Belarus. 1993.
It has fallen. The USSR has collapsed and all the territories it took from the West are being returned.
Of course, the girls weren't ever supposed to find out. The existence of the Red Room depended on their being a Soviet Empire to protect and defend. Now, they would be faced with the more difficult task of bringing it back entirely. There was no way they could know about the enormity of the task at hand. Gorbachev had folded to the international pressure of the world's nations and hadn't been able to continue the great legacy of the USSR that Stalin and Khrushchev had worked so hard to build.
Of course, Elena knew exactly what was happening in the outside world. Three years since Mara's death and three years since Montgomery's experiment, she had become a whole other young girl to the one she anticipated she might one day grow to be. Despite being only nine, Elena's childhood had long since ended. Montgomery had told her she was near to completing her specialist training under his observation, excelling beyond expectation, he said she would most likely be one of the youngest girls to graduate the Black Widow and the first to complete the Scorpion Programme. She knew it was wrong, but Elena couldn't help but feel silent pride, she had become self-assured. If she was never going to be good at anything else in her life, she knew she would be able to survive and this was the place that had given her that ability.
Her nights were still split between the Gold Room and Montgomery's office where his 'experiment' had been revealed to teach Elena how to dissociate from long-term pain.
"Useful if you are ever caught. They won't show restraint because you are a woman and we've trained you to not expect that form of treatment. They will most likely torture you for information. Your skills assure me you will be one of the most well-skilled to leave to Academy…" he paused briefly. "…but you can never account for human error. You must be strong enough to withstand the most volatile pain."
He had said it with a smile, as if he was doing Elena a favour, in torturing her night after night until she eventually found a way to create a mental path away from this place to where she could no longer feel the pain. It was the only time she could freely think. She would be in her old home, with a burning fireplace and a board game scattered on the coffee table. Her father letting her win at scrabble whilst her mother nursed her new baby sibling. She never knew if it was a boy or girl, but it didn't matter. Her escape was the fantasy of family that she had been deprived of.
Montgomery's lessons had resulted in Elena's skin becoming an intricate road map of tiny scars, cuts and bruises, some couldn't be seen but every single one was felt. She had learnt to look at them as lessons, each one a reminder that she was able to withstand anything they threw at her. Occasionally she had caught the other girls glancing at her skin when they changed between classes, but they never stared for long. She couldn't blame them, some days the scars disgusted her too.
Montgomery sat across from her, signing more documents as Elena pressed a padded dressing into the newest bleeding wound on her abdomen, crossing over with another scar that was still pink against her pale skin. He sighed as she flicked beads of sweat from her brow, the scientists had created another serum they said would make her immune to all known viruses, ironically, it involved injecting her with all known viruses at once to see if the serum would combat them. Combined with her constant lack of sleep, she no longer had any fight left to resist the regime, it was so much simpler to succumb to the pressure and obey orders. A headache began to encroach on her temples as she shivered despite sweating. It was always so bitterly cold in the office and steam rolled from her skin in delicate curls.
Closing the manila folder that had her name on the front and her photograph paper clipped to the inside cover, Montgomery crossed his arms and leant forward.
"There is just one more thing we must do before our time together is over." Elena made eye contact with the aging man across from her for the first time that night. His expression was unreadable as usual, but she felt a sickening sensation rise in her stomach regardless. The door to his office opened and a soldier marched over to her, pushing her head to the side, exposing her neck and pressing a syringe into her skin before she could protest.
Elena was woken at sunrise along with the other girls, unable to remember the journey from Montgomery's office back to her bed. As she waited for the teacher to unlock her handcuff, she noticed a pain in the back of her head and it burned for the entire day. She missed steps in Ballet and didn't achieve a perfect score in her marksman assessment. She heard the other girls muttering behind her as she lowered the rifle onto its stand, but her teacher simply disregarded the fault and handed down a passing grade. When she allowed an opponent to get a kick at her jaw she cursed herself for not sparring with as much ruthlessness as normal and yet that teacher ignored it as well, the lack of discipline concerned Elena, it was almost like they all knew why she wasn't performing as well. Combined with the burning in the back of her head, that concerned her above all else.
By the time night came, her whole head was throbbing, and waves of nausea had accompanied her other symptoms. The lights were switched off in the dorm, but she had taught herself to not fall asleep before the soldiers came for her and it wasn't long before they did.
The Gold Room was empty of all other people that night apart from the soldiers who dutifully remained at their posts outside the door. Inside was identical apart from a small table with a wadded white envelope sat on top. Elena followed her normal routine regardless and sat down and waited in the silence, staring at her clenched hands in her lap. Eventually a shrill ringing invaded the silence and she looked up – Elena Marakova was never going to be a particularly patient girl. She couldn't deny that the envelope had peaked her interest from the moment she had set her eyes on it and if she had learnt anything it was that nothing in this place was an accident. Every thought, every action was precisely thought out and planned down to the finest detail. She examined the room again, looking for anything else that was out of the ordinary and her eyes came to settle on a small camera in the top corner where a red light flashed in steady intervals. Had that always been there? She couldn't be sure but wherever the scientists who were normally present were, they were watching. She reached forward and picked up the envelope.
The contents were not a letter like she had thought it might be. Instead it was a stack of polaroid's, she felt a chill roll over her as she began to slowly shuffle through them, she willed herself to stop but her hands continued regardless. She chewed on the inside of her lip when she came across a photograph of a foot with a small brown tag on the big toe. The writing was too blurry to make out what it said but she could sense foreboding as she shuffled it to the back of the stack and continued to look through.
Half way through the photos, Elena's neck began to burn like someone was holding a match to her skin. The individuals in the photographs were looking vaguely familiar, like she had maybe passed them in the street once or seen their photos on her mantelpiece in St. Petersburg. When she got to the bottom of the stack, she dropped the others behind and held the last photograph in a tight grip. Their faces were exactly as she had remembered them, their eyes wide open and the clean gunshot wounds in their foreheads, both between the eyes. The memories of New York that she had tried so hard to forget came flooding back in an intense wave of unprocessed grief and anger. She was a terrified five-year-old again, screaming for her parents as she was dragged from her new life and thrown into the wilderness of Belarus of which she would never leave. The burning in her neck intensified and spread until her whole body once again felt as if it was on fire. Elena clenched her eyes shut and tears burned, her hand screwing the photograph into a ball and dropping it onto the stone floor. She heard a door open and footsteps came into the room.
"Open your eyes." She heard someone instruct but she didn't obey, the pain was too unbearable. She shook her head and felt hands grip into her shoulders harshly.
"Don't be weak. Weakness will get you killed. Do you want to die?" Elena shook her head again.
"Then open your eyes." She did as she was told and as soon as she did, the pain began to subside, and a new sensation took over her. She could hear everything in the room. The ticking of the clock, the murmuring of the small camera in the corner, and the thoughts of everyone else who surrounded her.
"Did it work?" One asked. Elena turned her attention to him, and saw his home, his wife and four sons.
"Ask it something." Another prompted, she could sense the fear in his voice and when she focused on him she heard him repeating nonsense words in his mind, keeping her out and so she turned back to the other man.
"Your sons." She began, and the men fell silent. "Filip, Vadim, Yuri and Alexei." Each of the scientists turned to the man as he nodded eagerly.
"We did it." He whispered, clearly un phased at what she had said. "Thank God, we broke her." They all continued to mutter amongst themselves as exhaustion swept over Elena and she sank back into the chair, not caring what they planned to do to her. The grief and rage in her subsided and her eyes began to close of their own accord.
"She sleeps too much. We will need to address this." She heard one of the scientists say before scribbling something into her file. She didn't fight when two hands picked her up and dragged her back to her dorm, allowing her full weight to hang on them, too tired to lift her own feet. By the time, they dropped her back onto her bed and closed the handcuff around her wrist, she was already drifting off to sleep.
The soldiers locked the door to the communal dormitory and began to return to their post. They didn't believe so much in the science mess that the scientists had insisted on developing whilst these girls were being trained as weapons. But they had assisted them for the past number of months in breaking the young girl and all it had taken was some photographs of her dead family. The scientists would be smug that they had been right about that theory. The soldiers had been pre-warned about the girl. That she was different, not that any of the girls in this place were normal. They thought that they had prepared themselves, but they had felt that girl in their heads and they couldn't help but wonder if she knew what they had done.