The erasure part two

The transition from blackness to consciousness felt like surfacing through oil—thick, slow, and suffocating. My eyes fluttered open to a ceiling of cracked plaster and the smell of boiled cabbage and old tobacco.

"Take it slow," a familiar voice said.

I sat up, my head throbbing with a rhythmic cadence that matched the 23.5 hours of travel still vibrating in my bones. I was on a narrow cot in a room that looked like it hadn't been renovated since the Cold War. The man I knew as my uncle, Charles, was sitting in a wooden chair across from me, his face illuminated by a single, flickering bulb.

"Charles," I croaked, my voice cracking. "I saw the obituary. I saw the grief in your widow’s eyes. I thought you died We all did."

"I had to," he said, his voice thinner than I remembered. "The cancer was real and was bordering on terminal. The only way I could buy more time—the kind of time only high-level state medicine can provide—was to come back. To work for Russia again."

I stiffened, the word hitting me like a physical blow. "Again?"

Charles gave a weary nod. "I worked for the KGB through my college years, even while I was dating my second wife. It’s a shadow that never truly leaves you."

"You were my handler," I whispered, the realization twisting in my gut. "All this time?"

"They knew the familial connection made it a risk," he explained, leaning forward. The light caught the hollows of his cheeks; he looked like a ghost inhabiting a living man. "But they also knew he’d be the only person you would ever truly trust from this side of the world. They purposely kept us in different cells until the moment you needed to be pulled out. They called me back in to get you out from under our government’s thumb."

"How is your health now?" I asked, looking at his trembling hands.

"The tumors shrank," he said with a grimace. "The treatment works, but the energy level... it sucks. I’m a shell, but I’m a shell with a purpose."

"How did you fool her? Us?"

A ghost of a smile touched his lips. "My oncologist was in on it. He was my handler back in the day. He brought me back in and found a double—a man who looked enough like me, someone dying with no family and no one to mourn him. We swapped places in the hospice. To the world, I am buried in a plot back home."

The level of deception made my skin crawl. "How long have you known who I was in the field?"

"From the get-go," he admitted.

"And how long until I’m free of this?"

"I don't know," Charles sighed. "You’re in deep. Fifteen years of service doesn't just vanish because you crossed a border. It will take time to erase you properly."

We ate a sparse meal of rye bread and tinned fish. The conversation turned to the people I’d left behind without naming names. Charles – or the man pretending to be my uncle – didn’t need to know their names nor what they meant to me.

"I need to be protected, Charles. If this to be done the right way, I need to remain safe," I said, meeting his eyes with a cold intensity.

"I’ll work to get you free," he said, "but first, I need to build your Russian life. How is your language?"

"I'm near fluent in speaking," I replied in perfect Russian, the vowels rolling off my tongue with practiced ease. "But if I have to read a dossier or write a report in Cyrillic, I’m royally screwed. I can’t do either."

"We’ll start the identity paperwork in the morning," he said, standing up with a groan. "I’ll use my contacts to find you an office job—something with a fake title and a boring desk. I know what you’re worth financially; you don’t have to work another day, but we need the cover."

Charles fell asleep almost instantly after the meal, his breathing heavy and rattling. I sat in the corner, the adrenaline and jetlag making sleep an impossibility. My mind was a beehive of conflicting thoughts. I needed therapy—the weight of the last decade was crushing me—but what did Russia think of mental health? And then there was the larger problem: I was in a country that viewed human rights as a suggestion, and I felt like I was being held by a man who had faked his own death. A man that I didn’t trust completely to believe that he was truly my uncle.

I stood up and began to pace. Uncle Charles had always been a man of obsessive order, yet this cabin was a shambles. Dust motes danced in the dim light, and papers were strewn across the table. The inconsistency gnawed at me. Was this truly my uncle, or was this the ultimate play by the FSB? I decided to start cleaning the room and the rest of the small cabin; it was the only way to settle my nerves and search for clues.

While he slept, I moved with a ghost's silence. I went to my bag and grabbed my burner phone. I sent a few texts to other contacts I have here in Russia, testing the waters. Due to the late hour, I didn’t expect any immediate responses, but I needed to know who was still on the board.

As I waited for a response, I checked my documents, my chargers, and the GPS tracker my childhood friend was monitoring. I checked the seams of the lining. My heart stopped.

There, tucked into the double-stitched corner of the inner pocket, was a micro-tracker. I removed to my clothes. I found three more embedded in the hems of my jacket and shirt as well as my belt loop on my jeans.

Charles had put these on me.

The betrayal was a cold blade in my chest. If he were truly my uncle, if he truly wanted me free, he wouldn't have tagged me like a head of cattle. I immediately took them off and crushed them. I destroyed the trackers, got dressed, and slipped out of the cabin into the freezing Russian night. I was done being a pawn.

I was three miles from the cabin, walking along a frozen ridge, when my burner phone vibrated. it wasn't one of my Russian contacts responding. it was a number that i didn't recognize.

"Hello?" I whispered.

"It's Sera," she said. "I hope you left because I don't think that man is your uncle."

I took a sharp breath, the cold air stinging my lungs. "I'm already gone, Sera. I’m on a ridge three miles out. I agree with you—I don’t think it’s him either. The trackers he planted were amateur, but insulting."

"Good," she replied, her voice clipping through the digital static. "What are you going to do now?"

"I'm not sure," I admitted, looking out into the white abyss of the growing storm. "But I need you to do me a favor. Don’t track me. Not at all. I need to essentially drop off the radar in Russia while staying in Russia. If you’re pinging me, someone else will eventually find the frequency."

There was a long pause. "I can't just let you go dark, Deppgrl. I'll keep loose tabs on you rather than a hard track. I'll contact you in the morning. Just... stay alive until then."

"Thank you, Sera," I said. I ended the call and pulled the battery from the burner. I told myself that I’d reinsert the battery during my trek the following day.

I walked another 23 miles in a blizzard that felt like a physical weight against my chest. The wind whipped through my layers; even with the extra clothes I’d pulled from my bag, I wasn't warm enough. My fingers were losing sensation and my breath came in ragged, icy plumes. Every step was a battle against the instinct to simply lie down in the snow and sleep.

By the time I reached my first safe house—a place I knew with absolute certainty that no agency or relative had on a map—I was shivering violently. I fumbled with the hidden latch, nearly sobbing with relief when the door swung open. Inside, I stripped off my cold, wet clothes, my skin pebbled and blue-tinged, and hung them up in the closet.

I wasn't entirely alone in this sector. I had allowed a few local grifters to use this cabin over the years. It was a trade: they got a roof, and in return, they kept it clean and stocked with canned food, gallons of water, and seasoned wood. They had done their job well. I lit the wood and kindling they had already set up in the hearth. Within minutes, the small space began to warm, the orange glow reflecting off the frost on the windows.

I wrapped a thick towel around myself, grabbed a few large buckets, and stepped back out into the biting wind to gather snow. It took a dozen exhausting trips to fill the large metal tub. Once back inside, I lit the wood in the small grate beneath the tub. While the fire worked on the snow, I gathered another pile of snow for a second round—I needed to wash the scent of that other cabin and the travel off my clothes as much as my body.

When the water finally reached a near-boiling temperature, I ladled some out into a basin to rinse with. I climbed into the tub, the heat almost painful against my frozen skin, and spent an hour scrubbing the grime and the "travel" off me. I pulled the plug, watching the gray water disappear down the drain and through the pipes that led deep into the frozen earth away from the cabin.

I rinsed off, dried my hair, applied deodorant, and finally dressed in the fresh, dry clothes I had shipped along with my medications. The relief of clean fabric was indescribable.

I moved on to the clothes I had worn through the blizzard. I poured lye soap into the second batch of melted snow, dumped my gear in, and stirred the heavy wet fabric with a broom handle. I let them soak for hours, neutralizing any lingering scents or chemical traces. Eventually, I drained the tub and used the last of my stored water to rinse the soap away before hanging the clothes in the closet furthest from the fire to dry slowly.

I would have loved to fall into the bed and sleep for a week, but the cabin wasn't secure. The locks were rusted and barely functioning, and the thought of Charles—or whoever that man was—hunting me through the snow kept me on edge. I knew I had to leave at first light, and I knew I couldn't leave this place standing.

I dug through the cabinets until I found a large, durable canvas bag I’d left here years ago. I began to pack: the freshly cleaned clothes that finally dried, my meds, the burner phone, trackers, and charging cables. I tossed in the remaining cans of food, water bottles, and basic utensils.

For the rest of the night, I moved with a mechanical precision. I prepped the cabin to be torched, dousing the dry wood and old furniture in accelerant. I organized and reorganized my bag for maximum weight distribution, allowing myself only fifteen-minute increments of rest in the chair, never letting my eyes close for long.

When the first grey light of dawn began to bleed through the blizzard, I shouldered my pack. I struck a handful of matches and dropped them onto the prepared kindling. I watched for only a moment as the flames took hold of the curtains and the floorboards.

I stepped out into the storm, heading for the next safe house sixty miles away. The blizzard showed no signs of letting up, and I knew that on foot, in this terrain, the trek would take several days. But the trail behind me was burning, and for the first time in fifteen years, I was truly invisible.