The shadow cast by moonlight

The door opened with a loud creak. The man's silhouette was barely visible in the dark, but his eyes shone with unnatural light. "I didn't wish to disturb you this late, but neither do I want for you to panic, Doctor Ziffer. Believe me, I have no ill intentions."

Eve frowned, but her shoulders relaxed a little. From the logical point of view, if Victor wanted to harm her, he had a ton of opportunities for it. From the emotional point of view… she trusted his word. He wasn't the person to throw it left and right.

Victor nodded and stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. "Right. So before you jump to the wrong conclusions, Doctor Eve, I want to clarify things."

Eve's fists clenched. "I know you are a telepath, but could you, please, don't reply to unspoken words? If you read my mind, you know I got your hint already."

"Forgive me. It was rude of me."

Victor walked up to the window. The moonlight fell upon his sharp features, giving them an ethereal air. For once, Victor didn't wear a deep frown, but his emotionless face didn't bring any warmth either. In this instant, he looked like a god of humans' dreams, the spirit that came straight from the deepest parts of imagination. A mystery in flesh, one that always carried with it a dagger called "danger".

In contrast, Eve sat in shadow. Her dark hair blended with the darkness of the night, but her light skin stood out. Her eyes, usually of modest moss-green, were now bright with the same unnatural, electronic light that she once saw in the eyes of the acid zombie. The uneasiness in Eve's body language didn't overweight her self-confidence, and even if she looked tense, he didn't look fearful. If Victor was a spirit, then in this moment, Eve was a witch that was going to contract it.

"So, how much exactly do you know, Mister Kraust?"

"More than you'd like me to, but enough to know that I can put my hopes on you, Doctor Ziffer. I had been watching you ever since you had come to this house."

'So, he knows about the nanites… I wonder since when. But to know something this big and to never show it… This man has the best poker face I've ever seen.' Eve pursed her lips and met Victor's glowing eyes. 'And he just read this in my mind. Tsk.' She snorted, but the annoyance she felt distracted her from her anxiety a little more.

"What hopes are talking about? Since you know who am I and what I can do, it's probably about your nanites?"

Victor nodded. "Indeed. You are a smart woman, Doctor Ziffer. Let me tell you about it from the beginning."

Eve sat more comfortably in her bed. For a while, Victor stayed silent, as if gathering the words. As the seconds passed, his eyes turned more and more cloudy, as if he looking back into the distant past; his expression slowly became more and more troubled until suddenly snapping into the stone-like mask again.

"The obsessive-compulsive disorder you had noticed is an old problem of mine. After suceeding the company from my father, I became the CEO of Radiant Technologies. It-"

"Wait, wait, Radiant Technologies? Really?" Eve almost jumped from her bed with excitement. "I can't believe it!"

Victor looked at her with visible irritation. "Doctor Ziffer, don't interrupt me. We can talk more about it later."

Hearing the commandeering tone of his voice, Eve knew that Victor's OCD was acting up, but from his look she knew it was one time when it was justified. She awkwardly picked at her nails. "Sorry. Please, continue, Mister Kraust."

After throwing another reproachful look at her, he spoke again. "As I wanted to say, it was very stressful on me, and the OCD appeared as a result of it. Whenever the situation around was out of my control, I had a compulsion to bring it, or something else, to order. Back then, it was manageable, and treated with therapy. But after the apocalypse… You can imagine. In order to deal with it, I tried to follow my compulsions. As a result, I gradually became a survivors' leader. Eventually, it allowed me to be one of the first to increase the level of my nanite core and to access my superpower. This was where it became more complicated."

"My superpower allows me to read thoughts and control others' minds. I suspect I was an undiagnosed esper from the very start, and my nanites had only enhanced what had already been there; but only you will be able to tell for sure. At first, this power was very useful for me as a leader of the base, but over time I began to suspect that… I may be controlling the minds of the people I'm in contact with without mine own, or theirs, notice. With time, it became a certainty. This… is why I came to live there, in this place. I don't need to care about animals' free will."

Eve listened to Victor's words with rapt attention. The picture he showed her… there were so many things unsaid between the lines. She could only imagine what he was through. Just like with Xia, when she thought about it, Eve realised she was very lucky for the last six years. 'But this ability of his… it's terrifying.'

She shook away the straying thoughts and scratched her chin. "Let me guess. You want me to do something with your power? Disable it, so you could return to the society?"

"Exactly. You will also be able to look at my core as much as you want. And if you succeed, I'd be glad to follow you and help your mission in whichever way I can."

Eve blinked. "When you put it like that, I have no reasons to disagree. But… Aren't you afraid that I might instead disable you for knowing too much?"

"Aren't you afraid that I might be controlling your thoughts and decisions at this very moment? Even I, myself, can't be one hundred percent sure. I have little to lose, Doctor Ziffer, but much to gain. It's only you who has a lot of both."

Eve chuckled at that. Then she let out a long sigh, feeling herself deflated and exhausted from all the tension. "I agree, then. We can discuss the details tomorrow."

Victor inclined his head in an agreement. "Good night, Doctor Ziffer."

He left without further ado. When the door closed behind his back, Eve fell flat on the bed. 'Uh… For once, I want to sleep like a normal person after all that happened. If I will even able to.'

Her mind was still in turmoil, but that one was of a much more pleasant kind than the anxiety and fear that Eve felt earlier. The knowledge that she was like an open book for someone was disturbing and unnerving, but Eve knew she had some understanding of Victor too. Even if it was unequal, it calmed her down. At the very least, she knew that he truly didn't wish her or her friends—and they really were her friends now, weren't they?—evil. Though that didn't mean that he wasn't going to do it by accident...

'But he was the CEO of Radiant Technologies! Really, what sort of luck is that?' Eve gushed internally.

Radiant Technologies was a company established in the last quarter of the twenty-first century. Their specialisation was robots of all kinds: from smart appliances to Terminator-like military-grade war robots. By the time Eve was studying in school, they were the biggest and the only supplier of robotics on the market—one of the monopolistic mega-corps that had as much or even more influence than country leaders.

As disdainful as Eve was towards mega-corps in general, these blood-suckers that would do anything for a person's money, she was a fan of that one. Only for their products. At one point in time, she had disassembled so many of them in order to understand how they worked… Her childhood dream was to work there—before Eve learned enough to aim even higher.

She sighed and covered her eyes with an arm. 'What a bunch the four of us make. If it was before the apocalypse, Victor would've been one of the first targets for Xia's bullet. As for myself and Celina, we could probably hope for her disdain at most. But now look at us, all together like that!' As Eve's thoughts strayed to more and more random topics, her mind slowly drifted off into the sleep. It was, as she wished, a normal one for once.

In the living room, Victor felt it too. Only then he allowed himself to relax enough to return to sleep again. He, too, slept restfully for the first time in a while despite his long legs not fitting on the couch.