She woke up on an old sofa in a dark cabin. It was a single room, lit by a fireplace and a kerosene lamp on the table. A man in a plaid shirt stood with his back to her and seemed to be cooking something on an old gas cooker. The place seemed safe enough, so Eve decided to assess the damage and tried to move.

The gunshot wound in her leg flared up like she stuck a red-hot iron in there and she hissed in pain. Other places, presumable those which took the worst impact when she fell in the stream, hurt too, but it was nothing compared to her leg. Plus, she was thirsty and hungry. All and all, she was alive with all her limbs where they were supposed to be and no immediate threat to her life, but that was about everything positive that could be said about the situation.

Her movement attracted the attention of the man. He walked over to her and felt her forehead. Eve studied his face, not old, but not exactly young either, weathered, honest, but there was something hard in his blue eyes. He looks like a hero from an old cowboy movie, she thought.

"No fever," he said. "That's good. I don't have any antibiotics here."

"Who are you? Where am I? What happened?" she asked, her voice raspy from the thirst.

"I'm Jacob Stone, the Librarian," he replied, adding his profession as if it was a part of his name, and handed her a cup of tea. "You're still in the war zone in Ukraine, about a mile from the stream where you passed out. This cabin was abandoned, so I made it my base of operations for the time being. And as to your last question, I was going to ask you the same thing. How the hell did you end up being chased by five Brotherhood soldiers across the forest?"

Eve looked down at her clothes and realized that she was still wearing the civilian clothes she had worn for the undercover operation in Lviv that had gone exquisitely pear-shaped. In her torn jeans and used-to-be-gray shirt she must have been a rare sight in the middle of the war zone.

"I was undercover," she confessed. "Things went wrong, my team was killed, I was captured. I escaped, they chased me, they shot me, I fell and that's all I remember."

"Well, we found you and we didn't fancy the way those men were looking at you," Jacob Stone smiled impishly. "So we thought, hey we can save a lady and get rid of five Brotherhood members at the same time, this must be our lucky day."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome, ma'am."

Eve, with some help from Jacob, managed to sit up. "So, where are your friends?"

"Who? Oh, I was talking in plural, of course. No, it's just me and Rubens. C'mere, boy, come and say hi to Miss...?"

"Colonel," she corrected him. "Colonel Eve Baird."

"Nice to meet you, Colonel Eve Baird. Rubens, come and say hi to Miss Colonel." And there was the impish smile again, but she noticed it didn't quite reach his eyes.

Rubens crawled out from under the table. He turned out to be a dog, a big gray shaggy thing, who got drool all over Eve's face and made her immediately fall in love with him. Jacob left her scratching the dog and brought her dinner, which consisted of scrambled eggs, slightly stale bread and half a sausage.

"Sorry, it's not much. I was planning the provisions only for myself," he apologized.

But Eve, who had spent the last three days enjoying the hospitality of the Brotherhood Army, gobbled it up like it was the best thing she had ever tasted.

"So," she said, wiping the plate clean with the last piece of her bread, "how does a librarian end up in the middle of a forest in Ukraine?"

"Well, you might have guessed – I am a special kind of librarian," he winked.

She raised her eyebrows slightly and gave him her best questioning look, but he just took her plate and went to wash it in an old battered sink.

"I heard the Red Prophet is captive in Nitra," he said, his back still turned to her.

Eve felt her heart skip a beat. Was this all an elaborate trap? How did he know about the most powerful and the most mysterious member of the Brotherhood? And why the hell was he asking about her of all things?

The dreamy, detached face of the Red Prophet flashed in front of Eve's eyes. You shall meet a wolf...

"The Red Prophet, huh?" she replied, trying to sound casual. "Why so interested in her?"

"I've met her before." There was something in his tone telling Eve that there was a whole story behind those four words.

"So did I," she told him. "She told you a prophecy, didn't she? It's a pretty good scare tactic."

"It's not a scare tactic," he shook his head and kept washing the pristine plate. "Everything she says will happen eventually."

Eve felt nauseated. The things the Prophet told her... she never foretold happiness, only grief - the one thing Eve Baird had had enough of.

"But that's not why I'm interested in her," Jacob added. "I never thought she would let herself be caught."

"Only she didn't," Eve blurted out. Then she considered how much she could reveal. She needed this special kind of librarian and she felt that if she was about to ask him for help with crossing the war zone, she might as well give him at least a bit of the truth. "They have a new weapon, something deadlier than anything we've fought so far. They need something to activate it, something hidden in Vienna HQ. I think she realized that the easiest way in was to get captured."

Jacob turned around, his face dark. "How long before she is transferred from Nitra to Vienna?"

"Days," Eve estimated. "That is if she isn't there or on her way already. I don't have more than a week. I have to get to one of our camps and warn them."

"You shouldn't walk on that leg," he shook his head.

"Damn my leg, if she gets it, it's all over! With that thing in their hands we're all dead by September!" she yelled. How could he think about something so trivial?

"Isn't there another way to get a message to them?" he continued, calm and methodical.

"Do I look like I have a radio on me?" she exclaimed. "Wait, of course I do, I'm just running through the woods because calling extraction is for wussies!"

"Calm down, Miss Colonel, I'm just checking all the possibilities. Counting in your leg, it's two days walk to the nearest Allied camp, if they haven't moved it. And the woods will be swarming with soldiers. But it can be done," he concluded, "if Rubens and I go with you."

"G-go with me?" she stuttered. She had expected map, information about the Brotherhood and the Allies, some provisions at best, she would never ask him to actually join her.

"Yeah, sure. I'm done here anyway and I need to get out of here too. With the two of us we might be able to even get some sleep before we get out of the war zone. We set out tomorrow, no arguments," he raised his finger, because she had already been opening her mouth to protest. "We'll need all the speed we can get and tired people are slow. Go to sleep, you never know when you'll have the next opportunity."