Editing Baku (section)

=== History ===

Evgeniy Mura only realized recently that most people do not have so many gaps in their memory. They felt natural, and they'd always been there. The gaps had never bothered him. Save one, of course - the one that changed everything. That one had been different.

For one thing, it had been the first time he had ever woken with the taste of blood on his tongue, and parts of ... something, something not human - strewn around him. The blood was splashed all over his face as well, as he had found out when he looked in the mirror. Green blood. And what had been staring back at him... The cuts had been only superficial, but who knows if he still had the bad luck? He hadn't really noticed any. And when he'd wrapped a towel around his hand, and gone back into the other room - there was nothing there. That's how the Mist worked, he'd found out.

Some time in that gap he'd become a rift, and moved to the City.

The last things he remembered before that yawning gap were joking with his trainer Maxim in his beat-up VAZ 2112 on the road to a bout in Tbilisi, and jogging out to the ring, feeling pretty confident. He'd built up a good record, the style he'd adapted from MMA training and what his father taught him was hard for people to figure out the first time, and his opponent was bigger but had the look of someone who'd spent too much time partying and not enough training.

The actual fight was lost in the gap.

Yeah, the name was a bit unusual. Russian mother and Japanese father. They had met after - he didn't know if he should call it Nomonhan or Khalkhin-Gol. Gunso (Sargeant) Hirano Mura of the Imperial Japanese Army had been captured in that battle - he'd actually spoken with Zhukov, he liked to remind people. That was before Zhukov was a famous name. Afterward, the Japanese had preferred to list their prisoners as killed, to maintain some sort of honour. At least 3000 could not return home. His father was sent to work in a camp near Vladivostok, where his mother was a nurse. They married not long after Mura was considered rehabilitated.

A couple of the places they lived before ending up in Baku were lost in the gaps. But he remembered fishing in Lake Baikal, and one little village in deep woods that seemed untouched by time. Most of his memories were about Baku. Oil city; it had a distinctive smell. It was even his nickname on the MMA circuit.

The gaps had been rare, since the big one. In the last few years he'd begun to understand the City a little, and how he'd been changed. He started the gym - he couldn't fight for money any more, lest he lose control and tear someone apart, but he could still teach. He hunted monsters. And he had been digging into that one big gap.

When he'd found that picture in the library, with that harmless tapir look, he'd had to laugh. Belatedly, he remembered that his father had even mentioned the Baku once, when he'd had a nightmare as a kid. A Baku from Baku, called Baku. Someone - someone or something - had completely changed his life as some kind of sick joke, and he had to live it. One day they would meet, and he would have some questions.