Nikita

The schedule: 7:30 breakfast, 8:45 therapy, 12:00 lunch, 19:00 dinner, 20:45 evening medication again. Time marked by chemical intervals and food deliveries.

Two roommates share my space. 115 radiates energy, chatty, quick to laugh, always in motion even when sitting still. The other woman occupies her bed like furniture. No conversation, no eye contact. Age impossible to determine. She exists in parallel to us, inhabiting the same room but different reality.

The smoking area becomes my navigation point. 115 settles beside me, immediately comfortable in proximity. Two others sit across: 204, male, weathered face that holds stories, and 205, female, quiet observer.

I study them. Something familiar in 204's posture, the way he holds his cigarette.

"You two are actors, right?"

They exchange glances.

"No," 204 says, "but thanks for the compliment."

But I know him. Last year, a bar in the next town. He'd leaned close during the chaos: Not all police are corrupt. The same voice that later told me the escape on foot had been a trap.

115 offers half her cigarette. We fall into conversation easily, the kind that happens between people who recognize kindred damage without needing to name it.

Mid-morning, staff announces an outing. Nearby supermarket. Supervised excursion for patients deemed stable enough.

I need money, clothes, everything, I am still with my same clothes I left my flat with. But going outside with documents feels dangerous. Leaving them here feels equally unsafe.

Bathroom. Lock the door. Photograph each document: ID card, health card, bank card. Evidence stored digitally in case physical copies vanish.

When I emerge, 115 looks at me differently.

"You're Nikita!"

The reference hits. French film. Feral girl transformed into government assassin. Drug addict from the banlieue, arrested after pharmacy robbery goes catastrophically wrong. Two cops dead, all her crew eliminated. She kills another officer in custody, cold, brutal, decisive.

Life sentence. Then the secret services fake her overdose. Transfer her to their facility. An operative named Bob gives her binary choice: become professional killer or die here.

She resists. Then adapts. Brutal training, not just violence but style, refinement, transformation from street fighter into elegant weapon.

She meets Marco at a supermarket checkout. Casual encounter becomes serious relationship. He discovers her double life. She leaves at dawn while he sleeps. Bob arrives looking for her. Marco hands over the documents she recovered, asks Bob to stop hunting her. Her life is already destroyed.

"Yes," I tell 115. "That's me."

She grins like she's solved a puzzle.

Staff inform me I can't join the outing. Too recently arrived. Minimum one week before supervised excursions. Seven days of proving stability before they trust me with temporary freedom.

115 and I spend the day moving between spaces, bedroom, smoking area, communal corridor where tables and chairs cluster around vending machines and television. She teaches me dance exercises. She was a dancer before whatever brought her here.

Other patients drift through. Most are here for drug problems. This surprises me, I'd expected different pathologies. But everyone seems genuine. No filters. No performance. Hierarchy doesn't exist here. Groups form, dissolve, remix according to mood and cigarette supply.

I discover my credit card works in the vending machines. Coffee for currency. I trade machine credits for cigarettes, establishing small economy.

But 115 never gives whole cigarettes. Always splits hers in half, offers one portion.

I start asking other patients, ones who can leave the facility or receive family visits, to buy me cigarettes. I offer vending machine credits in exchange. Fair trade that bypasses 115's half-measures.

Activities here are limited. Television. Cards. Smoking. Occasional structured events.

Second day, staff announce music analysis session. Optional. Who wants to participate?

I follow the group upstairs.

We settle into a room with better furniture than the ward. A facilitator plays songs, asks us to discuss what we hear. Therapy disguised as cultural appreciation.

The first song hits me before the lyrics start. I discovered this during grape harvest. Handsome Man used to sing it while we worked the vines, sun beating down, that entire world before everything fractured.

Feels like a century ago.

204 analyzes it. His interpretation catches me off guard, he's hearing things in the lyrics I never noticed.

...And not like now on Saturday evenings...

Suddenly I'm thinking about 31. About 38. Both dead now. Life in a room with 31. Saturday evenings drinking wine with 38. All those moments that felt eternal but weren't.

Tears come before I can stop them. They're not coming back. That reality finally completes its calculation in my chest.

But 204 continues his analysis. He focuses on different lines:

...A flower can grow from this love I have for you...

He talks about future love, relationships built without judgment of past; two people meeting beyond their histories, creating something new from accumulated damage.

I think about Handsome Man, messages I still don't fully understand, whether redemption exists for people like us.

204 must be connected to The Whole. Friend of Handsome Man's, maybe. Placed here to watch me, help me decode my own life. The analysis feels too precise to be random. He's teaching me something, showing me routes I can't see alone.

The session ends. We return to the ward. 115 immediately wants my reaction, did I like it? What did I think? She vibrates with social energy that exhausts me.

"It was good," I tell her. True enough.

I seek for 204’s on the web, sure to find an actor, but there are too many namesakes, a none an actor.

Evening medication arrives on schedule. I swallow pills that blur sharp edges, soften the day's accumulation, I'll sleep without dreams.