Someday, Somewhere Better-Impossible
Metal still rang in Aram’s ears when he woke in Kavaristan.
Not an alarm - just the memory of it, the way the sound had cut through the corridor in Ossenko as if the building itself had decided to close.
He sat up in the small room where he kept Sara’s token, the air cold enough to sting his throat.
The floorboards were damp with night condensation.
Somewhere outside, a pipe knocked like a slow, impatient fist. His palm found the envelope before his mind caught up, fingers closing around the worn paper as if it could anchor him to the world.
He told himself it had been moving too fast to be true. That the last transfer could still be delayed. That he would find her - some clerk with a soft conscience, some officer with a debt, some crack in the system big enough for love to crawl through.
But the corridor had been ready for his reaching. And now, in Kavaristan, the room felt like a held breath that had turned solid.
The envelope was warm from his skin, the creases familiar under his thumb.
Legal documents didn’t look like miracles.
They looked like something that could be burned, stamped, erased.
They smelled faintly of dust and the cheap soap he’d used on his hands before he dared touch them.
He’d carried it through crowds and checkpoints and searches, hiding it in cloth and in fear.
Even now, he kept it close, as if distance could make it less real.
His phone lay on the bedspread, face down. He didn’t want to look at it. He didn’t want the screen to confirm what his body already knew: that promises made across borders could be swallowed whole.
When it finally rang, the sound was too loud for the small room, too ordinary. He snatched the phone like it might bite.
“Aram?” The voice was a man’s, clipped and careful. A journalist, maybe. An NGO contact. Someone who’d learned to speak without wasting breath.
Aram’s mouth was dry. “Where did you get my number?”
“Don’t - ” A pause, a swallow you could hear. “It’s confirmed. Sara is dead.”
The words landed without drama, like a door closing in a house you thought was still open. Aram stared at the wall. The plaster had a hairline crack running through it, a thin gray vein that had always been there. Now it looked like a seam.
“She - no.” His voice scraped out of him. “Which hospital? Which - what did they say?”
“They didn’t call it a hospital. They don’t use that word.” Another pause. “There was an incident after arrival. Transport was supposed to be routine. Then paperwork went missing. Then… they found her.”
Aram’s grip tightened on the envelope until the paper inside seemed to press back. His knuckles ached.
“Found where?”
“I can’t - ” The man’s voice went thinner. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to get you something official, but the people who would tell the truth are the ones who are paid not to.”
Aram’s heart beat so hard he felt it in his wrists.
He pictured Sara’s face as he’d last seen it - cheekbones sharp in the airport light, eyes bright with that stubborn kind of hope she never managed to smother, even when she knew better.
He pictured the way she’d handed him the token, her fingers brushing his, her breath quick as if the air itself might be listening.
“Who told you?” he demanded, because anger had to go somewhere. “Who stands to benefit from this being ‘confirmed’?”
“They’re not giving names,” the man said. “They told me to stop calling. They told me it would be dangerous.”
Aram almost laughed, a sound without humor. “Dangerous for who?”
“For you,” the voice answered, and then the line went quiet except for the faint hiss of connection.
Aram stared at the phone until the screen dimmed. The room seemed to tilt. His body wanted to deny the weight of the news, wanted to bargain with physics: if he moved fast enough, if he ran hard enough, if he found the right person with the right key, the dead could be turned back into the living.
But he was in Kavaristan. The transfer was already completed. The system had already decided. The building had been ready.
He looked down at the envelope again, at the small worn rectangle that had carried Sara’s legal name change from one life into another. A woman’s name on paper. A woman’s right to exist, written in ink that could be stolen or ignored.
He opened it with hands that didn’t feel like his.
Inside, the documents lay exactly as he’d last seen them - creased, clipped, edges frayed from being hidden and pulled free too many times. The paper had a faint oil sheen where his thumb always rubbed, as if his touch had tried to preserve what the world refused to protect.
It shouldn’t have mattered now. It shouldn’t have been able to keep breathing. And yet his chest hurt with the need to hold it like proof that she had been here, not just a rumor of suffering, not just a story of someone who vanished.
His phone buzzed once more. A message notification. He didn’t want to read it, but the screen lit up like a wound.
It was from an unknown number. No greeting. No flourish.
They’ll call it an “accident.” Don’t let them. She was gone long before they signed anything.
Below that, another line.
I’m sorry. I have one item that survived. Don’t throw away what you have. It’s all that’s left.
Aram’s vision blurred. He wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand, smearing cold tears into the grime on his skin.
He thought of asking where the “one item” was, thought of demanding a location, thought of chasing a trail that might still exist if there was even a shred of truth left to find.
But the message ended with no map, no address.
Only the insistence of someone who’d seen the inside of too many locked doors.
He stood too quickly and the room spun. The envelope fell open on the bedspread, documents splayed like a wound.
Outside, the pipe knocked again. The sound made him furious in a way he couldn’t explain. Not at the pipe - at the world’s refusal to stop functioning just because his life had broken.
He dressed without thinking, shirt first, then jacket.
The fabric scratched his wrists. He shoved the envelope back inside and tied it in the cloth he used to hide it, the knot tight enough to make his fingers ache.
The token had always been a promise, something she gave him to keep the future from dissolving.
Now it was a relic, and relics were for graves.
He left the room and walked through the narrow corridor of the building where the walls sweated. In the stairwell, someone had left a bucket half full of murky water. The smell of damp concrete and cheap detergent hung in the air.
A neighbor sat on a step, eyes down, holding a transistor radio with one earbud missing. When Aram passed, the neighbor’s gaze flicked up and then away, cautious in a way that had become normal since Sara’s family had started making calls and whispering about compliance.
Aram didn’t ask questions. Asking meant being seen. Being seen meant being counted.
He moved fast anyway, because grief had turned into a kind of motion.
He didn’t know where he was going at first. His body took him toward the places where he’d once thought he could find answers - cafés where he’d met the man in the plain jacket for quick information, a corner shop where the clerk had sometimes slipped him papers, a back room where an aunt had once told him to keep his voice low and his hands steady.
Now, the streets looked the same and nothing was the same. Posters on poles fluttered in the wind. A boy in school uniform ran past with a backpack slapping his spine. His laugh was bright and careless, the kind of sound Aram couldn’t afford.
He reached a small office where a friend of a friend had once helped him navigate bureaucracy without looking like he was navigating. The door was half ajar. Warm air spilled out, carrying the smell of tea and paper.
A woman behind a desk looked up. Her eyes were sharp, not cruel. She’d seen him before, in the kind of light that came after trouble had already started.
“You’re late,” she said, though she didn’t know what clock he ran on.
Aram set the cloth bundle on the counter without opening it. “I need confirmation. Official. Names.”
Her expression tightened at the word official. “Who told you?”
“Someone who knew.” He kept his voice low. “They said she’s dead.”
The woman’s fingers paused over a stamp. “They say a lot of things.”
“Then tell me what you know.”
She looked at him for a long moment, measuring whether he was asking out of desperation or strategy. Finally, she leaned forward and lowered her voice further.
“They returned her paperwork,” she said. “They called it… resolution. The family paid. They paid to make it clean.”
Aram’s stomach turned. “Paid who.”
She didn’t answer directly. Instead she said, “There’s a memo that went through. It’s not signed by one person. It’s routed. It’s a chain. If you wanted to stop it, you would have had to catch the first link. You can’t catch the last one.”
Aram heard the corridor in his head again. Metal clicking. A door closing. A system that didn’t need his reaching because it already knew where he would be.
“So there’s nothing,” he said, and the word nothing tasted like iron. “No record of what happened to her body.”
The woman’s gaze softened in a way that made Aram angrier than cruelty would have. “There’s always a record,” she said. “But the record exists for the people who can use it. Not for the ones who ask.”
He stared at the stamp on the desk. He wanted to smash it. He wanted to tear every document until the names turned into blank paper and the world had to admit that it had lied.
Instead, he swallowed. “Then give me what you can. Anything with dates. Anything with the place.”
She hesitated, then reached into a drawer and slid a thin sheet of paper forward. It wasn’t pretty. The ink was faded. The stamp was smeared where someone had pressed too hard.
Aram didn’t touch it right away. He could feel his pulse in his fingertips.