Yuri jumped as someone ploughed into his back, throwing out his arms to steady himself and knocking his bowl halfway across the table. He was still barely awake, not that he'd been able to sleep for long the night before as he still hadn't worked out why he'd collapsed a few days ago, and he struggled to take in Ivan's mischievous, excited grin as it seemed so out of place.
"Morning captain!" Ivan perched cross-legged at his side, so close he may as well have been sat in Yuri's lap. He'd caught the attention of the boys at the table next to theirs, and probably everyone else around them. Yuri shot a half-hearted glare across the hall that didn't quite achieve the fearful response he was hoping for, but the boys got the message regardless and moved seats.
Ivan lowered his voice to a minute whisper. "So I overheard one of the engineers talking about the Director—"
"Overheard?" Even though they were apparently content to let Ivan help, Yuri knew the Abbey's staff would never be reckless enough to talk about anything important around him.
Ivan shrugged nonchalantly, a lazy smirk on his lips. "Okay, I followed him, same thing." If he had the energy to do so, Yuri would have laughed. "Anyway, what's important is that the Director's called Valkov back again. He's leaving today."
He instantly knew what the boy was thinking. Today? No, it was far too soon, Yuri wasn't ready. There was more he wanted to check, little gaps in their plan he wanted to fill in, loopholes and escape routes he wanted to cover just in case things turned sour. Ivan seemed to notice his apprehension, urgency flickering in his eyes before it was forced away.
"Come on, it's our best shot. We don't know if he'll go away again—what if it's not for months?" Hands gripped tightly onto Yuri's arm, tugging almost desperately at his sleeve. "You said yourself it's vital you get in there."
Yuri sighed. Ivan was right; they had no idea when the chance to get into Valkov's office might come round again. He still felt exhausted, wasn't at his best and the last thing he needed was to collapse in the middle of searching for the files. Without knowing the cause—it seemed to be so much more than just lack of sleep—he had no sure way of preventing it from happening again. But he knew he could say that regardless of when they decided to go, whether it was today or not for another month. He was about to resign and give Ivan his approval when the boy beat him to it.
"Good. I'll meet you at curfew, you know where." He'd removed himself from Yuri's side and disappeared from the hall before Yuri even had a chance to agree.
Turning back to the abandoned breakfast he had no intention of finishing, Yuri folded his arms over the table again and stared out at the grounds. He calculated he had another ten minutes at least before his first session, long enough to repeat their plan in his mind for possibly the hundredth time; his schedule for the day was a gruelling mix of gym and circuits that would leave him little free time to think.
Ivan would draw the guard away with a well spun lie, leaving Yuri to break into the office. It made sense; he'd only let the boy know so much and hadn't really detailed what he needed to find, and Yuri was in no fit state to really be running around the Abbey with a guard on his heels. The only thing that could stop them at that point would be if that guard turned out to be Levitsky, but he'd been informed by both Ivan, and more importantly Vasily, that Levitsky no longer worked late.
Once he was in he'd have to be fast, neither of them in any doubt that the guard would pick up on Ivan's trick the second they neared the food hall, just had to grab what he needed and leave. A quick sprint to Ivan's workroom near the engineering block—Ivan reassured him the department emptied early—and he'd return to his own room just before dawn.
Easy. In theory, anyway.
But there was still one more thing to check—well, there were many, but if Ivan wanted to do this today then Yuri would have to put those aside—he glanced around to find the boy he had spotted on arrival and saw him making his way towards the queue at the other end of the hall.
Grabbing his own tray, Yuri swiftly caught up with him, ignoring the muffled protest of the boy he cut in front of. "Vasya."
"Yeah?" Vasily didn't bother to turn around to look at him, keeping his voice low.
Yuri pressed himself a little closer to the older boy's back, waiting for the worker behind the hatch to take Vasily's empty tray and move off before talking again. "If wanted something—"
"Tomorrow morning." The reply was sharp, irate, and this time Vasily glanced over his shoulder with stern eyes. "Don't talk to me about that here, Yura. Not again." He walked away without another word, leaving Yuri standing alone.
There was a quiet cough and Yuri looked down to see hands trying to tug the tray from his white-knuckle grip. He released it, ignoring the pitiful look he received, too concerned by Vasily's apparent anger. Something wasn't right; Vasily was rarely flustered by anything and up to now had seemed, if anything, a little too eager to help Yuri communicate with Kai.
Whatever it was that was setting Vasily on edge, Yuri didn't have much time left to think on it as the intercom blasted his name through the hall a second later.
Late in the evening, Yuri found himself hovering at the end of the corridor that led to Valkov's office, unbelievably relieved to see that he didn't recognise the man guarding the door. He watched Ivan shake and ruffle his clothes, smack his cheeks with the palms of his hands and almost force himself to hyperventilate. When he was satisfied with his dishevelled appearance, the boy shot him a grin before sprinting down the corridor.
Yuri hid, ducking into another doorway out of sight of the uniformed man stationed outside the office. Ivan skidded to a halt by the wall under the camera to avoid being caught and hammered out words, so strained and panic-stricken that even Yuri—who had heard Ivan repeat the same line a hundred times—struggled to understand what he was trying to say. He couldn't help but feel a little impressed.
The guard finally understood Ivan's lie; that there was a boy in the food hall who had collapsed and wasn't breathing, Ivan thought he had tried to escape but he must have got stuck in the snow because he was frozen cold—Yuri suddenly wondered why they had chosen to place their imaginary emergency in the food hall and not somewhere much further away—and Ivan ran the opposite direction to where Yuri hid, the guard hot on his heels.
Silence seeped into the corridor and Yuri unfolded himself from his hiding place, sliding along the wall and keeping well out of sight of the camera. He needed to move it somehow, the lens was directed straight at the door, but when Yuri stood underneath it and attempted to jump up and knock it off target, he came a good few inches short.
They'd clearly made a miscalculation; Ivan had assumed he'd be tall enough to reach and Yuri had stupidly believed him without checking. He kicked at the wall in frustration. If he couldn't shift the camera, then he couldn't get access to the office without being recognised, couldn't get the documents Kai needed. And if he couldn't get the documents… he jumped as Wolborg's usually subtle presence burst to life as a flash of colour in his mind, almost as if she were trying to tell him what to do.
Yuri unclipped his launcher and locked his blade into place without even thinking, only realising how foolish his idea was when he was aiming his blade upwards. He wanted to knock it askew, not destroy it. Again, Wolborg flared, and a soft crackle echoed through the corridor as his blade slowly became coated in ice; a buffer to protect the camera unit from the sharp bite of his attack-ring. Yuri silently thanked his companion and she flickered in understanding.
He pulled on the ripcord with barely a fraction of the power he normally would—Wolborg almost launched herself—and his blade jumped the short distance to the camera, tapping it upwards so that it aimed at the corner where the wall met the ceiling, leaving the door unprotected. Yuri rushed in, crouching to collect Wolborg as he did so.
The room was almost dark, lit only by the sliver of moonlight from the window and the light spilling in from the corridor. Ivan had told him about the paperwork he'd noticed on Valkov's desk, but between them they had decided that the obsessive man was unlikely to keep anything of importance in plain sight. No, what they needed was more likely to be locked away, and Yuri cast his eye around the various filing cabinets and draws that lined the office. There was a small wooden tray on the desk that Ivan had said he'd seen a set of keys in and carefully searched under folders and letters until he came across them.
Yuri grabbed the keyring and immediately set about trying to get into each and every cabinet, hoping to find one that contained something useful to them, something damaging to Biovolt. He only had a limited amount of time before he knew the guard would return. There was no boy dying in the food hall, and there were only so many ways Ivan could lead the guard around the Abbey, only so many lies he could tell before the guard realised he'd been tricked.
Finally, after he'd fumbled clumsily with the keys more than once, Yuri managed to open one of the cabinets. It was full of thick files, bound in beige card, all organised by name. He searched, banging his way through the drawers until he found himself, yanking the file out and spilling the contents onto the floor. He was utterly shocked by what he'd found.
Everything that had ever happened to him over the last ten years was splayed before his eyes in plain black and white. Literally everything.
He wasn't sure whether to feel lucky or disgusted.
He picked through the file with shaking fingers, eyes quickly scanning printouts and scribbled notes, looking for anything that might be of use to Kai and forcing himself not to be affected by what he was reading. Valkov had even recorded the first time he set eyes on Yuri; a cold day in Saint Petersburg, watching two eager young boys dart across Palace Square. Valkov had described every aspect of him in the most minute detail, and it made Yuri feel physically sick to know that the man had been scrutinising him so intimately without his knowledge. Apparently Valkov had made his mind up about bringing him to the Abbey before Yuri had even known the place existed.
A thin sheet of paper slid from the file, and Yuri cautiously collected it from the floor. His birth certificate, something he had never seen before in his life, and it wasn't a copy either. It didn't make sense; he'd made the choice himself to join Biovolt, his mother had already left by that point and not once since making the decision to come to Moscow had Yuri ever seen his father. How Valkov had managed to get hold of his birth certificate, a document that as far as Yuri was concerned should still have been in his parent's possession, he wasn't sure.
The file held details on his medical history, every appointment he'd had with the Abbey's doctors, every second of his training recorded in intense detail, even down to the meals he'd eaten and the rest time he'd been allowed. Every punishment he'd ever endured and every resulting injury, now that was something Kai could use. But it wasn't enough, Yuri wanted to find more. He'd been the favourite—able to get away with things the other boys would have been disciplined for—he needed to find someone with a worse record than his. A familiar face crossed his mind, and he delved back into the filing cabinet intent on finding a file he knew would be there.
He wasn't surprised to see it was twice the size of his own. Yuri forced himself to take a deep breath before daring to pull back the band holding the papers together. He should have skipped straight to the records of Boris' punishments, something Kai would be able to use as proof that Biovolt cared nothing for the injuries they caused, but he just couldn't help himself, settling back on his heels as he skimmed page after page of the training Boris' refused to talk about.
Yuri had expected it to be bad, expected it to be harsh, but he certainly wasn't prepared for the cruelty the printed words and handwritten notes threw up at him. Boris had spent an entire year squashed under one particular Doctor's boot, subjected to the most horrendous onslaught that Yuri just couldn't even have imagined. He'd been forced through so much that Yuri had never heard about; beaten to cause pain and beaten again for expressing it, days and weeks locked in a pitch black room, isolated, hooked up to machines that Yuri didn't understand the purpose of, only to be beaten yet again, all to rip emotion from his mind.
Broken wrists, dislocated shoulder, fractured kneecap, countless sprains, a botched experiment that had left Boris blind in his left eye and a horrible, detailed surgery to rectify it, a knife that cut far too deep far too often and heavy fists that rained upon already thick bruises, the damage was almost endless…
Yuri blinked at the words, stunned and barely able to take them in.
A wet drop hit the page he was staring down at and Yuri lifted his thumb to his cheek, shocked to find it was damp. The pages ran on, every injury Boris had sustained during only that one year, every assault that had caused the scars that littered his friend's skin. And suddenly—
Suddenly he didn't want Kai to see this, he didn't—couldn't—need to see the horrors Yuri had just read about. He wished he hadn't seen the file himself, felt so unbelievably guilty, remorse twisting inside him, suffocating. He'd been the one to convince Boris to join the Abbey with him, had pressurised him into it, all because he didn't want to be alone again. Until Yuri had come along, Boris had been happy living under market stalls with only himself to worry about.
The final entry for the year—a handwritten account from Valkov—crushed the air from Yuri's lungs so fast he nearly collapsed, one hand slamming against the floor to stop himself from falling whilst the other crumpled the paper. The reason Yuri had never seen this Doctor, the reason he had never even heard his name, was because he was dead.
Valkov had killed him to keep him silent.
Boris had watched him do it.
And according to Valkov's own words, his friend didn't even bat an eyelid at the display.
The whole purpose of the training was to create a soldier who was completely and utterly devoid of anything except a singular desire to follow Valkov's orders without question; so when Valkov had told him to watch, Boris had done so. Valkov had been immensely pleased with the end result. Yuri wondered what had gone through his friend's mind. Whether anything had gone through his mind.
No matter how wrong the reports were, Yuri knew deep down that Kai had to see them, he needed to know just how far Valkov's cruelty stretched, needed to know that Valkov had killed another man for the sake of his own insane ambitions.
Yuri closed his eyes and took a deep breath, focusing his mind on Kai and Kai alone and forcing himself to block out everything he had just learnt because, right now, he didn't need to be distracted by the thoughts and emotions swirling under his skin.
He piled papers to his side; the way Valkov had eyed him up from the very beginning, the injuries he had sustained at the man's command, and the gruesome details of Boris' specialised training, everything else he slotted back into the files with trembling hands. He could stop his mind from thinking about it, but he couldn't stop the tremors wracking his body or the sickness that curled in his stomach.
Wolborg suddenly flared again in his mind, not for comfort but a warning, as seconds later Yuri heard heavy footsteps reverberating through the corridor. He froze, crouched on the ground halfway through returning Boris' file and swallowed the lump in his throat.
Valkov's office only had one exit.