Moscow, Russia
9 March 1915
"I don't have to tell you, of course, that this is very important."
"I understand, sir."
"Do you, Braginskiy? Because this is General Selivanov who demanded your expertise."
Ivan eyed his commanding officer in his peripheral, smiling inoffensively as the older man grimaced in distaste. Captain Onisim Novikov was a superstitious man of the particularly pernicious variety, beyond even what was normal for their most rural and uneducated of comrades. Talk of the inexplicable and perceivedly unnatural made Novikov vastly uncomfortable; being put into direct contact with it made him break into hives.
"Sir," he repeated with slight reproach. Novikov grunted dismissively, shoving a single, thick file folder into Ivan's grasp, carefully avoiding the younger man's gloved hands.
They were slowly making their way down a long hallway comprised of thick cinder block walls and gleaming linoleum floors, passing heavy metal doors every few yards and winding around the empty gurneys and wheelchairs left pushed up against the walls and trailed by two silent soldiers in pristine uniforms.
"You're arrogant," Novikov said, pointedly not meeting Ivan's gaze and choosing instead to look down and adjust his lapel pin. "I've seen better men than you go up against the Matryona and come out broken. I suggest you fix that attitude. I have no use for broken things, Braginskiy."
"Sir."
Novikov rapped his knuckles against a door lintel as they passed: an answering shriek rang out before it was cut short. Neither man spared the door a passing glance.
"Is General Selivanov already in Przemyśl?" Ivan asked, dodging around a harried-looking nurse bearing a tray laden with various surgical tools.
"Starving the bastards out. Started up another frontal assault in mid-December, I think. Though I don't know why you're asking me since you already know," Novikov spat.
Ivan had the nerve to look innocent. "Of course I would afford my CO every privacy, sir. I wouldn't wish to impose—"
"Your entire existence is an imposition, the whole lot of you," Novikov growled, lengthening his stride to pull ahead. Ivan trailed him, his longer legs having no trouble keeping up with the shorter man.
"If I may—" Ivan began.
"You may not, because you're not the only one around here with some intuition, obnoxious as you are about it. I can't wait until this is all over and I can accept my promotion back into Petrograd and leave all you monsters behind like a bad dream."
Behind Novikov's back, Ivan was grinning fiercely. It was likely to his own detriment, but he enjoyed the other man's refreshing honesty if not the man himself; his words always echoed whatever his thoughts sang out, sharp though they might've been. With an exaggerated pause, Captain Novikov came to a halt in front of a door, nearly indistinguishable from the rest save for the higher sheen on its handle, suggesting it was unused to being opened.
"The Matryona," he said melodramatically. Ivan politely said nothing, slipping the file beneath his arm and shifting his stance into a patient parade rest as Novikov shot him an annoyed look for ignoring what he deemed the necessary dramatics for such a moment. Ivan echoed "The Matryona" back at him and Novikov seemed appeased.
"Remember," Novikov said, "this is for General Selivanov especially, but we want everything you can wring out of her. We," he continued, lazily motioning to the soldiers that had come to a halt behind Ivan, "will be monitoring you both to make sure you don't get up to anything."
"Sir—"
"Braginskiy, we may keep dogs but that doesn't mean we trust them not to bite us at the first opportunity," Novikov said coldly. "No matter how good their collars are."
Ivan's eyes narrowed but he wisely said nothing. A muscle worked in his jaw and his hands were clenched so tightly behind his back that the seams of his gloves creaked perilously. Novikov looked at him for one long moment before turning his gaze back to the metal door, satisfied. He knocked briskly just once, taking a single step back as the door creaked open a few scant centimetres. A tired-looking woman appeared in the space between the door and the jamb, dark bruises from many sleepless night under her eyes. Her hair was a mess of unwashed blonde curls lightly streaked with gray, piled high atop her head in what had probably been a very fetching style several days ago.
"Nadya," Novikov greeted her gallantly, taking her hand in his and lifting it to kiss her knuckles. She smiled tightly in response and pushed the door open a bit wider, gaze straying to Ivan.
"Is this the one?" she asked. Ivan blinked; her voice was much lower and huskier than he'd expected.
"It is. Braginskiy, this is Doctor Nadezhda Bezrukova, the Matryona's handler." There was an odd, proprietary gleam in Novikov's eye as he presented the doctor to Ivan's restricted acquaintanceship, but the warning was clear in the look he gave Ivan over Bezrukova's head. Ivan said nothing, offering the doctor a polite nod.
She frowned slightly, thoughtfully, taking him in from head to toe as though he were a very interesting lab specimen (though to those in her line of work, it would not be an inept comparison). "You are quite young. Tell me your age."
"I—"
"He is twenty four, Nadya. Not so very young."
"He's a child," she demurred, slipping her hand from Novikov's grasp and turning back to disappear through the door. Novikov watched her go with a discontented expression before lifting his chin sharply at Ivan to indicate that the younger man should proceed him into the chamber.
The room itself was unremarkable, square and made of the same gray cinder block walls and linoleum tile, though one wall had mirrored panel. It was bare of any personal effects or furniture except for a single wooden chair.
It was occupied by a girl, her face obscured by a wild mass of stringy black ringlets. Her skin was the odd color of someone with a darker complexion gone pale for lack of sunlight. Her wrists and ankles were bound to the chair's arms and legs with thick leather restraints. She was so still that Ivan might've believed her to be a very unsettling doll; at that moment, she inhaled sharply and her head rolled back to rest on the chair's rear slats, her eyes open and unblinking and pure white.
She was young, he noted. Not much older than Yayushka would be—
(That thought he shied away from immediately.)
"Our newest acquisition from Serbia," Novikov proclaimed proudly. Bezrukova rolled her eyes as she collected her clipboard and bent to examine the restraints around the girl's limbs. "A Romani from Vardar Macedonia—"
"You may brag to your subordinates later," Doctor Bezrukova cut in, straightening as she finished her inspection, "about the successes of your hunting trips. There is still work to do and little time to do it in. She is a far-seer," she continued, looking to Ivan. "Though you already knew that," she added wryly, noting his lack of surprise. He inclined his head in acknowledgment.
"And so she can see the future."
"With complete accuracy. Insofar as we can tell," Novikov interrupted, unwilling to be left out.
"She only speaks her prophecies in Bugurdži," Bezrukova answered to Ivan's questioning look, "when she speaks at all. All she can do is see. So if we do not have someone of your particular…talents to interpret, all her words are useless."
"There are others—"
"She broke the rest of them, the little Matryona," Novikov said. "We have a difficult task recordkeeping with her when she keeps destroying the pens."
"She…'broke' them?" Ivan asked.
"Killed them," Bezrukova clarified.
"Brutally," Novikov added gleefully.
"Ah," Ivan said.
"We will be observing you from there," Bezrukova nodded at the mirror. It quickly became obvious that it was not a mirror but a panel of one-way glass. "In case something happens."
"I understand."
And he did, though the thought brought him no comfort. Instead, he cursed Emil Bloch.
—-
Not much later, he stood alone in the room, save for the Romani girl, knowing that two soldiers waited outside the closed door in case of an emergency and that the doctor and his commanding officer were watching through a window from the next room over. Inhaling deeply, he unbuttoned his shinel coat and folded it neatly, setting it aside on the floor.
The girl hadn't moved at all. Ivan could hear her, vaguely, nothing coherent: it was like listening to a rapidly flowing brook made of radio static.
Sighing, he tugged off his slightly-too-small gloves and stuffed them into his back pocket, flexing his hands to return sensation to them. He turned to the girl, whose head had started rolling back and forth across the wooden slat, her lips moving quickly but with no sound issuing forth.
"You will have to speak a civilized tongue, I'm afraid," he told her, rolling the sleeves of his gimnasterka up to his elbows. "Do you have a name, girl?"
The only response was a short, breathy keening.
"Ka…kako se zovete?" he tried in Serbian. His was intensely limited; he knew only a few phrases from his recent travels.
The Romani girl went very still for a long moment.
Ivan took a step towards her, crouching in front of her. She was a very small girl for her age, he thought. "Kako se zovete?" he asked again, reaching out to touch her face.
"Vanya."
The girl was staring at him with her sightless eyes, speaking with the voice of his long-departed mother. Ivan stared back in mute horror, fingers frozen a hair's breadth away from her cheek.
"Vanya," the girl said again, and it was the exasperated tone his mother had used when she had been too tired to answer another of his hundreds of childishly curious questions.
"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, that's me."
The Romani lifted her chin imperiously like a queen and turned her face into his hand.
He awoke, disoriented and screaming, being dragged down the hallway by the two soldiers from before by his arms, his whole body shrieking as though every nerve was aflame and his mind eaten by hellfire.
Bezrukova and Novikov were charging down the hallway after him, arguing in loud voices and violent gestures that he couldn't even begin to understand.
The soldiers dragged him through a set of double doors and past a gaggle of nurses who pressed themselves up against the walls in shock. There was a sharp left turn down a far narrower hallway where his screams echoed further before they pulled him through the doorway of a small room, lifting him onto a gurney shoved against the wall and lashing his rebellious limbs down with the same leather restraints as before.
The door burst open again but only Doctor Bezrukova shoved her way through, giving the terse order to hold him down as she prepared the syringe.
When Ivan awoke again, it was to a dull gray ceiling and with no sense of how much time he'd lost.
"What happened?" he croaked. Doctor Bezrukova appeared, bending over him and shining a penlight into his eyes.
"Nothing that I expected," she replied. She didn't simply look tired now; she looked exhausted, beyond the point of what mere rest could fix. "Nothing that any of us expected. How do you feel?"
"What day is it?" he asked instead.
"It's…still the ninth of March," she answered hesitantly. "What do you remember?"
"March tenth, British and Indian troops in the Artois region of northern France attack the Germans around the village of Neuve Chapelle. The Germans are going to be outnumbered and taken by surprise," Ivan said in a monotone. "The British will achieve their initial objective but fail to capitalize on the narrow breach they create in the German lines. After three days of fighting, with over eleven thousand casualties, the British offensive will be suspended. The Germans will suffer over ten thousand casualties."
Bezrukova stared at him mutely before turning away and leaving the room.
—-
"He killed her, Nadya! It's all completelyruined! What the hell will we say to the commanders now?!"
"Shut up and listen to me, you fool," Bezrukova hissed, shaking off Novikov's grasp on her wrists. "He remembers all of it."
"All of—" Novikov faltered. "All of it? You're sure?"
"Not all of it," she replied grimly, "but enough to put the higher-ups at ease until you can hunt up another clairvoyant."
Novikov groaned, turning away and massaging the bridge of his nose.
"Ruined," he lamented, "the whole thing ruined—"
"But it's not ruined!" she broke in. "Don't you see what this means?"
"I see that it means that Braginskiy has destroyed our best tool," he responded sourly. He brightened immediately. "Though I suppose that means I have a good excuse to get rid of him now—"
"Stop being such an idiot," Bezrukova snapped. "Think! The Matryona was our most powerful mutant and he completely overwhelmed her."
"I thought it was the other way around," Novikov muttered, turning to a table laden with glasses and beverages. He poured a generous measure of vodka into a tumbler for each of them, proffering a glass to Bezrukova. She grabbed it and took a reluctant sip.
"Apparently not," she replied dryly, "since she's the one we're putting on ice. There was some recoil, obviously, but he's completely sound. And I think, perhaps, a bit better than before."
"Of course," Novikov said, looking at her curiously. "You said he remembers everything. That's useful enough."
"Think of the long term, Onisim. He's no clairvoyant now, but he was…lifting things."
Novikov continued staring, mystified.
"In his sleep," she clarified.
"…large things?" he asked.
"Everything in that room," she confirmed. Novikov set down his glass with a loud thud.
"My God," he murmured. "I'm never going to get out of here now."
"There was another thing," she said.
"We may as well have the whole of it now, since I'm going to live and die in Moscow," Novikov said absently, pulling on the edges of his moustache.
"He answered a question I asked."
"Oh yes," he replied derisively, "the epitome of human achievement."
"He did it without touching me. And I hadn't…said anything aloud."
Novikov went very still, dragging his eyes up from the floor to gaze at Bezrukova with hard, flinty eyes. She steeled herself, looking back up at him fearlessly.
"You're certain?" he demanded in an undertone. "Completely certain?"
"He told me about an ambush in France happening tomorrow. The British against the Germans, a surprise attack."
"And?"
"And it won't come to much, but we'll know in less than a week if he was right."
Novikov sighed and picked up his glass again, examining the clear liquid with an expression of distaste. He curled his lip and tossed the alcohol back in one large gulp, pounding his free hand against his chest at the searing burn.
—-
"Twenty-nine years isn't very long, is it?"
Nadezhda Bezrukova glanced up from her note-taking to peer at Ivan curiously. He was released from his restraints at last, a full four days later. He was sitting up, one shoulder pressed against the wall, right hand wrapped around his left wrist in his lap and flexing his left hand absently. He looked too young, with that lost expression on his face. At the same time, he was an intimidating physical presence, seeming too big to be allowed.
"It's not so very long," she ventured hesitantly. "But not all that short either. Did you see—remember something else?"
"Just something she told me," he murmured quietly. "It has nothing to do with the mission. It's just private personal business."
"We've been very lenient on you, Braginskiy," she chided him. "You know none of this can be kept secret from us, for the sake of the mission. Besides, you don't have any private personal business."
"Every person does—"
"Yes, every person. You don't fit that criteria. None of you do. I don't know why I have to keep reminding you."
"I don't know either," he replied quietly.