Chapter 77: The Girl Who Wanted to Choose Before Being Chosen
The National Gallery of Georgia felt like a cathedral built for silence and stolen glances. Sunlight, filtered through tall windows, fell in thick, dusty slabs across parquet floors, illuminating floating galaxies of mote. The air smelled of lemon polish, old varnish, and the faint, metallic tang of climate control. Rows of portraits watched from gilded frames—kings, poets, sorrowful beauties—their painted eyes following Varek and Izolda as they moved slowly through the halls.
Izolda was uncharacteristically still. She walked beside Varek not with her usual magnetic sway, but with a sort of absorbed tension, as if the quiet of the place had temporarily shocked her system. She paused before a large canvas of a woman in a black dress, her expression one of profound, untranslatable boredom.
“She looks like she’s waiting for a text message,” Izolda murmured, a ghost of her usual playfulness in her voice.
“Three hundred years too early,” Varek said, stopping beside her. “She’s waiting for a husband to return from a war, or for smallpox to not scar her. The anxiety is similar, just slower.”
Izolda snorted, a short, unguarded sound that seemed too loud in the hall. She caught herself, glancing around at a pair of elderly tourists who frowned in their direction. She lowered her voice. “You didn’t bring me here for an art lesson.”
“I brought you here for the silence,” Varek said, his hands in his pockets, his gaze on the painted woman. “And the faces. They all made choices, these people. Or choices were made for them. The result is the same: frozen. Forever. A testament to a single moment of negotiation with the world.”
He turned from the painting to look at her. The sunlight caught the subtle gold in her hair, the restless uncertainty in her eyes. She was the most alive thing in the room, a volatile chemical in a preservative fluid.
“Your moment is coming, Izolda. The selection. One from six.” He let the numbers hang. “You’ve seen the mechanisms now. The mountain. The bazaar. The… transactions.”
A faint blush coloured her neck at the memory of the fortress, Vaso’s possession, the cold stone. She didn’t look away. “I’ve seen.”
“So I have a question. A final one.” He shifted his stance, his voice dropping into a confidential register that seemed to pull all the ambient sound from the air around them. “If it guaranteed your selection, and voided theirs… would you betray the other five? Madona, Makvala, Besarion, Otar, Vaso. Would you sacrifice them all?”
Her laugh arrived first—a bright, reflexive sparkle of sound that echoed off the high ceiling. It was the laugh she used at parties, the one that drew eyes and promised she found everything delightfully trivial. It rang, and then, as it met the unwavering calm of Varek’s mercury gaze and the solemn faces of the portraits, it faltered. It died in her throat, leaving her lips parted in a silent ‘O’ of surprise at her own failed performance.
The silence rushed back in, heavier.
She turned to look at the painting again, as if the woman in black might have an answer. “No,” she said, the word soft but clear. “Not all five.”
“Why not?”
She chewed her lower lip, a nervous, girlish habit she usually suppressed. “Madona… yes. Maybe. If her judgment ever became a weapon aimed at me. She thinks my generation is frivolous. She’d sacrifice me for a handbag. So, yes.”
She moved to the next painting, a stern patriarch. “Makvala… perhaps. It would be like a chess game. She’d expect it. She might even respect it. There’s no malice there, just… sport.”
She took a few steps, her heels clicking softly, then silent on a rug. “Besarion… if it was necessary. If he was in the way. He’s solid. He’s real. But he’s not… flexible. He’d be a casualty of circumstance, not of hate.”
She stopped, her back to Varek, facing a smaller, darker canvas of a boy with wide, sad eyes. “Otar…” Her voice changed. It lost its edge of calculation, softened into something almost pained. “He told me. At the university. After the lecture on existential poetry. He thought it was awful, pretentious. He said he just liked things that were clearly true. ‘The sky is blue. Bread is good. You are beautiful.’ He said it just… like that. Not to flatter. Like he was stating the chemical composition of water.” She reached out, almost touching the gilded frame, but pulled her hand back. “He’s not a player. He’s a person sitting in the stands, wondering how he got a ticket. Betraying him wouldn’t be strategy. It would be… cruelty. It would complicate me.”
Then she turned around. All the softness was gone, burned away by a hotter, fiercer flame. Her eyes were sharp, her posture taut. “Vaso is different.”
“Explain.”
“Betraying Vaso wouldn’t be about winning a game,” she said, her words coming faster now, a pressurized stream. “It would be about setting a fire in my own house to burn the locks off. He doesn’t want a partner. He wants a portrait. Something beautiful he can hang on his wall and point to as his. ‘My Izolda.’ My choice, my laugh, my time, my body—all pre-approved. Belonging.” She spat the word as if it tasted of ash. “If betraying him here, in this, meant freedom from that? I would do it. I wouldn’t ask the game for permission. I wouldn’t even wait for you to finish the question.”
The confession hung in the silent gallery, stark and undeniable. It wasn’t a polished justification. It was raw motive, torn from the core of her.
Varek studied her—the heather of her chest, the defiant set of her jaw, the way her hands trembled slightly even as they clenched into fists at her sides. He saw not a strategist, not a ruthless climber, but a creature of wild, beautiful flux trying to wrest control of its own narrative from every other hand that sought to hold it—from Vaso’s possession, from society’s expectation, even from the tempting script of this selection game.
She didn’t only want to be chosen.
She wanted to choose herself.
A slow, genuine smile touched Varek’s lips, one devoid of calculation. It was the smile of an archivist who has just found the missing folio that makes sense of the entire chaotic, contradictory text.
“Thank you, Izolda,” he said, his voice warm with something like respect. “That was perfectly clear.”
He didn’t elaborate. He simply turned and began to walk toward the gallery’s grand exit, leaving her standing alone in the aisle of watching faces. She didn’t follow. She stood surrounded by centuries of frozen choices, the dust dancing in the sunbeams around her, feeling for the first time that her own chaotic, terrifying potential was the most real canvas in the room.
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Mziuri Park, Tbilisi, Georgia — near Chavchavadze Avenue, in the Vera River valley.
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Mziuri Park, Tbilisi, Georgia — near Chavchavadze Avenue, in the Vera River valley.
April afternoon softened everything. Sunlight dripped through the fresh, green leaves of the park’s tall trees, dappling the paved paths that wound past a tranquil, murky lake. Children’s shouts echoed from a distant playground, a bright tapestry of sound against the low hum of city traffic just beyond the pines.
Otar Jinjikhashvili sat rigid on a bench, his knees locked together. He watched a pair of ducks paddle in listless circles. He’d been sitting there for ten minutes, his heart performing a dull, frantic rhythm against his ribs. When Varek’s shadow fell across him, he flinched, as if struck by something cold.
“Relax, Otar,” Varek said, his voice easy as he took a seat on the far end of the bench. He placed a paper bag between them. “Pkhali. From the café. You look like you forgot to eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” Otar mumbled, but his stomach chose that moment to contract audibly. He flushed, the heat crawling up his neck.
“Your body disagrees.” Varek didn’t push the food, just leaned back, observing the ducks. “Peaceful here. A good place to think without the weight of architecture. Or portraits.”
Otar said nothing. He focused on a crack in the pavement, tracing its jagged path with his eyes. He knew why he was here. The final interview. The mountain and the fortress and the bazaar had all been terrifying, but they were chaos—you could hide in motion. This stillness felt like an exhibit.
“Your mother was in the botanical garden,” Varek said casually. “Very composed. Very determined. She gave a compelling argument for her own candidacy.”
“She’s good at that,” Otar said, the words tasting like dust.
“She is. Besarion was up at the Chronicle. Also compelling, in his way. Izolda was in the gallery.” Varek paused, letting the names settle like stones in water. “Everyone has a theory of survival. A price. A line they won’t cross. Or will.”
Otar’s hands were trembling. He tucked them under his thighs, pressing hard against the cold wood of the bench. He knew the question was coming. He’d rehearsed answers in the mirror, trying on different versions of himself—the ruthless one, the clever one, the remorseful but pragmatic one. He’d practiced the cadence of a man who belonged in conversations like this.
“So,” Varek said, turning his head just enough to catch Otar’s peripheral vision. “The same threshold. Your selection guaranteed. Theirs voided. Madona, Izolda, Vaso, Besarion, Makvala. Would you betray all five?”
The rehearsed answers lined up in Otar’s throat, a slick, prepared chorus. Yes, for the opportunity. Yes, for a future. Yes, because they’d do it to me. He opened his mouth, the compliant shape of ‘yes’ already forming on his tongue.
And then he stopped.
The word died, unvoiced. He saw his mother’s face in the garden, not composed but frozen when her love for him was used as a metric. He saw Izolda’s fleeting, unguarded smile in the university hall, a moment of pure noticing that had warmed him for days. He felt the dense, intimidating shadow of Vaso, a stain he wanted to scrub from the world, not join.
He remembered Besarion’s rough approval after they’d secured the disc, a grunt that felt more valuable than any trophy. And Makvala—her dangerous, knowing smile in the bazaar alley, a smile that saw right through him and hadn’t laughed.
To betray them all would be to annihilate every meaningful point of contact in his terrifying new world. It would be a nuclear solution. He would be alone in the ashes, crowned king of nothing.
“No,” he said.
The word came out quiet, but clean. It didn’t wobble.
Varek didn’t respond immediately. The park sounds swelled to fill the silence—the ducks squabbling, a bicycle bell, a mother calling a child’s name.
“Explain,” Varek said, his tone neutral, clinical.
Otar swallowed, his throat tight. “I might fail. I’d probably panic. If Vaso cornered me, I… I might even try to get him out first.” He was thinking aloud now, the truth spilling in fragile, uneven pieces. “I lied already, to my mother, for the disc. It made me feel sick. If I did that times five? If I made that my currency?”
He finally looked at Varek, his eyes wide with the horror of the vision. “Then I’m just proving I’m worthless in a different way. I become the guy who matters because everyone else is gone. That’s not strength. It’s just… emptiness with a medal.”
He ran out of air, out of words. He sat there, deflated, awaiting the dismissal. He had failed the test. He had chosen the weak, sentimental path. He was his mother’s boy after all.
Varek studied him. The assessment in his mercury eyes wasn’t cold. It was meticulous, like a jeweler examining a rough stone under a new light. He saw the crack in the shell of obedient fear. He saw the nascent, trembling structure of a personal ethic rising from the rubble—untested, unpolished, but unmistakably there.
Obedience had shattered. Something else, something far more intriguing, had begun to take its place.
Varek nodded once, a slow, deep acknowledgement. He didn’t smile. He didn’t offer empty praise. He simply stood, picking up the paper bag of untouched food.
“Eat, Otar,” he said, placing the bag firmly in Otar’s limp hands. “You’ll need your strength.”
Then he walked away, leaving Otar on the bench clutching the warm food, the ducks, and the terrifying, burgeoning weight of his own unconverted value.
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Dedaena Park, Tbilisi, Georgia — on the right bank of the Mtkvari River, near the Dry Bridge.
The night air in Dedaena Park carried the damp, mineral scent of the Mtkvari, mixing with fried dough from a nearby café and the faint, acrid trace of skateboard wheels grinding on concrete. Strings of bulbs wound through the trees, casting a warm, uneven glow that made the shadows beneath them deeper and more private. Varek found Makvala leaning against the iron railing overlooking the river, watching the dark water swallow and distort the reflected lights.
She didn’t turn as he approached, just took a slow pull from a small bottle of local brandy. “The maestro of difficult questions arrives,” she said, her voice a low, amused ribbon under the park’s ambient noise. “I was starting to feel left out.”
“Your turn was always saved for the right atmosphere,” Varek replied, joining her at the railing. He declined the bottle she offered with a slight shake of his head. “Daylight interviews are for measuring principle. Night interviews are for measuring appetite.”
Makvala laughed, a genuine, rich sound that carried. “My appetite is famously poorly measured.” She capped the bottle and set it on the wide stone ledge, turning to face him, her elbows propped back against the iron. The playful light danced in her eyes, but her focus was absolute, a hunter’s stillness. “So, ask. Before I get bored and find a skater to flirt with.”
The question didn’t need framing. It hung between them, as present as the river’s rumble.
“The five others,” Varek said. “Your guarantee. Their erasure. Would you do it?”
Makvala’s smile came first—a quick, bright flash of teeth. Then her gaze drifted past him, into the middle distance where thought lived. She took her time. This wasn’t a struggle; it was a tasting.
“Yes,” she said finally, the word precise. “But not stupidly. And not all the same way.”
“Describe the ways.”
“Madona would be pleasure.” The answer was immediate, effortless. “A long-denied dessert. It wouldn’t feel like betrayal. It would feel like… editing. Removing a false footnote from a text. She’s built her life on judgments she can’t afford. Unbuilding it would be almost artistic.”
A skateboard clattered to the pavement in the distance, followed by a chorus of whoops.
“Izolda would be timing,” Makvala continued, her fingers tapping a silent rhythm on the railing. “Catching her on the switchback of one of her own emotional storms. You don’t betray a hurricane; you just step aside and let it hit the coast. She’d do most of the work herself, if you placed the wrong person in her path at the right moment.”
She paused, her head tilting. “Vaso would be justice disguised as mischief. Unspooling that man’s ego would be a public service. You’d just have to find the one screw he thinks no one can see and give it the gentlest turn. The collapse would be structural. Beautiful.”
Her voice softened, not with pity, but with a kind of aesthetic disappointment. “Otar would be unfortunate. Because fragile people make betrayal feel less elegant. It’s like breaking a glass that’s already cracked. The mess is predicted, the satisfaction minimal. You’d do it, but you wouldn’t savor the click.”
She fell quiet then. The sounds of the park filled the space: laughter from a café terrace, the relentless river, the thrum of bass from a passing car.
Varek waited. He knew who was left.
“And Besarion?” he asked.
Makvala didn’t answer immediately. She looked down at her hands, then out at the black water, her earlier performative ease evaporating. This pause was different. It had weight.
“I would betray him too,” she said, her voice lower now, stripped of its playful cloak. “Of course I would. If the math required it.”
She picked up the brandy bottle, rolling the cool glass between her palms. The bioluminescent channels in a passing Laurian’s skin cast a faint, rippling blue light across her face for a moment.
“But perhaps,” she added, the words so quiet they were almost lost to the river, “not before seeing how far he can challenge me.”
She met Varek’s eyes then, and for the first time all night, there was no game in her gaze. There was a raw, unsettled curiosity. She was thinking of the bazaar alley, the brutal physics of him, the way her cleverness had met an unmovable object and, for a suspended second, hadn’t wanted to win. She had wanted the impact.
“He’s the only one who doesn’t play my game back at me,” she said. “He changes the game. He makes it… real. And real things are harder to discard cleanly. You get fragments under your nails.”
Varek listened, absorbing the confession. He saw the map of her logic, flawless and cold, and the single, fissure-like fault line running straight through the territory named Besarion. Her betrayal would be clinical, efficient, and utterly comprehensive.
Except for the one man who had, through sheer, uncompromising authenticity, made himself an unpredictable variable in her personal equation.
A slow smile touched Varek’s lips, not of judgment, but of profound satisfaction. He had her complete metric.
“Thank you, Makvala,” he said, pushing off from the railing. “You’ve been exceptionally thorough.”
He melted into the pattern of shadows and light, leaving her alone with the bottle and the river. She didn’t watch him go. She stared into the water, her own reflection fragmented and swirling in the current, thinking of challenge, of fragments, and of the unsettling cost of a perfectly executed plan.