement that science and technology unlocked and encouraged. The world had become deafening because of this, but Gdansk chose to dampen science and technology’s hold on the way people lived. This came with its benefits, but dependency upon outside forces for protection was not one of them.
The local police combatants were minimal.
The man swelled in size. His slow approach terrified the boy. He raised himself with raw palms, his butt lifted and sat back down in a scattered rhythm along the stone ground as he scooted away from the man-shadow with glowing eyes. A slight twinkle came to be on the man’s right shoulder.
The man’s voice released as if exhaled instead of spoken, also in Polish. “You’ve done everything as you should have. That’s what’s too bad.”
He reached for a small blade stapled to his hip. It shone on its right face the warm color of the yellow LED lamps sewn to the lip of the concrete overhang; the left face closest to the sea lit up a white so bright it gleamed in the man's vision. To him, the sea made no noise--it silently greeted him to those foreign lands as if he belonged there, born under the same side of the moon as the boy.
This man, Witt, felt guilt for what was to come. But Xandria had ordered it so it must be done.
“We know who sent you,” Bozydar said. “They told me this might happen.”
He spat at Witt’s shoe, though it landed short. Witt stepped on it.
“You’re not a phantom, you’re a demon! A shit American demon.”
The boy continued to muddle curses as if new to using the words. Witt lifted his arm, forearm so heavy it dragged below his elbow as if hardly attached. He pointed the knife at the boy. On his way toward him, blade in hand, Witt stopped a foot away.
“What’s your name,” he asked.
“You know my name,” the boy said.
“Your real name, please.”
“‘Please’? What the hell is this?”
Witt’s vision shook and distorted. Lights flickered, that’s how he began to see them. They detached from their source, floated around him like fireflies distinct against the dark blue quilt covering the sky. His left hand steadied the blade by supporting his right, which trembled as his eyes darted, seeking each pixel of light as they were presented to him.
“They couldn’t even send a healthy one to kill me? I’m not the last one, you know this. You can’t kill us a--”
With no hesitation, Witt traded his blade for a gun from the holster attached to his other hip and held it directly at the bridge of the nose of the boy who he knew only as B.O.Z. 135. Witt recognized nothing of Poland except for the language he studied for months before this mission, but he knew Polish people had full names which did not contain numbers.
“I won’t give you the satisfaction,” Bozydar said.
Witt begun to hug the trigger with the pad of his pointer finger. The barrel of the gun shone blue with strips of light along the muzzle, forward sight, and take-down lever, outlining the gun like visible veins underneath thin, pale skin. The deadly weapon primed, prepared to breathe into the face of the boy a single projectile eager to endorse a languishing death .
“Nie wywołuj wilka z lasu," Witt said.