The story is still open and accepting characters! Just to keep you interested, here is a short piece introducing the first two main characters - Liha Novokova and Nadia Volkova. If you want your character to be accepted, please, please leave a review so that I know how to improve - the more detailed, the better!

1986

Poor Olga -

She was one of the breakable ones.

And she had broken.

When the older Widow found her, she was singing, softly, to herself. They had locked her in a small room, the odinochka - two feet by two feet, Nadia had known it well as a girl - and they had beaten her, subjected her to plet', the lashings, and threatened her with worse with a self-assurance that spoke of long experience. Nadia had never seen a girl with her nostrils slit or the skin burned from her face - certainly, it would go against the Red Room's entire purpose, to create invisible girls of smoke and ghostlight - but in the moment, your skin burning from the rozga and your legs shaking beneath you from terror and lack of sleep, the detail was easy to overlook.

Olga's tune was sweet - her words, macabre. Nadia had never heard the song before, but that meant little.

"They're not your friends, they all want to sell your blood - Isn't that why everybody signs up? So keep your singin' voice golden, keep your red shoes on. Run, darling, run. Run, darling, run. Run, darling -"

She paused, abruptly, spotting the dark-haired teenager lingering at the edge of the studio. A dozen mirrors reflected a refracted, broken version of Nadia back at herself - her eyes, as sharp as scalpels, blazed from a golden face framed by stray strands of ebony hair, wispily escaping from the otherwise perfectly coiffed bun shared by all Widows in the Room during training. They wore long hair, because that was easy to change - one could always cut her hair short, shave her head, and thus change her entire appearance, but one couldn't exactly make it grow. It was a case of practicality. Nadia liked that, the practical nature behind every decision at the Room.

"Can you hear the screaming?" Olga's voice was very gentle.

Nadia was prepared to agree mindlessly, anything to ease the other girl's tense, frightened voice, but was surprised to find that she was not lying - she could hear the screaming. No, screaming was the wrong word - this was a softer sound, quieter, pitiable. A gasping for breath, a moan, in one of the small rooms that lined the long, dark concrete hallways of the facility. She stepped closer to Olga, a single stride across the polished floorboards that took her further from that awful sound, and said, "They're just making her perfect, Olishka. Like you and I. We're being made perfect."

Sometimes, you needed to set a broken bone so that it would heal correctly. The Red Room dealt in broken bones.

"See after all, it's a crazy dream, dorogaja, and all the good cards burn up in a flash..." She turned, a quick chaîné of wheaten hair and blurred limbs. "Oh, my, my, it's getting late, Zolushka - How long before these dresses turn right back to rags? They're going to kill me, Nadia. I know. Run, darling, run, and don't stop - leave the broken glass behind, Zolushka, it'll only make you bleed. Run, darling, run, we're nothing but broken things and -"

She stopped, abruptly. "It's time for dinner," she said. "You should go."

Nadia missed nothing, not with those dark eyes of hers. "Olishka." She hesitated. She was not close to the other girl, but they were two facets of the same diamond, two sides to the same gold coin. Olga was a reflection of Nadia in a cracked mirror - nearly the same, but not quite. "Не стоит забывать." The girl was right. She was awaiting her death, here in this ballet studio that still echoed of the faint strains of music and the violent movements of the dance. She was dokhodiaga. And Nadia had no interest in getting involved. "Мы будем совершенными."

"Nadia." A voice at the door turned her head. Another widow, Katiya, stood there, her pale face set and unhappy. She held a revolver in her hand, looked beyond Nadia, to the girl in the mirror. "It's time for dinner," she said. "You should go."

Nadia nodded. "Of course, tovarisch vdova."

She did not glance again at Olga, merely turned to go, and left the broken, breakable girl behind. It wasn't so bad for Nadia. She knew how these things were. She was ten years old, after all - five years in the Red Room had taught her well.

The other widow who had been making that awful sound had fallen silent now as Nadia went into the hallway and walked towards the small canteen where they would be served their dinner. It was silent, utterly, despite the mass of humanity within - the Room so often was.

She couldn't help but glance into the open door of one of the rooms as she passed. She regretted it, of course - they had one of the unfamiliar girls, the prizraki, on the gurney, her hand hanging over the side like she was dead. They were cutting her open, two dark-haired male scientists Nadia didn't know, but the prizrak's eyes followed Nadia as she flitted past the door. The prizrak had grey hair and dark eyes, and blood on her face. They were empty, those dark, dark eyes. That was what it meant to be a prizrak.

There was only one Red Room, and they trained only the widows. But Nadia had heard the rumours throughout the school - of the existence of a corresponding academy for boys, where they trained the male assassins and spies. And, of course, they kept the monsters, the prizraki, under the floor.

She shook the thoughts from her head like so many cobwebs. To survive here, you concerned yourself with only what concerned you - no more and no less. With that thought, Nadia's mind turned to the important things in life - food and ballet - and if she heard the muffled gunshots in the studio behind her as imperfect, broken Olga was put to rest, well, she gave no indication.

1992

The chair Madam Belikova sat in, like a burnished throne, glowed on the marble, where the glass held up by standards wrought with fruited vines from which a golden Cupidon peeped out (another hid his eyes behind his wing) doubled the flames of seven-branched candelabra reflecting light upon the table as the glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, from satin cases poured in rich profusion.

"Speak to me."

Iin vials of ivory and coloured glass unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused and drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air that freshened from the window, these ascended in fattening the prolonged candle-flames, flung their smoke into the laquearia, stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

"Why do you never speak?"

Huge sea-wood fed with copper burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, in which sad light a carvéd eagle swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed as though a window gave upon the sylvan scene the change of Philomel, by the barbarous king so rudely forced; yet there the nightingale filled all the desert with inviolable voice and still she cried, and still the world pursues, the widow's song to dirty ears.

"Speak."

And other withered stumps of time were told upon the walls; staring forms leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

"What are you thinking of?"

Footsteps shuffled on the stair. The building was awake with shadows and monsters; the hallways, they echoed and groaned.

"I never know what you are thinking."

Under the firelight, under the brush, the madam's hair spread out in fiery points, glowed into words, then would be savagely still. Her tongue was a knife hungry for blood, and it slashed out mocking words with a violence.

"Think."

She thought they were in rats' alley where the dead men lost their bones.

What was that noise? The wind under the door. What was that noise now? What was the wind doing? Nothing again nothing.

"Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?"

She remembered those are pearls that were his eyes. She remembered dying.

"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

No. Nothing, nothing. She had no place in this world. She was nothing.

"Shall we play a game of chess, pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door?"

She had no tongue to speak with. If she had, what would she say? She angles her face towards the lone window in the room, and watches faraway stars. What is the city over the mountains, that cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air? Falling towers - Jerusalem Athens Nanjing Alexandria Vienna London Stalingrad Bucharest home home home.

The stars were wreathed in charcoal clouds, and faded now, choked in grey. Everything was grey: her hair, his smoke, the sky. She'd spent so long devoid of color she didn't know what it meant anymore. Here, in the Room, there existed two colours in their extremities: red and grey.

Liha Novokova, her hands dark with ash and gasoline and her face smeared with blood, was not a stranger to either.

Ruzga. Birch cane.

Не стоит забывать. Don't forget.

Мы будем совершенными. We'll be perfect.

Dokhodiaga. A goner.

Prizrak. A ghost.

Tovarisch. Comrade.

Vdova. Widow.