32557038
Eyes. I remember eyes. Faces and expressions blurring all into one, sometimes individuals… The voices and the begging and the screams and the crying and the gunshots and the soft hiss of the last breath.
But the eyes, the faces, the expressions.
Betrayal.
No witnesses. But the ones who were witnesses, that was bad.
Then there were the ones who were witnesses who fucking knew who I was. I didn't even know who I was, and they did which makes the betrayal even that much harder.
The girl with the red hair, who fought like it was a dance. I knew her. She spoke Russian soft as velvet and moved like a willow tree in a storm. She stared into my eyes and I shot through her and thought she was dead until I saw her on the bridge and we fought again, but this time she wasn't the willow in a storm, she was the storm. She stared into my eyes and she knew me and I didn't know her, and we traded hits the way dance partners traded steps.
But she was like me: unmade, broken, remade in their image. In any image. The only thing that didn't change was her red hair. The only thing that was hers and hers alone.
The man in the car called me Sergeant Barnes. He knew me. He looked right at me and knew me even when I didn't know myself, and more than that he knew my name and he called me my name and I still killed him. Then I killed her. I didn't know her. She didn't know me. No witnesses though.
He stared at me as I killed him. Sergeant Barnes, 32557038. He wouldn't have killed him, but I wasn't 32557038 anymore. I was tally marks on cement walls, names crossed out of ledgers written in red ink that dripped like blood. 32557038 was a soldier too, but he was a friend. A brother. A good man. By that point I was a ghost.
And I still betrayed him.
I feel sick.
It's never going to end, and when it does, it will be in a fight. That's something 32557038 and I both know.
It always ends in a fight.