"Get up, Raya."

Raya didn't want to get up. She'd only just started falling asleep. Tugging on the blankets, she shifted on the thin pad of her mattress and burrowed deeper into her pillow, trying to erase the voice.

"Raya, now!"

Raya rubbed her eyes, listening. No one was crying out in pain. No alarms were ringing. She heard only the soft, urgent breathing of someone who didn't belong in her room.

"Raya, get up. Come on. You sister is in trouble."

Raya sat up then, eyes wide and blinking in the darkness. A tiny crack of light shone from under the door, showing the outline of a boy's form hunched over her bed. She looked immediately to the cot on the other side of the room where Klara should have been sleeping. It was empty.

They'd taken her.

Raya was up and out of bed, across the room and tearing at the blankets before Aleksander could grab her.

"Raya, stop! She is fine. She is fine!" he hissed, grabbing her hands. His were warm and trembling. "She is with Isaak. He is hosting a gathering. You have to get out of here. Now."

Raya's heart pounded. She blinked, as if seeing him for the first time. "What? Aleksander, what are you doing in here? They will punish you." Disoriented and sluggish, she could only think of one reason why someone would have woken her. "Is it time for a drill?"

"Raya." Aleksander's kind face was warped with hardness and pain. "Quiet now. You need to get yourself out of here. I will get your sister once the gathering is over. But you have to leave now, or it will be too late."

"Get out? I do not understand." Raya was awake now. Wide-awake. She followed Aleksander around the tiny room as he went through her things, yanking pieces of clothing from their designated spaces and stuffing them into a small shoulder bag.

"You get out. Go back through the rock fields. Stay in the shadows, Raya. Stay away from the windows. Do not go out the front gate, find the back fence, near the river. There's a hole. Do not stop for anything or anyone until you are safely hidden."

"But. . . Klara, what about Klara?"

Aleksander's frantic look vanished. His face looked hard again, blue eyes squinting to see in the darkness and his mouth a grim, thin line. He grabbed Raya's hands, pressed his lips against the scars on her knuckles. "I will find her, and I will get her out. But you must go. Now. They will be waiting..."

"Who? Who will be waiting? Aleksander, I―" But he was already jerking about, taking more clothing from the small dresser next to Klara's bed and shoving it into the bag. "Aleksander, please. What is going on?"

He looked at her, eyes mournful. Dropping the bag, he took Raya's shoulders in his hands and leaned his forehead against hers. She was not used to such a tender touch. Stiffly, she endured his embrace.

"You must listen," he insisted, squeezing her frame. She did not wince, like she had been taught. But the intensity frightened her. "This is not a life. Everyone deserves more than this. Especially you."

"We are safe here," Raya answered automatically. Aleksander wasn't making any sense. Of course this was a life. Her frantically beating heart was proof enough. "Isaak keeps us safe from Muggles. He teaches us how to protect ourselves, how to keep hidden."

"Isaak keeps you safe because it gives him power," Aleksander said angrily. His hand slid down Raya's arm and grasped her wrist, holding it so her palm faced the ceiling. Scars, ghosts of past pain criss-crossing her arm, were dimly visible in the poor light. "Are you really safe? Does he really teach you how to protect yourself? You can not stop him from hurting your sister."

He was hurting her. Raya pulled her hand away. He released it without hesitation. "She must learn discipline. We all must endure it, or else the Muggles will find our weaknesses and use them against us."

"No more!" Aleksander hissed, almost shouting, with rage in his voice. "No more. Not for you. Not for anyone. You must go, now." With a shove that was nearly gentle, he pushed her toward the door. Raya was too small to fight back, so she surrendered, like she had been taught to do when faced with a superior's command. But she did not let the emptiness fill her, leaving behind nothing but an ache in her stomach. No, she was too alert, too frightened and confused to slip away into that little space in the back of her mind where she kept her emotions when she didn't need them.

Aleksander cracked the door open and peered out. In the hall, a torched burned, warm and flickering. It made shadows dance between the cracks in the walls. He shouldered the bag and took Raya's hand. She followed him into the hall.

They had done this hundreds of times, woken from sleep to the ringing of alarms, Isaak's smooth-as-silk voice persuading them out of bed. They would march, quiet as kneazles to the training room, where they would demonstrate their skills to whichever benefactors Isaak was entertaining. There were usually less of them when they left than when the entered, but no one could think about that.

Now, instead of going down the hall to the training room, aided by blaring sirens, Aleksander pulled Raya in the opposite direction, silence their only witness. Through the wooden doors that were supposed to be enchanted and down the steep metal stairs, where more torches cast flickering black shapes on the stairs below. At the bottom was a set of double doors.

Aleksander slid the bag off his shoulder and looped it across Raya's. "You remember my instructions?" She could only nod. "Good. They will meet you beyond the fence. Hide with them until I bring your sister. Listen to everything they tell you, yes?"

"But, the shield..." The children had been warned from a very young age about the magical protection surrounding their home. It was supposed to keep out anything or anyone that wanted to hurt them. It did a good job of keeping them all inside, too.

Aleksander quietly pushed open one of the doors, letting in a frigid blast of night air. He led her out into the dark, damp mouth of a cave. "The shield is down. The Aurors have taken care of it. You must go. Now. I will..." With strange tenderness and urgency, he bent down to kiss her forehead. Then he stepped back into the stairwell and closed the door behind him.

Raya grabbed for the handle, but their wasn't one on the outside. There wasn't even a door anymore, just a smooth wall of rock. She would not be able to get back inside unless one of the patrols found her. And even then, they might kill her before she got a chance to explain.

A gust of wind blustered into the cave and took her breath away, sending Raya to coughing and clutching at the shoulder strap of Aleksander's bag. Her arms and back already ached from her thin mattress and the way the springs dug into her, from scrubbing floors and toilets on her hands and knees and even longer hours of practicing harmful spells. Raya's muscles pulled and strained from the weight of the bag, though she knew it couldn't be very heavy.

Raya straightened. Aleksander had told her to run, to wait with people called Aurors, but she didn't think she could make it. The ground was covered in snow, hiding rocky and treacherous terrain, and she had no shoes. She looked out into the darkness, trying to discern the chain-linked fence that she knew loomed out of the rock a few meters ahead.

This was stupid, ridiculous, terrifying. She should just go around to the main entrance, wait there in the warm crag of rock for morning, then demand to be let back in. Anything to get back inside where it was warm. But if Isaak found out that she had almost run away...

"Find the back fence, near the river."

But, Klara...

"I will find her, and I will get her out. But you must go. Now. They will be waiting..."

Raya padded across the cold, slippery rock to the cave entrance. The night twinkled with pin-pricks of light, thousands and thousands stretching across the sky. Sirens had started blaring inside, but she was far enough away that they were only a dull and faraway bleat.

Raya ran.

Rocks bruised her feet. Snow sent her crashing to the ground. But she kept getting up, kept straining for the fence. She could see the hole now, on the opposite side of the creek, though she had know idea how Aleksander would have discovered it.

When Raya came to the bed of the tiny river, she stopped. The water appeared shallow, but it could have been a trick. Isaak was good with tricks like this, lulling his children into a false sense of security before...

Raya looked back at the cave's mouth, at everything she had ever known, open and baring rocky teeth like a hungry mouth. Klara was still inside. Aleksander had said that he would wait for the gathering to finish before he went to get her, but he had also said that Raya had to go, now, before it was too late. Too late for what? And what if he was too late?

A feeling of nausea swept over her. She was caught between the unknown, grasping through a hole in the fence, and her sister, apparently in danger, still waiting to be rescued. She closed her eyes, breathing heavily, thinking that there was no way to be free. Any patrolman who bothered to investigate would see her messy tracks and follow them. She would be found at any second. Caught. Brought back.

Punished.

Killed, just like her mother.

The world stopped spinning. Raya found her balance. And she ran.