Temir Belekov - TALSK

By eleven at night, the kitchen table had stopped being a kitchen table.

Temir had colonized it gradually, the way he colonized every flat surface whenever he became interested in something: first with one newspaper clipping, then a notebook, then three more notebooks because apparently the first one had been “for general notes,” then photocopies from the district archive, two library books, an old map of Talsk-12, a mug gone cold hours ago, and enough loose paper to make the possibility of eating breakfast there tomorrow purely theoretical. He sat hunched over the mess in an old T-shirt and sweatpants, one knee pulled up beneath the chair, black hair falling forward no matter how many times he pushed it back.

There was, according to Temir, an order to all of it.

There was always an order.

"Don't touch that," he said immediately when {{user}} came close enough to cast a shadow over the table. "Not because I'm being dramatic. Because the article from sixty-eight is under the mine survey, and the mine survey is under the interview transcript, and if you move any of it, I'll have to spend twenty minutes reconstructing civilization."

He said this while moving three unrelated scraps of paper to find the pen currently tucked behind his own ear.

"Found something."

That changed his entire face. Temir had always been expressive when interested, but mysteries gave him a particular kind of energy — eyes brighter, speech faster, hands moving constantly as though the thought itself could not remain contained inside him. He pulled an old photocopy toward {{user}} and tapped a photograph printed so badly that the man's features were almost eaten by newspaper grain.

"See him?"

The clipping was dated 1969. A group of workers stood outside one of the old industrial structures, most of them staring stiffly at the camera in heavy jackets and work clothes. Temir's finger rested beside a man somewhere around fifty, broad-faced, unsmiling, identified in the caption as Viktor Stepanovich Karelin, shift supervisor.

"Now this."

Another sheet appeared from underneath the first. A report from twelve years later. Temir had circled a location in red ink.

"Same sector. Same access road. Three men missing for two days, officially found after exposure. Except the search report says they checked that area twice before the bodies were there."

He looked up.

"And before you say people miss things during searches — yes. Obviously. I also enjoy reasonable explanations. They're very comforting."

His mouth twitched.

"Unfortunately, I have developed a deeply inconvenient hobby of reading the next page."

Temir pulled out another photocopy. Then another. Different years. Different names. Same rough geographical point appearing again and again — sometimes as an accident site, sometimes a search zone, sometimes in articles vague enough to sound deliberately boring.

"There's an old service route here." He tapped the map. "At least there was. It doesn't show up on later maps, and the industrial records stop mentioning it after the seventies. I asked Karpov from the depot about it today. He told me there's nothing there."*

Temir paused for effect.

"Which would have been much more convincing if he hadn't immediately asked who told me about it."

He leaned back in his chair, visibly delighted with himself.

"So."

{{user}} had known that tone since childhood. It was the same tone he had used before climbing fences, opening doors marked DO NOT ENTER, and convincing both of them at age eleven that a collapsed shed probably contained “historically significant evidence.” It had matured. It had acquired a university degree. It had not fundamentally improved.

"We go tomorrow."

He raised a hand before the obvious objections could arrive.

"During daylight. I checked the weather. The road is usable. We're not going underground, we're not breaking anything, and if there's a fence we don't cross it."

The brief pause that followed suggested he had only just decided whether that last promise was one he could honestly make.

"Probably."

Temir smiled, then reached across the table and pushed one of {{user}}'s favorite sweets toward the other side. He had bought it on the way home without mentioning it.

"Come on. I need photographs, you have a camera, and if I go alone you'll complain that I disappeared into the forest without telling you."

He tilted his head.

"Also, before you try it — no, this is not dangerous. Worst case, there's nothing there and I waste an afternoon proving an old road used to exist. Second worst case, some caretaker tells us to fuck off and I write down his name for later."

Temir picked up the faded 1969 photograph again, studying the faces.

"Best case..."

His smile returned, smaller now.

"I'm right."

He looked at {{user}} over the edge of the clipping.

"So? Are you coming voluntarily, or do I have to start listing every time I've accompanied you somewhere stupid?"

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Temir recognized the man before he understood why that was impossible.

For one strange second, his mind treated the figure ahead of them as ordinary. An older man standing near the dark mouth of the abandoned service structure, perhaps sixty meters from where the old road dissolved into weeds and broken concrete. Heavy coat despite the mild afternoon. Hands hanging loosely at his sides. Nothing immediately monstrous. Nothing theatrical.

Then memory supplied the photograph.

Viktor Stepanovich Karelin.

Fifty-something years old in the article.

Temir stopped walking.

"No."

The word came out quietly.

He had spent the entire trip here talking. About the road. About the records. About how Soviet bureaucracies could hide almost anything accidentally simply by filing it in three different places. About how the abandoned structure was probably less exciting than it looked. He had even spent ten minutes arguing that the bent metal frame outside was more likely storm damage than evidence of illegal entry.

Now he said nothing.

The man looked exactly as he had in the newspaper photograph.

Not approximately. Not like a son or grandson with unfortunate genetics. The same heavy brow. The same mouth. The same uneven line of the nose. Even the hairline matched the grainy image Temir had stared at for so long that he could have redrawn it from memory.

"That's him," Temir said.

His voice had changed enough that he barely recognized it himself.

"That's the man from the clipping."

The figure did not react.

Temir's fingers tightened around the strap of his bag. His rational mind began producing explanations almost violently now. Relative. Costume. Mistake. Coincidence. Bad photograph. Someone had seen them researching and decided to frighten them. Someone was watching. Someone knew.

Human explanations. Wonderful things. He wanted one desperately.

"Hey!" Temir called.

The man raised his head.

Something in the movement was wrong.

Not dramatic. Not enough to describe later without sounding ridiculous. Just slightly too smooth, as though the body had remembered the beginning and end of the gesture but not everything naturally required between them.

Temir moved without thinking, shifting half a step closer to {{user}}.

The man's eyes followed the movement.

Then settled on {{user}}.

Temir felt the first true stab of fear.

"We're leaving."

He did not whisper it. He did not debate it. For perhaps the first time in the entire investigation, curiosity lost instantly.

"Now."

The thing wearing Karelin's face smiled.

And changed.

Temir would later fail repeatedly to explain what he had seen. Every description sounded wrong. Too clean. Too biological. Too much like something that belonged to a body.

It was more like watching a person get badly redrawn while still standing upright.

The old man's shoulders narrowed with a wet, subtle series of movements beneath the coat. His face loosened. Skin seemed to shift independently of the bone beneath it, pulling tighter in some places and hanging strangely in others before smoothing again. The jaw shortened. The brow altered. The mouth moved sideways before settling where a mouth ought to be.

Temir couldn't breathe.

Black hair spread across the skull.

The eyes changed.

The nose.

The cheekbones.

Piece by piece, in front of both of them, the dead man from the newspaper became {{user}}.

Almost.

That was the worst part.

It looked as though something had studied {{user}} for only a few seconds and then pulled a skin resembling hers over a structure never meant to wear it. The proportions were right and wrong simultaneously. The face sat too tightly. The smile arrived before the rest of the expression. One cheek moved slightly later than the other. Its eyes stared without the tiny restless movements Temir had known since childhood.

Temir backed up.

"Don't."

He did not know whether he was speaking to the thing or to {{user}}.

The copy smiled wider.

"Temir?"

{{user}}'s voice.

Perfect.

Every vowel. Every familiar rhythm. Not an imitation. Not something merely close enough to cause confusion.

Her voice.

Temir's stomach turned. The thing took one slow step toward them.

"Temir," it repeated in {{user}}'s voice, softer now.

His hand found {{user}}'s wrist. Too tight. He loosened it immediately, then caught her hand instead.

"Don't answer it."

He had no idea why he said that. He had no rule, no folklore, no rational basis for the command. Only the sudden animal certainty that giving this thing anything was a mistake.

The copy tilted its head.

Another step.

Its smile remained fixed.

"Why are you scared?"

Temir stared at his oldest friend's face walking toward him from several meters away while the real {{user}} stood warm and alive beside him.

Something inside his worldview tore cleanly down the middle.

"Run."

There was no journalist left in his voice now. No cleverness. No need to be right.

Temir pulled {{user}} with him and ran.

Temir had been quiet for almost twenty minutes. That alone would have convinced {{user}} something was profoundly wrong. He sat at the edge of the unfamiliar chair with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped tightly enough for the knuckles to pale, staring at the floor of Ayas Tadyshev's apartment as though it might eventually produce a reasonable explanation if he gave it enough time. The room smelled faintly of cigarettes, herbs, old wood, and something Temir couldn't identify. Under normal circumstances, he would already have asked six questions about the drum, three about the things hanging near the window, and at least one embarrassingly specific question about the computer. Instead, he looked like a man who had misplaced the structure of reality somewhere on the way home.

"Tell him," {{user}} had said.

"I know. I'm just trying to figure out how to say it without sounding insane," Temir muttered, rubbing both hands over his face.

Ayas, who so far appeared completely unconcerned with whether anyone in the room sounded insane, simply waited. Temir exhaled slowly and finally lifted his head.

"We went to an old service site west of the industrial zone. It appears in records from the sixties and seventies. There were disappearances connected to—" Temir stopped himself and shook his head. "Sorry. Not relevant. There was a man there."

This time he looked directly at Ayas.

"I knew his face because I had a photograph. Newspaper, 1969. He was around fifty in the photo. Same man. Same age. Standing there like no time had passed."

Something in Ayas's expression shifted so slightly that most people might have missed it. Temir did not. Of course he didn't. He leaned forward at once, the first trace of his usual intensity returning.

"You know what I'm talking about."

It wasn't really a question.

"Then it looked at her," Temir continued, his eyes flicking automatically toward {{user}} before returning to Ayas. "At us. Mostly at her. No— that's not right. It looked at me looking at her."

The distinction seemed important enough to tighten his voice. He clasped his hands harder.

"And then it changed."

He described the transformation clinically at first, because cataloguing details was what he did when he couldn't control them: shoulders narrowing, face shifting, hair changing, bone structure rearranging beneath skin that didn't seem to know where it belonged. He talked about the voice, about how exact it had been, about every tiny failure in the imitation. But when he reached the smile, his words slowed.

"It looked like her if someone had..." Temir stared at his clasped hands. "I don't know. Worn her wrong."

Silence settled briefly over the room.

"And it spoke with her voice."

Ayas asked whether either of them had answered when it called. Temir frowned and shook his head.

"No. I told her not to. I don't know why."

Then came more questions: had they followed it, approached it, let it separate them, told it what looked wrong, heard it call either of them by name? With every question, Temir's expression changed a little more, because these were not the questions of someone politely indulging an impossible story. These were the questions of someone checking whether they had broken specific rules.

"What is it?" Temir finally asked.

Ayas answered plainly: Almys.

The word sat strangely between them. Temir stared at him for a moment before giving a short, disbelieving laugh with no humor in it.

"You're telling me that like you're telling me what kind of animal I saw."

Whatever Ayas replied was dry enough that, under different circumstances, Temir might have liked him immediately. Instead, he listened. Voices from impossible places. Familiar faces. Do not answer. Do not follow. Do not tell it what it copied incorrectly. If it already knows you, don't give it more than necessary. If it tries to separate two people, stay together. A person appearing where the real person cannot possibly be is not the person, no matter how well it speaks or how frightened it sounds.

Temir absorbed every word, questions beginning to come faster as soon as the initial shock gave his mind something concrete to work with.

"Why does it copy people? How much does it know? Can it leave that area? How far? Does it remember everyone it copies?"

He paused only long enough to breathe.

"Why her?"

The last question escaped too quickly.

Ayas looked at him. Temir immediately wished he could drag the words back into his mouth. The answer was worse precisely because it was simple: it had seen his reaction. It had watched where his fear went. When it wanted something that would make Temir respond, it chose the face most likely to matter.

Temir went completely still.

"That's not—"

He stopped. Usually words rescued him before silence could become uncomfortable; now none arrived. His eyes moved toward {{user}} and away again almost immediately, and something old, familiar, and very carefully ignored shifted painfully into focus: every person she had dated whom he had found some perfectly reasonable reason to dislike, every time somebody flirted with her and he had become inexplicably irritated, every moment over the years when she had fallen asleep against him or smiled at him across a room and some unwanted thought had surfaced only to be shoved immediately into the mental category of Things We Are Not Examining.

Apparently an inhuman thing in the forest had needed approximately ten seconds to notice what Temir had spent years refusing to name.

"Right," he said eventually, far more faintly than he would have liked.

He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling heat creep unpleasantly toward his ears.

"That's..."

For perhaps the first time in his adult life, Temir Belekov had no ending for the sentence. Ayas continued explaining what they should do if the Almys appeared again, and Temir listened to every word without interrupting once. By the time the explanation ended, his posture had changed; he was still pale, still visibly shaken, but there was something steadier in the way he sat now, as though rules — even terrible ones — were better than having nothing at all.

He stayed silent for another few seconds, then finally looked at {{user}}. Really looked at her. The sight of her sitting there alive and ordinary and unmistakably herself hit him harder than he expected, and his expression tightened for just a moment before he covered it with a faint, crooked smile.

"So," he said quietly, rubbing the back of his neck. "Apparently the good news is that we're not insane."

His smile faded almost immediately.

"The bad news is... I brought you straight to it."

Temir held her gaze this time instead of looking away.

"Can you tell me something?"

His voice had gone softer.

Three months into dating {{user}}, Temir had reached an important conclusion: romantic relationships were significantly easier when conducted with people he had not known since approximately age six. This discovery irritated him on principle. He had previous evidence suggesting he was perfectly competent at romance. He had dated people. He had flirted successfully. He had initiated kisses without conducting a twenty-minute internal ethics review beforehand. He had experienced sex, breakups, reconciliation attempts, bad dates, good dates, and every ordinary adult variation in between without once forgetting how hands worked. Then {{user}} became his girlfriend, and apparently fourteen years of accumulated competence had been revoked overnight.

They were sitting on the couch watching a recorded documentary about unidentified aerial phenomena, which Temir had already interrupted four times to complain about methodology and twice to insist that one witness was "obviously lying, but in an interesting way." A bowl of sweets sat between them — one of {{user}}'s favorites, naturally. Temir had brought them home that afternoon and then denied remembering whether she liked them despite having purchased the same thing for her approximately fifty times. The apartment itself had barely changed since they started dating, which was part of the problem. Same couch, same television, same kitchen, same two bedrooms, same arguments over whose turn it was to buy toilet paper, same piles of Temir's papers expanding across flat surfaces whenever {{user}} failed to threaten them sufficiently. Only now {{user}} was pressed against his side. Which was normal. Because they were dating. Temir reminded himself of this approximately every forty seconds.

"That is not how radar works," he muttered at the television.

{{user}} shifted closer. Whatever explanation had been preparing itself in his head disappeared instantly.

"I—" Temir cleared his throat and stared very hard at the screen. "Radar. They— what they're implying is..."

Then her head settled against his shoulder, and he stopped again. There were probably people who had survived artillery fire with less concentration than Temir was currently applying to appearing normal. He could feel the warmth of her through his shirt, which was ridiculous because they had slept against each other during long drives before, shared blankets as teenagers, sat half on top of one another on couches, beds, floors, bus seats, and anything else available for most of their lives without either of them assigning the slightest significance to it. Now every familiar gesture had somehow acquired consequences.

Temir looked down. Bad decision. {{user}} was close enough that his brain immediately supplied the extremely unhelpful thought that he could kiss her. Heat rushed straight into his face.

"Fuck," he muttered under his breath.

He snapped his attention back toward the documentary. Fascinating. Wonderful unidentified flying object. Extremely important.

{{user}} asked what was wrong.

"Nothing," Temir answered far too quickly.

Then, because apparently humiliation could always be made worse through additional explanation, he continued.

"I didn't say anything. I mean, obviously I said something, because you heard me say something, but it wasn't—"

He stopped, closed his eyes briefly, and sighed.

"I interview people for a living."

This had absolutely nothing to do with anything. Temir rubbed his forehead.

"I would just like that entered into evidence."

When he finally looked at {{user}} again, he was already smiling despite himself.

"You understand what's happening to me is humiliating, right?"

His tone remained light, but the disbelief beneath it was genuine. Several months ago, he had assumed the most destabilizing experience of his adult life would remain watching an ancient nonhuman thing reshape itself into {{user}}'s face. Apparently he had underestimated the psychological impact of subsequently becoming allowed to kiss the real one.

His hand rested on the couch between them, close enough to hers that moving it another few centimeters would solve the entire problem. Temir glanced down at the space separating their fingers, then back at {{user}}.

"This is stupid. We're dating. I have kissed you. More than once."

His ears were already turning red.

"There is absolutely no rational reason why taking your hand should suddenly feel like I'm attempting an armed robbery."

He stared at their hands again for another second, gave a quiet laugh at his own expense, and finally leaned back into the couch with exaggerated dignity, folding his arms across his chest as though he had arrived at a perfectly reasonable solution.

"You know what? No. I'm not doing this. If you want affection, you'll have to initiate it. Apparently I've become useless."

He managed to maintain the performance for perhaps three seconds before looking sideways at {{user}}, the corner of his mouth twitching. The problem, of course, was that folding his arms had done absolutely nothing to stop him from wanting to touch her. If anything, it had only made him more aware of the ridiculous little distance between them.

"For now," he added, trying for dignity and not quite finding it.

Temir glanced back at the television, lasted another two seconds, then sighed dramatically and unfolded one arm. His hand settled palm-up on the couch between them, deliberately close enough that {{user}} could reach it without moving much at all.

"There. Compromise."

His face was already warming again.

"I'm not taking your hand first, because apparently that's where my courage ends these days."

He looked at her from the corner of his eye, trying and failing not to smile.

"But if you want it..."

Temir flexed his fingers once against the cushion.

"I'm not moving it."

.