Cruel Wonders

"I came to the Zone to search for my wife."

That sentence remained stable longer than anything else, along with my memory of her name, her face, the simple fact that she had existed. I repeated it like a mantra. The mind, it turns out, is sometimes more reliable than instruments at keeping the chaos of the Warsaw Altered Reality Zone at bay.

I had been working here for six years. Or thought I had. Time here blurred, doubled back, abandoned its own rules. No one could track its passage with any reliability, despite the technology we built to stabilize and anchor our work and living spaces to what might optimistically be called real time and space. Optimistically, because no one was entirely certain which fragments of this tangled spacetime we were actually meant to belong to.

Maria had entered the Zone on her own. There was no dramatic argument, no sudden disappearance in the night. She told me where she was going and why, with the calm certainty of someone who believed they were finally making sense of the world. She had fallen in with a group she met online, a loose congregation that spoke in careful, reverent language about revelation and thresholds. They believed God resided within the Zone, not metaphorically, but literally.

At first, I assumed it was a phase, a coping mechanism. The Zone had been in the news for decades by then, framed alternately as a scientific anomaly, a geopolitical liability, and a miracle waiting to be claimed ever since it appeared in the late stages of the war. It attracted people who wanted answers, and people who wanted meaning. My wife had always belonged to the second category, and after we lost so much— well, that craving intensified.

She filed the forms, passed the screening tests, and crossed the perimeter fully legally. I never heard from her again. I was cleared to join a research team three years later.

The research barely mattered. We cataloged phenomena that refused to stay cataloged. We stabilized pockets of normalcy and called them labs. Experiments changed depending on who observed them, or who remembered them later. Papers were published, retracted, then published again under different names. I stopped caring about results. I focused on searching for patterns, anomalies in records. Eventually, I found something that aligned just enough to suggest a trail.

In one of the semi-stable border areas, explorers consistently reported the smell of flowers. Some of them even ventured a guess that they may have been peonies.

Maria's favorites.

The reports placed the phenomenon in what the maps called Area C-17, though that implied a stability that did not truly exist. It was a region where teams commonly lost orientation for minutes or days and returned convinced they had been somewhere else entirely. Still, it was passable often enough to be visited more than a few times, which meant there were logs, timestamps, witness statements. Enough paper to find a person in.

I volunteered for the next rotation without offering a reason. No one asked for one.

---

The transition into C-17 was uneventful, which in itself felt suspicious. The perimeter gates hummed, the pressure shift made my ears pop, and then the world resumed its shape. Asphalt. Sky. A line of ruined buildings leaning slightly out of alignment, as though they disagreed about where gravity ought to be. Normal enough.

The smell came an hour into the patrol.

It was faint at first, easily dismissed. Floral notes appeared often in reports, sometimes linked to other plant-related hallucinations or memory bleed-through. But this was different. Heavy. Sweet in the way peonies are, almost excessive.

I stopped walking.

The path behind me had changed. That was not unusual — I checked my position with my instruments, and waited for the disorientation to pass. It did not. Instead, the scent strengthened. The other two members of the patrol I had joined were nowhere to be seen.

I called out their names. The sound was softer than usual, as if the air had decided my voice was no longer worth carrying. Training dictated I should mark the separation and attempt to reestablish contact for a fixed interval. I did neither. The instruments in my hands were still reporting data, still pretending there was a coherent environment to be measured, but my attention had narrowed to the smell. It was no longer ambient. It had direction.

I followed it.

The buildings grew denser, closer together, their angles subtly wrong. Windows repeated themselves across facades that should not have supported them. Doorways opened into shallow darkness and closed again when I passed, as if embarrassed. The scent of peonies thickened with every step, stirring memories.

I slowed, not out of caution but because the space itself seemed reluctant to let me move quickly. My boots touched pavement that felt soft, as though the ground had not fully committed to being solid. The buildings pressed inward further, misshapen windows judging me from on high for pressing on.

I told myself I had to turn back, rejoin the patrol... even though I was not sure that was even possible. Instead, I kept walking. I squeezed myself through the small gap that the path forward had become, and emerged into a courtyard, or perhaps a clearing.

It opened between two buildings that should not have allowed space for one. Peonies filled it wall to wall. Pale pink, deep crimson, white edged with bruised purple. They grew directly from cracked concrete, from broken stairs, from the hollow shell of a tank half-sunk into the ground. No wind moved them, but they shifted anyway, a slow collective breath. The instruments at my waist emitted a soft tone and went silent.

I slowly entered the clearing.

The smell was overwhelming now. Nearly sickening, cloying, as if I was drowning in it as I pressed on, memories of Maria surging. The scent caught on something small — her scolding me because I always forgot to take off my boots at the door.

and there she was, arms crossed but smiling, as happy to see me as ever. Lilia ran up to me and hugged my knees, and I reached down to ruffle her hair. She asked me, 'mom, how was work?' and I replied 'oh, the usual. All good.' Maria shook her head. She could always read me like an open book. 'Do you want something to eat?' she asked, and I

I squeezed my eyes shut as hard as I could. The smell of peonies surged once more, and I felt weak, woozy. The vision subsided. I took three deep, shaky breaths — through my mouth, not through my nose.

When I opened my eyes, all the flowers were gone.

No — all but one. A yellow peony stood alone in the exact center of the clearing. The scent did not let up one iota.

My instruments remained silent at my waist. I reached for them out of reflex, pressed the reset sequence, watched the display flicker and then fill with symbols that meant nothing. The characters rearranged themselves when I blinked.

The flower seemed to lean to the side, guiding my eyes to the edge of the clearing, an opening between the ruined buildings. I saw a flicker of red hair disappear around a corner.

My mouth had gone dry.

"Maria!?" I gasped, before I could stop myself, and immediately started running, boots digging into the soft cobblestone-turned-mud. I slipped, nearly fell, the instruments in my hands sent flying as I barely caught myself. I didn't care. "Maria!"

The clearing shifted.

The mud under my boots hardened, becoming the uneven tiles of our kitchen floor. The air warmed. The smell of peonies thinned, joined by coffee and something frying in butter. I could hear plates clacking, the muted hum of a refrigerator, a life arranged into small predictable noises.

"You're late," she said lightly, from everywhere and nowhere.

My throat closed. I ran into the gap between buildings, the walls becoming increasingly domestic, doorways and windows shifting into furniture. I stumbled forward, the air thick with warmth and familiarity. The sharp edges of concrete softened into painted walls I knew by heart, pale yellow and slightly uneven where we had argued about doing the renovations ourselves. My breath sounded too loud in the space, as if I was intruding.

The hallway narrowed, then widened into the kitchen. Light spilled across the table in the same angle as late afternoons used to, though I could not remember what time it was supposed to be. The refrigerator hummed patiently.

Maria stood with her back to me, red hair tied loosely, one shoulder bare where her shirt slipped. For a moment I could not move. The scene held itself together with frightening precision: the cracked mug by the sink with cutlery in it, Lilia’s drawing stuck beneath a magnet shaped like a strawberry on the fridge.

"You're really late," she said again, turning slightly, smiling without looking all the way at me.

My chest hurt. "Maria," I said, softer this time, as if speaking too loudly might break whatever spell had gotten hold of me.

She reached for a pan, stirring something that hissed in butter. The smell rose warm and ordinary, pushing the last traces of peony back toward the edges of the room. A single yellow flower, in a vase on the windowsill. "Did you forget to call again?" she asked. "You know she worries when you disappear like that."

I looked toward the table. A small backpack sat on one of the chairs, half unzipped. A worksheet peeked out, covered in messy handwriting.

The room flickered.

The refrigerator hum dipped lower, sounding ever so subtly wrong. Shadows gathered where they should not have, pooling beneath the cabinets.

I took a step toward her. "Is this real?"

She laughed quietly. "You always ask questions like that."

Another flicker. The walls breathed outward, then drew back in. For a moment I saw the ruined buildings beyond them, a sliver of gray sky wedged between cabinets and ceiling. The scent of peonies surged, sweet and suffocating, threading itself through the smell of food.

"Lilia is gone, Maria. Or — are you even actually her?"

Maria paused, spatula held still above the pan. The sound of sizzling softened, as though the room itself leaned in to listen. She considered the question with an expression I recognized too well — the way she used to look when deciding whether honesty would hurt more than comfort.

"I don't know," she said at last. She set the spatula down and turned a little more toward me, enough that I could see her profile, the curve of her mouth uncertain now.

"I thought I knew," she continued. "Back when I came here. I thought there was something waiting. Something bigger than us, something that made all of this make sense."

The refrigerator hummed again, the note wavering at the edges. The walls gave a faint, slow breath. She shook her head.

"We kept saying God was in the Zone," she said softly. "That was the story everyone liked."

Her fingers traced the edge of the counter, absentmindedly, like she was grounding herself against it.

"But that's not right."

The yellow peony on the windowsill tilted toward her, petals trembling though no air moved. It's shadow lengthened, as if the sun was going down exclusively for it.

She looked at me then, properly, and for the first time her smile was gone.

"We didn't find God in the Zone," she said.

The words arrived gently, almost apologetically. The room shifted slightly. The light over the table brightened and dimmed in uneven pulses. The hallway behind me lengthened for a breath, stretching into impossible distance before snapping back into place.

I swallowed. "What does that mean?"

Maria's gaze dropped briefly to the backpack at the table, to the drawing clipped beneath the strawberry magnet. She smiled, gently and almost serenely.

"I think you know what it means."

The pan hissed again, too loud now, the smell of butter turning sharp, almost burnt. Underneath it, the peonies thickened — sweet, invasive, pressing into my lungs. The cabinets flickered. For an instant they were concrete walls again, wet and cracked with age. Then the kitchen returned, warmer than before, almost unbearably warm. My hands trembled.

"So you're not real."

She smiled.

"I didn't say that."

The refrigerator tone dipped lower, starting to resemble that familiar Zone hum. The shadows beneath the cabinets deepened, creeping outward like spilled ink. Maria leaned against the counter, watching me carefully.

"You came here looking for me," she said. "You found me." A small smile touched her lips. "Does the difference matter to you right now?"

The question hung between us. Behind her, the yellow peony shed a single petal. It drifted down in slow motion, taking far too long to reach the sill.

"Lilia," I said. The name came out with difficulty. "Is she...?"

The smell of peonies surged so hard my vision blurred.

"Careful," she continued. "The more certain you are about what this is... the more it will be just that."

My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against the edge of the table, feeling the solid weight of it under my palms, the faint stickiness where something had spilled and not been wiped properly. The detail was so small, so wrongfully ordinary, that my breath hitched.

Don't decide, I told myself. Don't believe anything. Just observe.

The room shivered.

The shadows thickened, swallowing the space beneath the cabinets until it looked like the floor dropped away entirely. The refrigerator hum deepened into that endless Zone vibration, a sound that always made my teeth ache. The yellow peony bent further, its stem bowing as though under invisible weight. The petal drifted down from the flower like it was moving through something far thicker than air.

Maria watched me quietly.

I swallowed. "If I don't choose," I said, the words thin, "then maybe it can't settle. Maybe I can keep it... open."

She tilted her head slightly. There was pity in her expression.

"You're already choosing," she said.

The kitchen flickered — cabinets turning to damp concrete, light collapsing into gray, the smell of butter burned away by the suffocating sweetness of peonies. The shadow of the flower, ever lengthening, flowed over my boots like thick tar. My chest tightened. The walls pushed inward.

I closed my eyes.

Not to reject it. Just to breathe.

I pictured the hallway as it had been. The uneven paint. The way Lilia's shoes always ended up kicked half under the table no matter how many times we told her not to. The safe, predictable rhythm of evenings I used to think were ordinary.

The pressure in the room eased. When I opened my eyes, the kitchen was whole again. The humming quieted. The shadows retreated into places shadows were supposed to be.

Maria exhaled slowly, like someone who had been waiting to see what I would do. I felt the choice settling around me, not like a decision but like gravity — inevitable, gentle, impossible to argue with.

"I know this isn't..." I stopped. The words felt unnecessary. The truth I had carried for years felt brittle. I let it go.

My voice came out smaller than I expected. "I don't care anymore."

The sentence hung in the warm air.

The peony on the windowsill straightened. The petal that had been falling finally touched down.

Maria's shoulders softened. She turned back toward the stove, stirring the pan again as if nothing unusual had happened. The quiet hiss returned, steady and comforting.

I moved without thinking and crossed the room. My legs felt weak, but the floor held. When I reached her, I hesitated only a moment before wrapping my arms around her from behind.

She was warm.

Not like a memory. Not imagined. Solid. Present.

I pressed my forehead to her shoulder. For a long moment neither of us spoke. The peonies faded to the room's edges, replaced by butter and coffee and the clean soap scent of her skin. Far away, the Zone hummed like a storm behind thick walls.

"I was so tired," I whispered.

She covered my hands with hers.

"I know," she said.

The kitchen light steadied. The air stopped shifting. The world, or this small piece of it, settled into place.