What Viktor Wants

He found her account three weeks ago.

Not through Delaney's feeds, not through the surveillance architecture, not through any of the systems he had learned to move through like water. He found her the way anyone finds anyone ;a name in a search bar, a profile that came up, a grid of images that he sat with for a long time in the blue light of his room while Delaney worked in the next room and the city did its nighttime things outside.

He had looked at her work first.

The paintings were not what he expected, though he couldn't have said what he expected. Dark blues bleeding into silver. Fractured cityscapes. Hands doing ordinary things at the wrong scale. He had looked at each image carefully, the way he looked at things that required full attention, moving through them slowly on the small screen of his phone.

Then he had looked at her face.

She had their father's nose.

He had stared at that for a long time.

Viktor knew, in the way he knew most things, precisely what he wanted and precisely that he was not going to get it.

This was not pessimism. It was just the specific literacy of a child who had been a prop, then a product, then a secret, and had learned through all of it to read the gap between what people said and what was structurally possible. Amore had said family and meant brand. Delaney had said safe and meant useful. He had learned to read the word underneath the word.

He knew what he wanted.

He wanted to sit in a room with her and have nothing be required of either of them.

That was it. That was the whole of it. Not a revelation, not a tearful reunion, not the kind of moment that got described in the agency paperwork as reunification in the careful language of people who processed children from one category to another. Just a room. Just the two of them in it. Just the specific ordinary weight of being in the same space as someone who shared something with him — not history, they had no shared history, they had been apart since before either of them was old enough to make memories worth keeping — but something structural. Something in the bone.

He had looked at her nose in the photograph and thought: I have that too.

He had thought, very quietly, the way he thought things he wasn't going to say out loud: she doesn't know I exist.

He had thought: that's okay.

It wasn't okay. But he had gotten very good at saying it was.

The letter took him eleven days to write.

Not because he didn't know what to say — he knew exactly what to say, had known since the third day, had written the whole of it in his head while Delaney conducted her meeting in the living room and he sat on his bed with his sketchbook and drew the same face from memory, over and over, from slightly different angles, getting the nose right. He knew what to say. He just didn't know what language to say it in.

His English was good now, better than he let on, better than Delaney knew. He had been learning for two years, quietly, the way he learned everything — through attention, through accumulated exposure, through the specific patience of someone who understood that knowing something and showing that you knew it were different decisions. He read the news feeds Delaney left open on her screens. He read the articles. He read the comments, which were their own education in how people used language when they thought no one important was watching.

He could write the letter in English.

But some things didn't exist in English yet. Some things only existed in Bulgarian, in the specific vocabulary of a childhood that had happened in a particular place at a particular time, and he wasn't sure how to move them across the distance.

He wrote it in Bulgarian first. All of it. Eleven days of drafts, each one shorter than the last, stripping away the things that were true but not necessary, the explanations that were really just fear wearing the clothes of context. He kept cutting until what remained was small enough to be the actual thing.

Then he translated it.

Then he put it in a drawer.

It was in his drawer for four more days before he did anything with it.

He wasn't afraid of her response. He had considered her response from every angle he could construct and in none of them did she say something that would be worse than the current situation, which was that she did not know he was alive. She could ignore it. She could be angry. She could forward it to someone, though he didn't know who, didn't know what the protocol was for receiving a letter from a half-sibling you didn't know you had. None of these outcomes were good but none of them were worse than the drawer.

He was not afraid of her response.

He was afraid of what happened after.

Because after was the part he couldn't map. After was the part where the structural thing he wanted — the room, the ordinary weight, the nose they shared — would either be possible or it wouldn't, and once he had sent the letter the question would be real in a way it wasn't yet while it was still in the drawer. Right now it was still theoretical. Right now it was still something he could hold at the precise distance he had learned to hold things — close enough to be real, far enough not to hurt him when it turned out to be impossible.

He had been holding things at that distance for a long time.

It was, he understood, not a way to live. It was a way to survive. He had been surviving since Sofia and he was good at it and he was tired of it.

He took the letter out of the drawer.

He found the gallery online. Not the Mercer — he had read the interview, had seen her mention the Mercer with the specific flat affect of someone being deliberately unbothered, had understood immediately what that meant. A smaller one, a group show she had mentioned in passing in the Priya Menon stream, a date three weeks away in a converted warehouse in Pantin that he had looked up on a map and then looked up again.

Pantin. The name meant nothing to him and then it meant Paris and Paris meant Raul's apartment and Raul's apartment meant the night the Fighter had seen his phone and gone still and then stood and said I have to go and the whole room had changed.

He put the map away.

He looked up the gallery's contact information.

He thought for a long time.

Then he did something he had not done before, something that required a different kind of courage than the letter, than the drawer, than eleven days of drafts in two languages. He opened a new message on a platform Delaney didn't monitor — a small one, a niche one, the kind of platform that existed in a corner of the internet she hadn't gotten to yet — and he typed the gallery's public inquiry address into the recipient field.

He attached the letter.

He thought about Delaney in the next room, her plan in its final phase, the name she had written Tomorrow next to three times, the Fighter whose medication was gone, the doctor who wasn't answering. He thought about Amore and the YouTube channel and the Hematogenas and his mother in a hospital he would probably never visit.

He thought about a nose in a photograph.

He pressed send.

Then he closed the laptop and picked up his sketchbook and drew her face again, from memory, the nose right this time, and he sat in his room in Delaney's penthouse in a city that was not his city and waited.

He did not know what he was waiting for.

Something, maybe, that had not arrived yet.

Something that might still.

He had learned at seven that wanting things was dangerous. He had learned at nine that hope was a resource you spent carefully because it didn't replenish quickly. He had learned at eleven that family was a word people used to mean very different things and that the difference mattered more than the word.

He was fourteen now.

He was still learning.

But underneath all of it, underneath the literacy of a child who had been a prop and a product and a secret, underneath the careful distances and the things held at arm's length and the words he knew in two languages for things that hurt — underneath all of it, small and persistent and entirely his:

Not the story of her. Not the file, not the four months, not the Bulgarian record with her name on it and the case number and the careful language of people processing children from one category to another.

Her.

Elena, who painted hands at the wrong scale because she wanted people to feel seen. Elena, who threw things out of windows when she was angry and missed the building across the street. Elena, who sat in a gym and ate sandwiches with her brother and her best friend and laughed about nothing, laughed about lettuce, laughed about the plural of cactus, laughed the way people laughed when they had made something real out of nothing and knew it.

He wanted to be in a room where that kind of laughing happened.

He wanted it quietly, completely, with no expectation that it would happen and no plan for what to do if it didn't.

He sat in his room and drew her face and waited for something he couldn't name.

Outside, the city kept going.

The letter was already somewhere in the world now.

Moving toward her.