When Dimitri awoke the next morning, a startling sense of unfamiliarity jolted him up into a sitting position. Then, as the light filtered through the hazy overhead fluorescents, he realized the concrete floor beneath him and the concrete walls beside him belonged to the strange three-pronged animal that called itself Corinth. He had been here for too long, that much was true. The Queen would be wanting an update, if not a full report, in the near future, but he wasn't quite sure how to complete what he'd come here to do.
The bonfire had burned down during the night to a small pile of ash, the floor surrounding it as black as night. Sleeping bodies lay scattered across the floor in the main Corinth clearing. He felt wrong in the place; a disturbance of incalculable enormity invading something sterile, pure. Corinth was more clever than Dimitri had given them credit for, and vastly more organized than he had previously believed.
Rogue communities weren't supposed to be powerful. They weren't supposed to be a threat.
Although, he reasoned for a moment, they could have Corinth as allies. While the mere mention of Court tended to make everyone tense, it didn't have to be that way.
Dimitri remembered a time when things were peaceful. It felt like so long ago.
Peace was not a word that Dimitri Belikov threw around lightly. After all, his job depended on conflict in order for him to do it efficiently. His hands were stained with blood and violence. If the war ever slowed or came to an end, as everyone hoped, he would become a writer. He'd decided this ages ago, but had never breathed the words aloud.
Writers, too, thrived on discontent.
"Oh, good. You're awake." Josiah Hollis said to his left. He was sitting on the ground, his long limbs twisted and folded into an approximation of comfort. Half-moon spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose as he shuffled through a set of documents.
"Good morning." Dimitri brushed dust off of his uniform.
"Is it?" Josiah kept his tone conversational in a way that made it painfully obvious that small talk was not his strong suit. "It happened again." He paused. "The attacks, I mean."
"When?" Dimitri's mind was still full of cobwebs. He brushed them to the side.
"While we were sleeping." Shuffle, shuffle. "Two more dead, three miles outside of where Rose was found." Josiah grimaced. "They were humans."
"You know what you have to do, don't you?" Dimitri didn't move from where he was sitting, choosing instead to covertly glance at what Josiah was examining.
"That's a non-option, Belikov." Josiah's throat caught mid-laugh. "Never thought I'd get to say that last name again."
"Court is always an option, Hollis," Dimitri said. "We are not evil, contrary to the opinion of your followers."
Josiah sighed. "They don't think Court is evil. They're just... wary. Paranoia is the difference between life and death."
He looked like a man who hadn't been able to relax since the day he was born. It pained Dimitri in an odd way to know this was one of the people who raised his child.
"Then how will you deal with this threat?"
"Like all the others. Quickly and quietly."
They held each others' gazes for a split-second, then Josiah returned to his work and Dimitri to his thoughts.
"Were you here all night?" Dimitri asked, his own question catching his mind off-guard.
Josiah shrugged in a way that said yes in the same way that it said no. "I can't leave Adam while he's sleeping."
The curled form of Josiah's husband pushed up against his feet, the silver Alchemist tattoo barely visible in the half-light. Adam seemed twenty years younger when he slept, but it was a fitful type of sleep. His hands twitched and clawed at the air.
"Nightmares," Josiah said softly. As quickly as it had gone, his business-like attitude returned. "It's nearly morning. We should wake the others."
Dimitri looked at the surrounding sleepers, all huddled in some form of sleep. He recognized them briefly from the memorial, but could not place their faces in his mind or their names on his tongue. Valya was not amongst the group.
"Come," Josiah said to Dimitri. He had woken Adam and was gathering his papers. "We'll gather on Level Four."
"The original team?" Adam asked. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.
"As many of them as you can get," Josiah replied.
Dimitri stood and stretched. It had been years since he had slept on something other than his bed, and he wasn't twenty-six anymore. He followed Josiah up to Level Four and wondered with a distant sort of distraction if this was the beginning or just the beginning of the end.
It had been two hours since the Ural Mountains team assembled on Level Four to go over the new information that had been relayed to them in the night and Valentina Belikova still hadn't surfaced.
"I can't believe that Stasla Junior would miss a strategizing meeting on her own pet project." Pollock snickered into his coffee, earning him a punch in the shoulder from Gin.
"Does she often sleep late?" Dimitri asked.
This earned a round of surreptitious glances from various members of the team to each other. He didn't enjoy this language they shared, of whispered secrets and wordless conversations understood with such fluency that human speech was rarely necessary.
Dimitri offered an expression of his own. It said: well?
"We know where she is, it's just..." Jasper trailed off.
"No one wants to get her," Gin finished.
They all shared knowing expressions that Dimitri was excluded from.
"You should go get her, Belikov," Pollock suggested. His fox-like face held a wicked grin. "The shock should be better than five espressos."
"Liam!" Gin hissed.
"If no one else is willing to retrieve Valentina, I will." Dimitri rose from his seat. "Would anyone care to tell me where I can find her?"
Josiah, the only one who had not yet spoken, sighed. "Unit 47. Go get the brat."
Dimitri knocked on the door to unit 47, a small one most likely for one person. It was in a section of Corinth that housed a majority of the young people who were either orphans or in training to become agents. Those who didn't wish to go through training remained in their family homes, which were larger and had several rooms.
He didn't hear any signs of movement behind the door and knocked again, but he had a sneaking suspicion that Valya was a deep sleeper just like Rose. He'd be lucky to get her up by knocking the door down.
"Valentina," Dimitri shouted through the door.
Still no answer. Dimitri was beginning to feel as if someone was playing a prank on him that only he didn't understand. He clenched his jaw and opened the door to the unit, letting light from outside stream in.
Valya was lying on the bed with an arm draped over Sasha's shirtless chest. They were fast asleep.
"Valentina," Dimitri said sternly. He gritted his teeth.
"Shit." Valya's head jerked upwards, her hair flying every which way. She saw Dimitri standing in the doorway. "Shit."
"You are late for the morning briefing," Dimitri said. He had nothing else to comment on, even though he wanted to. What his daughter does in her off time is none of his business, but that didn't mean he wasn't irked by it.
"Well, you could have knocked!" Valya said.
"I did."
Valya leaned over and swatted Sasha on the nose. "Wake up! We overslept."
Sasha blinked a few times and opened his eyes to see Dimitri darkening his doorstep. He gulped. "Oh shit."
Dimitri glowered at him.
"I'm coming to the briefing," Valya said. She picked up a t-shirt from the floor and pulled it on. "You can leave now. I'll be right there."
Dimitri stood silently, then turned and left the unit. "I'll be waiting outside."
Valya rolled her eyes and sighed.
The conference room on Level Four did its best to not go completely silent when Dimitri returned, a sullen-looking Valya in tow, but the expressions of the people he now realized were his colleagues did nothing but rile him up further. They knew that Valya spent every night in the bed of that Moroi earth user. That boy who did nothing but stare with his hooded grey eyes and run his fingers through the wild curtain of hair that hung about his shoulders.
Five years. The words echoed around Dimitri's mind.
He took his seat beside Gin, keeping his face as composed as possible. Pollock sat across from him, a lazy grin spread across his face.
"How was Amin's unit, Staslanya?" he asked.
"You can't double a diminutive, Pollock," she spat back. "Your failure in remedial Russian is showing."
"You didn't answer my question."
"It doesn't warrant an answer, asshole."
"Enough." Josiah slapped his hands on the table, making everyone jump. "Nice of you to join us, Valentina. Can someone catch the cadet up on what she missed while she was sleeping?"
Hershey was quick to claim the role and dragged Valya off to a corner of the room, their heads pressed together and their voices low.
"Don't be so angry at Valya." Gin leaned over to speak to Dimitri. She smelled of black tea and hardtack. "It's no wonder she doesn't want to sleep in her actual unit. Too many reminders."
Dimitri stared straight ahead at a patch of discolored plaster in the wall. "I don't know what the ruled of Corinth are, but I am assuming she broke quite a few of them last night."
Gin shrugged. "Maybe so, but we all did. Drinking on a non-designated day, sleeping outside of our units, indoor fires larger than regulation, the list could go on and on."
He turned his head to look at Gin with a curious expression. She was tall, almost as tall as he was, with slender limbs and dark skin similar to Sasha's. She was Moroi, but he couldn't remember if she'd mentioned what element she'd settled as. Her green eyes glittered in the sparse light. "What do you know of Aleksandr Amin?"
"Sasha?" she pursed her lips. "He's a good kid. Bad past, some dark marks here and there, but Stasla liked him. I figure, that must count for something, right?"
Dimitri bit his lip to stop himself from chuckling. "She wasn't always the best judge of character."
Gin smiled. "Like mother like daughter. Besides, I heard you and Stasla got up to some pretty unsanctioned events back in your day."
Dimitri went beet red against his wishes. Pollock snickered from across the table and leaned over to high-five Gin.
Two more. Two more had been killed and Rokin was in a state of lockdown. It wasn't as if Ekaterina wanted to leave, but she had to. She had to keep Emiliya safe at all costs.
The twisting, narrow streets that led them into down were bumpy and unmaintained. Most of the town had left after the recent attacks. They had all happened so close to each other- too close. Whatever was living in the hills had grown stronger, brasher; metastasized like a cancer, split itself in two and grown larger than ever before.
"Mother," Emiliya whined from the passenger seat of the truck. Their belongings were piled into the truck bed; everything they could bear to part with was left to rot in the dusty home back in the woods.
"Emiliya," Ekaterina returned in a similar tone. "Don't be like this."
"We can't leave," Emiliya said. It sounded so unlike her; the petulance in her voice was gone and replaced by something smooth and calm. It terrified Ekaterina to no end.
We can't leave. We can't leave. We can't leave.
She'd been muttering these words like a prayer ever since Ekaterina decided to start packing. They seemed to be tattooed in her flesh, carved into her skull, slipped onto her tongue by an unseen force.
We can't leave.
"We must," Ekaterina replied. She kept a firm grip on the steering wheel as they neared the outskirts of the village.
Emiliya was becoming more agitated by the minute. Her hair, as light as cornsilk, swirled around her like a current as she twisted in her seat, attempting to find purchase on anything. Ekaterina flung a hand out and pinned her in place. They were almost out of the village now, it was only a matter of ensuring Emiliya went with her.
Then came the screaming. It was almost too much for Ekaterina to bear, but she held fast, the truck rounding the sharp corners and the steep hills of the mountain slopes as Emiliya wailed in the seat beside her. Her nails dug into the flesh of Ekaterina's forearm with surprising intensity and drew blood upon first contact.
"We can't leave!" Emiliya wailed. Her eyes were wild and unfocused. She banged on the windows, clawed at the dashboard. Her seat belt and Ekaterina's arm choked her back into submission.
We can't leave.
And then, as they left the mountain upon which Rokin was perched, Emiliya stopped. It was a change so sudden that Ekaterina's foot slipped and she pushed on the brake instead. The truck slammed to a halt.
"Solyshka?" Ekaterina lowered her arm from Emiliya's chest, her skin slick with blood, and pushed a strand of hair away from Emiliya's face.
"Mama?" Emiliya touched Ekaterina's hand. Her eyes were green now, not the terrifying blue of before, swirled with disease and confusion.
"It's okay now, solnyshka," she said. She wanted to sob. "We're safe now."
Emiliya reached up to touch the wounds on her mother's arm. The neckline of her dress shifted to reveal a flash of glittering gold on the taut skin of her collarbone. "It is not yet over."
"What?" Ekaterina recoiled.
Emiliya placed a hand on Ekaterina's cheek. Blood smeared along her jaw.
"It is not yet over."