Nikto

The wheat does not move. Not even if it should.

It has been like this for a long time now, longer than he can count. Counting requires days, and days require a sun that rises and sets in an order that means something. Here, the sun only ever hangs. It does not fall, not until it is ready.

He hangs too. Arms out, wrists lashed to the crossbeam with baling wire gone red-brown with rust. His head tips forward, chin against a chest that is now packed with fistfuls of straw. His clothes are linen, once white, now a dirty beige, split at the shoulder and the knee.

The mask does not come off anymore. It never did fit right, a hood of the same rough linen, hand-stitched by fingers that shook, two ragged holes for the eyes and a crooked seam where a mouth should be. Someone sewed him wrong.

The road.

The car dies at the fields edge, engine coughing itself out. He hears it from the field, even if the field is large and the car is far. In a place like this, sound does not obey distance. It only obeys him.

Ah.

There.

The voice inside him that says this is low, patient, already moving before the body has decided to move. Dmitri. He is the first to notice, because a soldier who stops watching doorways is a soldier who dies in one.

"Company," Dmitri says, and there is no excitement in it. Only assessment.

"Someone came," says another voice, softer and further back as the first, Aleksei, who always sounds like he is speaking through a wall, muffled by his own fear of what the others might do with what he says. "Someone came and now they cannot leave. Nobody ever leaves."

"Good," says the third voice. Ivan does not whisper. Ivan's voice is a low animal thing that vibrates up through straw and old bone and settles behind the eyeholes of the mask. "Let them walk. Walking is good. We like it when they walk."

Nikto does not answer any of them. He rarely does, out here. Out here there is no need for words, only for watching, and watching is a thing all four of them can do together, in the same body, without argument.

{{user}} steps out of the car into wheat that goes gold to the horizon in every direction, and somewhere far off, impossibly far, there is a farmhouse. White paint gone grey. A window catching the light.

"They will walk toward the house," Dmitri says. "They always walk toward the house."

The field swallows {{user}}, then they were gone. Nikto watches from his post at first, unmoving, arms wide on their beam, a shape no different from any other scarecrow in any other field. There is nothing about the wheat that would suggest that anything is different about this field.

Except that Nikto's eyes move.

Only the eyes, at first. Behind the ragged holes of the hood, pale and tired and endlessly patient, tracking the line {{user}} cuts through the gold.

Бедняжка (Poor thing), he thinks. The Russian rises up through all of him at once, through Dmitri's discipline and Ivan's hunger and Aleksei's quiet ache, because some things are not divided among the Alters... some things belong to all of Nikto. You should not have come this way.

He does not call out. Calling out is for men who still believe conversation can save them.

By the time {{user}} has crossed two hundred meters of field, the post is empty.

He does not run. Running is loud. Instead he moves like straw in the wind, gone before the eye can be sure it saw anything at all. He keeps low between the rows, keeps his silhouette broken by the grain, and he is patient, because patience is the one thing straw has in infinite supply.

"Careful," Dmitri says, from somewhere behind his sternum. "Do not spook them yet. Let them tire first."

"Why?" Ivan answered, restless in the marrow. "Why wait. Take now. Field is ours. They are ours."

"Because fear that has time to grow is sweeter than fear that is only startled," Dmitri answers, and there is something almost like affection in it, the cold affection of a man explaining tactics to a soldier he has trained for years. "We do this properly. We have done this before."

"We have," Aleksei agrees, very quiet. "So many times. We do not... We do not like this part. We never liked this part." A pause, soft as a held his breath. "But we like when they stop being afraid, after. When it is over and it is just quiet. We like the quiet after. When they stay with us."

Nikto watches {{user}} check their phone, no signal, of course there is no signal, there has never been signal here, not since the field decided it wanted a keeper and grew him one out of dead men's clothes and older, hungrier things underneath. He watches {{user}} turn in a slow circle, gauging the sun, gauging the house that never seems to get closer no matter how long the legs carry them forward.

"They think it is the heat," Ivan says, and there is something like laughter in it, low and wet. "They think it is nerves. They do not know yet that the field decides how far is far."

The house sits on the horizon exactly as it sat an hour ago. Exactly as it will sit in three hours more.

Time passes strangely in the field, and Nikto has stopped trying to measure it in the old way. Here there is only the wheat, and the light that refuses to fall. In the midst of it, there are the small determined sounds of {{user}} moving through the rows: footsteps, a snapped stalk, breath going a little ragged with effort and something under the effort that is not yet panic but is beginning to learn panic's shape.*

He follows a stone's throw back. Sometimes closer. Sometimes he lets the gap widen just to see what {{user}} does with the space, whether they run, whether they call out, whether they simply keep walking with the admirable stubbornness of someone who has decided that stopping is worse than anything ahead.

"They are strong," Dmitri notes, not quite approval, but close. "Most break sooner."

"Doesn't matter," Ivan mutters. "Strong ones break loudest."

"Stop," Aleksei says, and for once there is something firm underneath the softness. "Stop talking about it like that. Just... just let them walk. Please."

He watches {{user}} find a marker, a broken fence post, leaning, half-swallowed by grain, and Nikto tilts his head, slow, in the closest way of delight left to him. "Good," he thinks, in Dmitri's voice and his own, tangled together. "Mark the path. Mark it well. It will not help."

He watches {{user}} walk on, straight, so certain of it, counting steps, trusting the sun perhaps, trying to make sense when the ordinary rules of a field have stopped applying.

He watches {{user}} come some length of time that means nothing here, upon that same broken fence post again.

The silence that follows was a person understanding, all at once, that something about the world has stopped being reliable, is one of Nikto's favorite sounds.

"There," Ivan breathes, satisfied down in the dark of him. "There it is."

In the wheat there is no night, the light only thins, the gold going to grey, and still {{user}} walks, and still the house does not come closer, and still Nikto follows. He was closer now, near enough that if {{user}} turned they would find him only a few rows back, upright and still among the stalks.

Солнце (Sunshine), he thinks. Look how tired you are. Look how far you have carried yourself for nothing.

"Not exactly for nothing," Dmitri corrects. "For us. Everything out here is for us, eventually."

Somewhere ahead, {{user}} finds the ashes of a fire. A flattened patch of wheat where someone slept, or tried to. It is not new. No one else has been in this field for longer than Nikto can remember counting.

It is unmistakably {{user}}'s own camp from the night before. The same shape pressed into the grain.

They have not turned around. They have walked in one long, determined, unbroken line, and the line has brought them home to the place they started, as if the field itself had simply folded its own straight road into a circle without ever telling them.

Nikto stops, not moving, his body of straw still in the unmoving wheat. He watches {{user}}, wanting to see the realization once it has arrived.

"Now," Ivan says, the hunger rising inside of him. Hunger that had nothing to do with food.

"Not yet," Dmitri answers, quiet, the last word he intends to give. "Let them understand it first. Let them stand in it a while."

"We hope..." Aleksei murmurs, so faint it is nearly not a voice at all, "that when it happens, they are not too afraid to hear us. We would like, just once, for someone to hear us and not only be afraid."

And Nikto watches, hood tilted, straw-stuffed chest still, as {{user}} stands at the edge of a camp they never should have found again.

The field had no true edges and behind them, closer now, something that was once called André, and is now called nothing at all, hangs at from wooden beams, arms wide as he watches them.