Sergei

He gasped, and I felt the temperature in the room suddenly drop. Zero clenched his fist, knuckles white, his features crooked. Then his shoulders dropped, his face smoothed. He exhaled slowly, like a dying man on the death's bed.

When he opened his eyes, he seemed somehow less mad. Older, more tired. There was a dark fire in his eyes now, a lot of pain, and a bottomless sea of cold, frightening resolution. He looked around, taking everything in, and then turned to us.

Sergei Duncan smiled a little, and said:

'Is that you, Mickey? You have grown.'

Mickey flinched as though someone had hit him. His lips quivered.

'Yes. Yes, it's me.'

'And you are Matthew. Linda's boy.'

I gritted my teeth.

'Yes, I am. So it's true then. You knew her.'

'I have.'

'You knew her on the Farm.'

He looked away.

'That's also true.'

I felt something hot rising in my chest.

'Tell me how. Were you imprisoned there with her? Or were you one of the prison guards?'

He sighed.

'We don't have much time. It's hard, holding myself together. It gets harder each time. Soon I'll be lost in the Disease forever.'

He finally looked at me, and I saw darkness in his eyes.

'If you want to know the truth, you'll need to understand how, and why. I'll tell you, if I can. But you need to hear. Will you?'

Mickey and I looked and each other and nodded.

Sergei closed his eyes for a second, and then said:

'Then listen.'

#

This is what Zero told us on that first evening.

'Some time ago, I have ventured on the Death Pilgrimage. It is an ancient tradition of the wraiths, surrounded by shadows and myths. One of the last remnants of our past that we managed to preserve. Everything else is gone. It is also a game, as old as the ritual itself. The game is complex, and elegant, and cruel. So incredibly cruel. Most wraiths know how to play it well.

Did you know that back in the Twentieth century, high-ranking Purity officers were required to study that game? In a short span of years, they became master players. Most would be better at it than we were -- if they had the Ability, of course. But they didn't. Why study, then?

Humans have this saying: know your enemy. They wanted to know the game to know us. How we think, how we approach conflict. They studied our ways, and became appalled, but also efficient in hunting us down. They became so efficient that there was no escape. They gathered us in their camps and slaughtered us in our millions.

My grandparents met in such a camp. They were scheduled to be incinerated, like their parents, and brothers, and sisters had been. But they survived. The amnesty came before the furnaces devoured them. They were reintroduced into the population, their nature guarded by the newly formed Protective Agency. How do you go on living after something like that? How do you walk outside and smile at the people responsible for the slaughter of your family? They did, because they had no choice. They had to go on living because throwing your life away was a sacrilege to the memory of those who had perished.

I was raised by my grandfather. My sister got the Disease when she was really young. A child. A rarity, but it happens. She died. My mother couldn't bear that burden. She died too, taking her own life. My father was beaten to death on the street. No one ever found out by whom, and why. So I was raised by my grandfather.

He was the one who told me about how well the officers of Purity knew the Death Pilgrimage. How well they knew their enemy. I was young and stupid. I had decided that I will get to know my enemy too. I'll know them better than they knew themselves. And in that way, I'll learn how to destroy them.

I spent many years learning how to be human. Most of the wraiths of my generation spent their time in isolation, avoiding close contact with their neighbors. Creating small secret diasporas, desperate to be with their own kind. Not me. I threw myself into the thick of humanity. Popular at school. Top of the class. Captain of the hockey team, captain of the chess club. Prestigious university, varsity star. Everything that follows. I studied humanity as if knowledge was water, and I was a man dying of thirst in the desert. And, of course, I studied the Protective Agency. But it was hard. The Protectors were as careful with knowledge as I was hungry for it. They learned the same lessons from the Purity that I did. The Agency was a bastion of secrets built on a foundation made of lies, and I was helpless to breach its walls.

So, I decided to switch the focus of my endeavor, at least for a time. Know your enemy. It is a part of a quote from an old Chinese general. The other part of it says to know yourself. I've become obsessed with the history of wraiths. What little remained, I salvaged and absorbed. But it wasn't enough. I learned more by observing the present. Still, it wasn't enough. I decided to stop trying to learn the things I didn't know, but instead examine the absence of knowledge, and what it could tell me. And, perplexed, I realized that we, the wraiths, know close to nothing about ourselves. And the things we do know come from the same source: the humans. Human scientists were the ones to isolate the gene that made us different. They were the ones to find the reason behind the Disease. They were the ones who separated us into categories, gave us words to describe our powers... and our curses. They have achieved the thing I was trying to achieve. They came to know their enemies better than their enemies knew themselves. And knowledge is power. With that power, they turned us into slaves.

But all that paled in comparison to the revelation I made while studying the absence of knowledge about the Disease. My first revelation. It shook the foundations of my soul. It changed everything I knew, and everything I strove to be.

The thing I realized was simple, but horrible in its implications. I realized that humans weren't the real enemy of the wraiths. They were just a symptom. The real enemy, the thing that had destroyed us, was continuing to kill us, was the Disease. The mysterious curse that plagued our kind for eternity, that inspired such fear in humanity that it came to massacre and enslave us. The fear of the Disease had built the camps, had fueled the incinerators. And still, no one knew how to defeat it. No one ever really knew what it is, or how it works.

I thought then that I had found my real enemy. I had to learn the Disease to defeat it. But how? The only ones who knew something about it were the Protectors. They had a monopoly on all the knowledge concerning the wraiths. In one unbroken chain of succession, they had inherited that knowledge from the Purity, who had inherited it from the Inquisition, who had inherited it from the Crusaders, who had paid for that knowledge on the field of battle with their blood. The only difference was that unlike all the previous incarnations of the power that was tasked with hunting the wraiths down, the Agency wasn't bound by superstition, ignorance or ideology. Theirs was a pure cause, backed by an almost unlimited amount of power and influence. For the first time in history, there was an entity that had the resources to possibly save us... if it was inclined to.

I learned many things about how humans think by playing chess. But one rule of that game always surprised me. If a pawn can reach the far end of the board, it is reborn into something more powerful. The same rule exists in checkers. A strange quirk of human logic. Why is it that a soldier can only become greater than they are in their enemy's stronghold? But there's wisdom in that, too. Sometimes you learn your true self by coming to know your enemies. Show me your enemies, and I will tell you who you are.

It became clear to me that to destroy the Disease, it wasn't enough for me to become one of the humans. I had to become one of the Protectors. As it happens, my previous actions put me in a perfect place to achieve that goal. When the Second Generation program was put into place, I was one of the first to volunteer and get accepted into the Agency. One of the ten wraiths to be inducted into the PA.

And so I've become the thing I used to hate the most.

It wasn't an easy road. Most of the human Protectors distrusted me. My own people called me a traitor. People I loved turned away from me. I endured it. I was on the path to being able to defeat the Disease, after all. Nothing could stop me.

But first, I needed to rise through the ranks of the Agency. I put all my will into it, building connections, winning respect, achieving results. Back then, I was naive enough to believe that there won't be a ceiling that a wraith won't be able to break, no matter how hard he tries. That I was more than just an experiment. We all were.

The disillusion came fast. But still, I was in the best place to learn about the Disease. The Agency spent decades studying it, studying us. They knew things I couldn't believe.

And they did things I thought I couldn't stomach. For a long time, this stopped me from reaching the full potential of my position.

You see, the Agency is not what everyone thinks it is. The duty of safeguarding the population from the wraiths, and wraiths from the population, is just the surface of what they do. A veil hiding their real goals and operations. Their real purpose is, and always has been, to harness our power. To make the Ability serve humanity, and the PA, instead of being a threat to it. To possess ultimate authority. And to achieve that, some of them are willing to do horrible things. Evil things. Things that made my skin crawl.

But not the same things. The second misconception that everyone has about the Agency is that it's a monolith, a single entity united by a shared goal. That's not true, at least not exactly. There are layers within the Agency, and factions inside the layers. Each faction has its own beliefs and pursues its own goals. The Generations Program. Project Caliban. Darwinists. And, of course, the Silent Genocide. The ruling faction. Masters of the status quo.'