Natalia

The room was massive, an old warehouse that had been reclaimed years ago. Pipes writhed like living things down the walls, and the harsh orange lights illuminated a room full of shifty-eyed girls with racing heartbeats.
Twenty-eight of us stood all in a line, already looking at each other like caged animals. The room was painted red. Dark red, rimming their fingernails. Dark red, welling at their knuckles. Dark red shining hair, tied away from my face, standing out in a nearly colorless room. I was wrapping my hands.
Only so I could hit harder. No one trusted me. Trust was weakness.

Thirty punching bags all in a row, two of them unclaimed. We tried to ignore them, tried to forget those last two girls. They were weaker, hadn't punched hard enough, hadn't ran away fast enough. Only the strongest survived here.

Whispers began to fill the air like static over a radio. What new horrors will today bring? Guns that could bring a battalion down, thin little knives that could pierce someone's heart without a sound. A thousand ways to break someone's neck. And worse. Things they would never forget.

"Romanova, Natalia Alianovna." A husky voice rang out. Unfamiliar, quiet but reverberating around the massive room nonetheless. Twenty-seven heads turned, saw the man walking down the line, looking at them thoughtfully. I didn't look up.

I kept wrapping my hands, slowly, carefully. I set my jaw, unwilling to respond until I knew who the voice belonged to. The man stopped in front of me, I could see through my eyelashes, a shadow in black clothes that frayed at the edges. Old clothes, worn through with ragged holes and tears cut from knives. Battle-worn.

He was watching me carefully, expressionless. There was a black cloth tied over his nose and mouth. Anonymous. Terrifying. The room was quiet. Had be come for her?

"I don't answer to people I don't know," I said quietly, slowly looking up at the person standing in front of me. He had the lost look in his eyes she saw too often. The lost look that killers had.

Messy dark hair, circles under the eyes. Muscles straining against a jacket that didn't quite fit. Shoulders slumped a little to the left, must mean the right was weaker. Nothing she hadn't seen before. "So you're Romanova."

I tilted my head to the side, my voice cold and eyes colder. I caught a glint of metal under his sleeve. I felt my eyes widen. "Who are you?"

"Your new instructor," he answered after a long moment, addressing the whole room. "You've been trained to be assassins, spies. You were taught infiltration and decoding, gauging emotion and expecting someone's next move. I'm going to show you how to effective. There's no grace in my work. Only the mission. I'm teaching you how to get out of a mess. How to be a soldier."

Every few months they'd get a new trainer, someone to toughen them up for a mission, give them a few scars to remember them by, and then disappear without a trace. I had hated those trainers, their self-centered spiels about what skills they had, and then repeated over and over how she and the other girls were here for a purpose. To serve Russia, just like those before them. He was no different than the rest, I told myself. Just another monster meant to intimidate her.

I would show him. I was a monster too.

"Romanova, is it?" He let out a short laugh. She had the name of the last Tsars. Now she killed people like them. "Step forward," the new instructor said. I did, boots echoing on the concrete floor. He had a low voice, underused and scratchy. "Now hit me."

"Is that an order?" I asked, a weak smile faltering on my lips. A cold feeling was spidering out from somewhere in my chest. Something I hadn't felt since she was a child. Something like fear.

He stepped towards me, towering over me like a nightmare with a rippling metal arm. "You're scared." The monstrous man said coldly, staring down at me dispassionately. I circled around him, but still he followed me an intensity in his eyes that sent a shiver down my spine. "Hit me, Romanova"
I watched him carefully, still circling. Looking for weakness. I could find none.

"Are you weak, Natalia?"

I hurtled forward with a cry, a blur of red and black, throwing a punch with all my weight behind it. He blocked, swatting her arm out of the air. Again I struck out at him, this time trying to connect to his gut. He knocked me back, sent her reeling to the floor. My head ached, my shoulder burning from where it hit the floor.

He's not using his left arm, I thought distantly, rising to my feet. He was still watching her coldly, gray eyes above a ratty black mask. Suddenly I didn't want to hurt him.

I just wanted to see his face.

So I attacked again, kicking off the floor with arms outstretched, throwing myself at him with all the force of a train barreling through the snow. I ripped off the mask, and my sharp nails dragged across his skin as I did.

This man—no, boy — was hardly older than her. No more than five years difference, though he carried himself like an older man. It's funny what time can do to you, what with the long Russian winters and too many battlefields. Or the experiments she'd heard whispers about. Maybe he was one of them.

Just some soldier boy with bad posture and high cheekbones, heavy boots and slow, confident walk. Maybe if he smiled, he might look like one of the boys she tried so hard to ignore.

The man's blood spattered across my face as he spun her around and cinched his arm around her neck. His arm was cold, colder than the icy wind that tore through the forest at night, colder than a dead man's skin buried in the snow. Closing down around my windpipe. I scrabbled at his forearm that seemed to seethe and hum under my fingertips, and my feet dangled a few inches off the ground. I kicked out at nothing.

The entire room seemed to be holding their breath.

"Who are you?" I choked out again, fighting to keep my voice steady. He loosened his grip just a little when I did.

"The man who fought you and won," he said in his low, gritty voice. She could just barely see his face at the corner of her eye, the sharp edge of an unshaved jaw and a strong nose that had been broken at least once. Strong arms and long legs, he could be a good teacher. At least better than the rest.

"That's a shit answer," I huffed, straining against his arm with a low animal growl.

He dropped me then, staring down at me, with these red marks around my throat. I crouched on the floor, forcing myself to breathe.

"Remember." His voice was low, so only I could hear him. "I am no one, Natalia."

"I don't believe you," I told him coolly, crossing my arms across my chest. She recovered quickly. "Everyone is something."

The crowd of girls gathered around them had dispersed, going back to their punching bags and target practice and whatever else. A few older men watched them from the shadows, different medals and trinkets glittering on their chests. The boy must have answered to them. They all did, in a way.

"A soldier, then, malen'kaya devochka."

"I'm not a little girl," I said tonelessly, turning and vaulting out of the fighting ring. I stormed away.

I stilled, kicking out at a punching bag nearby. He paused, standing behind me and studying her like a professor studies his books. With a quiet kind of admiration. I had killed a professor before, watched the warm light leave his eyes as he clutched at his little pen. That professor almost made her feel remorseful.

"You are," he said it like a fact, as if children were tolerated in the Red Room. When I was eight, I had assembled her rifle, loading and reloading bullets until her hands bled, instead of putting dresses on a pretty little doll like a normal girl would. I wasn't a child, and she never had been. There was never time.

"And what does that make you?" I said tightly, sending the punching bag spinning again. He leaned against a pillar, metal scraping against metal. "A ghost?"

He brushed past me, towards the door, breath strangely cool against her hair. "Maybe I am."