Chapter 265

Yuri Berec cast off the yoke of family, relinquishing along with it his right to inherit from the Berec household. Fortunately, by then Yuri had already amassed considerable wealth through the pharmaceutical patents he had co-filed with Gezar, and he had gained the financial power to indulge in anything he desired without restraint.

What’s ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) more, a scientist had just published a groundbreaking paper on viral vector gene therapy, and building on its results, a new horizon opened for the treatment of the Bazelli family’s genetic disease.

The two young men, now with only a lifetime of marriage ahead of them after curing Gezar’s illness, exchanged wedding rings in a fine restaurant while enduring the stares of strangers, then went home drunk on wine.

Perhaps it was the lingering glow of happiness at the end of that day.

In those days, news of hate crimes rattled the world often enough that they were cautious even of the smallest displays of affection outside. But in that moment, impulse overpowered restraint. Beneath the glow of a streetlamp warming the chill night air along a quiet roadside, the two men unhesitatingly sought each other’s lips.

Lost in burning passion, the sounds and presence of reality blurred like mist. Consumed recklessly with one another, they did not hear the sound of someone stopping only a few steps away.

“Filthy faggots. Plague-ridden scum.”

A stranger pulled up a motorcycle and suddenly fired a gun at them. The bullet grazed Yuri’s face and slammed into a wall. Dismounting, the man shouted louder, closing in as if killing queers was no crime at all.

“Give me the rings! Now!”

The plain gold rings with their tiny inset diamonds must have triggered his greed. He demanded them at gunpoint, threatening their lives.

A wedding ring could never be worth more than life. The two men were ready to hand them over. But the muzzle remained fixed on Yuri’s face. Luck had spared him once, but what if that bullet had pierced his skull? The thought that Yuri might already be dead sent Gezar plummeting into an abyss of terror. Drunk and reckless, fear gave way to rage, and he decided he had to subdue the attacker.

But trying to wrestle down an armed man was sheer folly. In the violent struggle that followed, shots fired wildly into the air, sharp cracks ringing out into the night. Too late, Gezar realized what a reckless choice he had made. From the moment he lunged, what might have ended as a simple mugging transformed into a deadly gamble that could only end with someone’s death. When the gun swung toward him, Gezar snatched it away in a lightning motion and pulled the trigger.

With a sharp roar and a flash heating the barrel, the acrid smell of gunpowder filled the air. A bullet screamed through it, and the man collapsed to the ground. Then came a chilling silence.

Under the dim streetlamp, the light faded from the attacker’s eyes. Watching greed and rage swallowed by darkness until nothing but an empty husk remained, Yuri took the gun from Gezar’s frozen hand. He pressed another bullet into the dying man’s heart.

“We killed him together. Self-defense ended a long time ago.”

They had committed murder. Their crime made it into nothing more than a short notice tucked in a corner of the next day’s evening paper, drawing no attention. That did not mean safety. With luck, a killing on a deserted roadside might drift unsolved forever, but there was always the chance that a persistent justice would trail them and strike like a snake from the grass at their heels.

So Yuri and Gezar could not return to their old life. They abandoned their second home and went searching for a forgotten land, a place beyond the world’s gaze. In time, bound together by the memory of killing, they arrived at a salt marsh where sea met swamp, and there became a wedded couple sworn in fate.

A woman left behind children at Yuri and Gezar’s house and disappeared. She could not take in her cousin’s children. She could barely care for herself, let alone raise boys who spoke Albanian more fluently than English. In the end, after searching, she found Gezar and left the children in his care.

Yuri and Gezar debated what to do. They considered sending the children to an orphanage, but the boys, with eyes hardened by early knowledge of the world, quietly cleaned up their own scraps of food and carried their belongings to the small shed behind the house, arranging them neatly. As if all they needed was food to fill their stomachs and a roof to rest under.

It wasn’t long before the couple realized the children were mature beyond their years and required little attention. And they were not alone—they had each other. The boys, they thought, would suffice for one another, just as Yuri and Gezar sufficed for each other. Thus began a life together that was neither truly cohabitation nor truly family.

The couple gave the children no more affection than one gives to dogs tied up outside. Perhaps it was simply that they loved each other too much to spare even a drop for anyone else.

The children’s names were Isaac and Ezra—or perhaps Ezra and Isaac. Their resemblance was so striking that even their parents had never managed to tell them apart. Everyone simply called them whichever name came first to mind, and neither boy cared what he was called.

Three months into this strange life together, Yuri, on a whim, felt regret that he could not truly communicate with the twins. Impulsively, he resolved to teach them English. Fortunately, Yuri and Gezar were both voracious readers, and their house contained more books than firewood. Before they could be burned for kindling, books became the bridge connecting the boys to the world.

It was the season when honeysuckle blossoms trailed under the eaves, filling the air with fragrance. Gezar lit mosquito coils, and Yuri, lamp in hand, read in his gentle voice: Aesop’s Fables, The Wind in the Willows, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The twins, fighting off sleep, sank into the worlds he spoke aloud.

But Yuri had to return to the laboratory for Gezar’s treatments, and with summer gone, the honeysuckle fragrance faded, and the sound of stories vanished. AccessWriting Tools

That tenderness passed with the season, yet the twins remained in the worlds of books Yuri had opened for them. In those fantastical realms, heaven and hell coexisted; angels and demons, elves and dwarves, wizards and dragons lived and breathed.

In contrast, the real world offered a host of teachers. Aristotle taught them how to think, Kant the limits of reason and morality, Newton and Galileo and Darwin the order of the world. Beyond lay black holes, galaxies, the abyss of the universe destined to remain an eternal secret. Turning pages, the boys endlessly traversed between reality and fantasy, and with delicate bodies and minds, they conquered the world piece by piece through imagination.

Despite being twins, Isaac and Ezra were opposites in nature. Ezra loved exploring the swamp, collecting whatever it yielded, heedless of malaria, crocodiles, poisonous insects, or its other perils. Isaac preferred the safety of the house, contemplating the world he had learned through books.

Yet they were twins. Even if they became orphans of the universe, with each other they had nothing to fear.

While the inland’s dry earth breathed slowly, time in the swamp raced. Its hot, sticky air rotted everything swiftly, brought it forth anew, and renewed the cycle. The children, within this accelerated time, grew quickly and naturally sank into the couple’s life, becoming their adopted sons.

As Isaac and Ezra shed childhood and grew into boys, their foster parents secluded themselves in the laboratory, searching for a way to banish the death-shadow that followed every Bazelli man. Household life collapsed. Instead of wasting effort on endless chores, they brought in an outsider.

The woman who began coming daily was mute, with a massive birthmark at the center of her sun-darkened face. Tall and slender like a flower stalk, with a long neck that gave her the bearing of a crane, she had a sorrowful air and striking beauty.

She lived apart from the couple, closer to the sea, on reclaimed land. Her house was so remote that even a road did not reach it—only a narrow, rickety bridge of stakes between islands allowed passage.

Her father, like Yuri and Gezar, was a criminal. His crime was unknown. Here, prying into someone’s past was taboo, and no one knew what had brought the pair to such a harsh land.

He earned money traveling between inland city and swamp, but one day he left and never returned. With his disappearance, their precarious household collapsed entirely. Once they subsisted on bread and cheap chicken legs; afterward, her meals became frogs and clams from the mudflats, reed shoots, wildfowl she hunted. She sometimes sold turtle eggs and shellfish, but the meager money vanished quickly.

Employed by the couple, she cared for their neglected home with gratitude. As her life improved, so did the household of the couple and twins. But good times did not last. The genetic specter that had claimed the twins’ father also resided in Gezar’s body, and one day, without warning, it flared—mutated cells hidden deep in his Y chromosome multiplying explosively.

Gezar began to wither. He suffered fierce vertigo, lost his vigor, his muscles stiffened, speech failed him, and darkness crept across his vision until he groped through shadowed days. At last, even with Yuri before him, he no longer recognized him. Gezar was swallowed forever by pitch-black night.