Sergey Dyachenko - Vita Nostra

Behind Dima Dimych she saw a highly complex structure, terrifying and powerful—it was hard to imagine that some time ago Sasha had that as her swing partner . She forced the corners of her lips to lift slightly; the examiner nodded, encouraging her:

“The first two assignments we can deal with quickly, agree?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead.”

She tested the tip of the pencil with her finger and pricked it. Licked off a drop of blood. Without stopping, without checking herself, she drew a chain of associations on the paper—from memory.

“Excellent. Next.”

Sasha took a deep breath. Five cognitive processes begin at one point of time, each is periodical, the periods are multiples…

“That’s enough, thank you. I knew it wasn’t going to be difficult for you. I am interested in the third sheet.”

Sasha licked her dry lips.

“Water?” the former gym teacher opened a bottle of mineral water. He poured some into a glass: the bubbles hissed and stuck to the walls of the glass. “Here you go.”

Sasha took a sip and coughed. She drank the whole glass. The examiner immediately poured her another one.

“Keep drinking. I assume you know how to complete the tests with the black fragments?”

“Of course.” Unintentionally Sasha spoke in the same tone.

“Good. If you are ready, let us not lose any time. Begin.”

Sasha pulled closer the page with a black rectangle and three white dots in the center. Took a deep breath.

Behind her back she heard the anxious rustling of paper. Her classmates were preparing for the test. She wanted to turn around for the last time to see their faces, but she did not dare.

The stage of the assembly hall smelled distinctly of dust. One of the windows let in a draft. And everything was drowned in sharp light; even through closed eyelids Sasha saw the glow.

“Right now?”

“Yes. Verb, you may begin.”

Sasha focused on the three white dots—three luminous eyes. She held her breath. One, two, three, four, five…

One hundred sixty-eight, one hundred sixty-nine, one hundred seventy.

Out of the blackness emerged—jumped out, revealed itself—a city surrounded by a wall high enough to reach the sky.

She saw it in minute, most explicit, most authentic detail. The city was the color of coal, graphite, the color of dark steel, faultless in its monochrome harmony. Sasha felt marble under her bare feet. Cool stone, and warm stone, smooth and rough, soaring walls, slender windows, spires rising into the sky…

It’s happening. She will do everything right. There, in the tower, a monster is waiting for her. Sasha must meet it face to face and not feel fear. A year ago it seemed impossible. But not anymore: having recognized her power, Sasha threw open her arms, unfolded her wings and flew.

She grew.

She billowed. She swelled. She absorbed outlines, smells, the texture of stone. In those places where Sasha stretched enough to reach the city, it ceased being carbon black and became softly gray, like an antique photograph. She claimed this life and this happiness; she inhaled the smoke, and the curve of a roof glistening in the rain, and the wisp of fog, and the majestic spire… The more she took the more powerful and multidimensional she became. Multicolored thoughts, so heavy and reluctant in a human brain, now flowed like a stream, no, like the sea.

She embraced the tower. It flinched, tensed up like an egg a split second before the birth of a baby bird, but Sasha squeezed it softly, buried it under her will like under cement. The tower failed to open, and whatever was hidden inside was now buried forever, and Sasha continued to grow without obstacle.

She claimed the city. She sensed it within herself like one senses his heart in the moment of powerful joy or fear. She flowed further, claiming the dark sky with two dull stars. These stars were superfluous in her picture of the universe.

Superfluous.

Extinguish?

She appeared—she was—a dark empty space. And she was also sitting at the table on the stage of the assembly hall, and in front of her lay a black “fragment.” Examiner Dima Dimych sat across from her at the table; his face was no longer cast in plaster of paris. He frowned and grew visibly more anxious with every second.

“ What’s happening ?”

Sasha hung between the points of “was” and “will be.” At this moment—for the first time since she opened the fragment—she had the feeling that something was not quite right. Something was wrong.

But she’s doing everything correctly!

“ Stop her! She’s broken loose again! Stop her, she’s uncontrollable!”

The door opened with a long screech. Simultaneously the heads of people sitting in the assembly hall turned: a man in very dark glasses walked down the aisle, stepping slowly, heavy-footed, over the old dull parquet floor.

The suit jacket on Sterkh’s back ripped open along the spine; steel-colored feathers peeked through the jagged slit.

“What is the matter?”

“Calm down. Continue the examination.”

Sasha sensed but did not see them around her. Not people—structures, diagrams of processes and human beings; the examiner who was a function. The matronly Irina Anatolyevna. The gym teacher, Dima Dimych, with his strange and terrifying metamorphosis. Sterkh stood with his angular twitching wings thrown up in the air. Next to Sterkh was Portnov, so tense that he was constantly changing, pulsating like a garden simultaneously undergoing both spring and fall. Something was wrong; she had gone too far. According to the planned examination she was supposed to stop near the tower…

She felt as if a page from the activator opened in front of her—enormous, multi-dimensional, encompassing all that can be represented in the universe. She saw herself—a mute word ready to reverberate. She saw many layers of reality—bright, textured, dull, vague, they gathered into surreal folds at the edge of her field of vision. Probabilities and rearrangements: she was supposed to stop at the tower, meet the examiner, select a point of application—she is a verb… And reverberate; it’s so similar to throwing a bowling ball into the midst of immobile pins, or swinging a still pendulum… Leave a chip at the neck of an ideal and thus non-existent pitcher… the dominoes would collapse, cars would run along distant roads, raindrops would fall, and Sasha would materialize for the first time, she, the Imperative, an instrument of Speech.

But something had gone wrong. She could no longer go back—not because the fourth dimension is irreversible. It was because her nature, her inner essence, led her here, to this dark space with two stars above her head, and here she was subject to different laws that did not fit into any reality known to her. Laws alien to any dimension.

“Stop!”

“Stop her! It’s not a verb, it’s a…”

“Yes. This is Password.”

Sasha who was the dark space shuddered. Two stars leaned over above her head—they were eyes, very intense, unblinking, and now black lenses no longer remained between them and Sasha.

“ Greetings, Password .”

That, which came from the darkness, spoke without words, in bare meaning. Sasha knew how to communicate, but she did not answer. She lost her… no, not her tongue. She lost that place in her soul where words are born.

“…Do you hear me, Sasha?”

She was still sitting behind the table. In the empty and dim hall without ceiling, without walls. Fog curled above her head. Across from her, in the examiner’s chair, now sat Farit Kozhennikov.

“Can you hear me?”

She nodded, overwhelmed for a second by the pain within her enormous heavy head.