Chapter 1: Nadezhda

Nadezhda sighed, and reluctantly fumbled a cigarette to her lips.

There was snow coming. She could feel it in her bones. Other people’s bones ached when the cold set into them, but hers seemed to ache just at the anticipation of it. They were rarely ever wrong.

It wasn’t heavy snow, if she had to guess. When it came, it would be soft, powdery flakes that sat as a light dust over the rolling countryside. Probably not even deep enough to make a snowman. She identified with snowmen. She understood them on a level most people didn’t.

Still, it wasn’t the sort of weather you’d like to ride a motorcycle in. Hers, a sleek but bad-tempered classic with rounded panels and slightly clipped wing-mirrors, was parked beneath the awning of one of the village shops. As close to safe as it could be, in this kind of place.

She’d come a long way. Driving without a destination, trying to relax and clear her mind. She was getting stressed, and snappish with it; she wasn’t suited for the world of business, and it rubbed her the wrong way far too often.

So she had quietly foisted the day’s tasks on her secretary, and went out riding until it brought her here, to a quiet town nestled in the snowy hills. She would have gone further if the weather had held, but it seemed that today, this was where her journey ended. After she finished her first and last cigarette of the afternoon, she squared her shoulders and went in search of somewhere to whittle her time away.

Her first thought was the church, but the scent of freshly brewed coffee stopped her in her tracks and lured her towards what she could only assume was the town cafe. No doubt it would be cheap coffee, lovingly brewed. Still bad, as all cheap coffee was, but she honestly preferred it that way. She’d drunk coffee boiled in saucepans and strained through dishcloths, and she had no fear of anything a place like this might brew.

A bell tinkled as she opened the door. She had to stoop slightly to squeeze through the doorframe; she was a tall woman, and country folk tended to be smaller than most. Lamentably, their buildings seemed to reflect it.

As soon as she came in, a squat woman with an ivy-coloured headscarf called her over from behind the counter, flashing a pleasant and guileless smile. “Well, if it isn’t a new face. Come on in out of the cold. What can we get you?”

“Just a coffee.” Nadezhda smiled, but it was brittle. She didn’t have the energy for lively people at the moment. That was why she’d taken care to escape her secretary, who was best described as a glowing beacon of friendly service. Sometimes the glow was nuclear. “And somewhere to sit.”

The woman’s husband, who seemed to handle any and all coffee-related enquiries, grunted and jerked his head at the booths by the shop window. Nadezhda immediately found herself warming to him a lot more than his wife; his attitude might have been rude, but it was straightforward and easy to parse. She missed when she’d been around people like that. Now that she was in business, everyone had a fake smile that had been be interpreted – even her.

The moment that thought occurred to her, she shook her head regretfully. She’d come out here to keep her mind off work, and yet, it seemed her thoughts were dragging her back there without her consent. She couldn’t escape, even though she’d run as far as this tiny countryside cafe.

“On second thoughts, I’ll take something to eat as well,” she said as she walked to a random booth. “I’m not a fussy eater, so I’ll take whatever’s cheap. Surprise me.”

The husband grunted again, having somehow made a sale that he didn’t even particularly want in the first place. Suffering from success. Sometimes life worked out that way. Nadezdha could relate.

Knowing that she wouldn’t relax unless she’d at least pretended to make progress, and that she no longer had the patience to wait idly while her food was prepared, she slid a sheathe of laminated paper from her satchel and laid some of it out on the table where she could see it. When the food and coffee came, she’d just use the files as a place mat. The joys of laminating your documents were many and diverse.

The files in question were reports on potential new employees. They began with a small square picture of the person in question, usually sourced from semi-public records like army enlistment or criminal mugshots. Most of them weren’t flattering, but it was still necessary to see a photo in case it provoked some gut reaction that could inform recruitment.

Then they went on to show what Nadezhda thought of as the “brute” details: name, age, date of birth, current residence, blood type (in case they found themselves losing too much while on business and more needed to be sourced), things of that nature. This section was, most of the time, fairly useless. It was good knowledge to have once somebody had been brought into the fold, but it didn’t do much to recommend or disqualify them during the recruitment process.

That would be done by the next section: a long personal history that her secretary, Masha, had dug up and formatted herself. Things like where a person was born, who had recommended them for what jobs, how long they’d stayed in certain roles, and who they might have established ties to during their work were often what filtered the useful from the dangerous. Knowing and understanding all that data was difficult, but essential for making quality hires in a business like hers.

For Nadezhda, it was work that unfortunately dragged. Getting a holistic view of data was never a thing she’d excelled at, and only diligence could substitute for talent when it came to things like this. Understanding what she was reading took time, and usually gave her a headache.

She did have the option of hiring some kind of HR Manager and kicking the job down the chain, but it would have been a poor move. Ultimately, the decision to hire or not – her decision – was too important to go to anybody else. In her line of business, hiring the right person was the difference between success and disaster. When things went right, she ended up with people like Masha. When they went wrong, money and secrets quickly began to walk themselves out of the company doors.

Minutes came and went. A cup of black coffee and a plate of pancakes was set down in front of her, and almost – though not entirely – summarily ignored. Using important documents as a place mat had one more benefit: when the food came, you couldn’t see them any more and you had to stop to eat.

She’d reached a decent stopping point for the moment anyway. The candidate she’d been reviewing was very here-nor-there; not good, but not outright bad either. Boot filler. Sometimes that was what you needed – there were some boots in the world that simply could not be left unfilled – but she always preferred a candidate who could give her something to latch onto.

She took a sip of her coffee, which was bad, and put in one sachet of sugar, which made it marginally better. She didn’t bother with milk or creamer. She didn’t believe in them.

As she contemplated her food, the cafe door swung open to admit the first customer since Nadezhda had first sat down.

It was a blonde woman, just a little above average in height, with long dewey eyelashes and a look that Nadezhda would have described as aggressively placid. Almost dopey. A light dusting of snow had settled on the shoulders of her rugged winter coat, and specs of it were quickly melting in her long hair. Flicking behind her was a fluffy tail with downy, pale orange fur; fox stock, evidently. She was carrying a covered wicker basket, holding it with both arms as if it contained a live baby – although anybody who brought out a baby in a wicker basket on a day like today needed their head examined, in Nadezhda’s not so professional opinion.

The first thing the girl did was sneeze, and she sneezed hard enough to almost unseat the ushanka hat from her head. With that accomplished, she walked to the counter.

“Hello, Auntie Zoya. Mother said to give you her regards. And also some eggs from our ducks,” the girl said, setting the basket on the counter and drawing back the cover. Sure enough, it was full of eggs – not the smaller, brown hen eggs that Nadezhda was used to seeing, but slightly larger, speckled blue ones.

“That’s wonderful, dear. Why don’t you sit down and get the cold out of your bones? I’ll make you something to drink,” the headscarf woman replied kindly, spiriting the eggs away into the back room. Her husband grunted, and switched the coffee machine back on.

It was the kind of thing Nadezhda assumed you often saw in small towns and villages. Not so much in the city. Things were more efficient in the city, but she’d caught herself missing the personal touches that only came when you let people slow down. She hummed to herself with a vague sense of dissatisfaction, but there was nothing that could be done.

Busy with her thoughts, she was caught by surprise when, rather than choosing any of the empty tables dotted around the cafe, the blonde girl walked directly over to hers.

“Hello,” the girl said, sitting down without so much as a by-your-leave. “I haven’t seen you before, so you probably don’t know. But this is my table. I sit here.”

Nadezhda raised an eyebrow incredulously, and cast a meaningful look at the empty tables around them. Most of all she was surprised at the girl’s temerity. Nadezhda was not a small woman; she loomed over most of her compatriots, even when she sat down, and her demeanour was not particularly approachable. It had been a long time since anybody had dared start trouble with her.

“Well, I don’t have any intention of moving,” she said, with the slow, firm tone of a woman whose patience was in sharply limited supply. “Is that a problem?”

“No,” the girl immediately said, just as placidly as she had spoken to the owners. “It doesn’t matter if you sit here. It only matters that I sit here, because this is where I sit.”

“So you don’t mind sharing, then.”

“Mm. It’s fine. I just have to tell you that this is my table, because otherwise people think it’s weird when I sit down where they’re sitting,” the girl said seriously.

She seemed to think this was a good and natural end point to the conversation, because she took a small, leather-bound notebook from her satchel and began to leaf through it. When she’d gotten to the page she wanted, she nodded to herself, put it on the table, and squared it precisely with her thumbs and fingers, as though hanging a painting. More personal effects followed: a fountain pen, a napkin, a carving knife, all placed very specifically. When she was done, she looked at the tableau she’d made with unmistakable satisfaction.

Nadezhda watched – at first in disbelief, and then mounting curiosity, and finally rapt attention. She didn’t have any particular clue what the girl was doing, but she had a strangely captivating way of doing it. When at last she finished, she took the ushanka hat from her head, revealing a pair of fluffy fox ears, folded it, set it in the very middle of her arrangement, and stood up.

“I’m going order a thing. I’ll be back soon,” she announced, and strode off. Not to the counter. The counter would be too obvious. Instead she simply wandered into the kitchen, presumably to lodge her order with the grumpy old man directly.

Nadezhda watched her go, turned her eyes to the arrangement of things in front of her, and then at last, beseechingly, to the old woman at the counter. She was met with a wide, almost mocking grin.

“She’s something, ain’t she? Don’t let it bother you, stranger. That’s just Sasha. She’s a little loopy, but she’s a good girl, and she’s perfectly harmless,” the woman cackled. “Could call her a bit of a local celebrity. Everyone around here gets to know her, sooner or later.”

“A… little loopy?” Nadezhda repeated flatly.

“Well. She was always a little bit like that, even as a kid, but then she got it in her head to join the forces chasin’ after some guy she was sweet on, and you can probably guess how much good came of that. Can’t say if she’s better or worse, but she’s never quite been the same since,” the woman went on. She shook her head, sighing. “Sure handy with a rifle, though. Every now and then we get a rabid animal wander through, and she’s usually the one to put them down. Once got a dog clear from the other side of town, right before it was set to bite old Mary’s girl.”

“I see.” Nadehzda’s brow furrowed, and her expression darkened – albeit briefly. Thankfully, she was in the habit of styling her fringe so that a curtain of hair hid half of her face, and kept her expressions under wraps. It wasn’t the reason she kept her hair that way, but it was a definite advantage when she had to keep a poker face in the boardroom.

“Well, that’s neither here nor there. She’s a little odd, but she isn’t hurting anybody, so try and be patient with her. We’d be grateful if you did.” The old woman turned her head to the kitchen, and then held her finger to her lips with a conspiratorial wink. “Whoops. Looks like I was chatting too long again. Kyahaha.”

Sasha wandered out of the kitchen, carrying a pot of coffee on a tray. She sat back down, carefully aligning the tray in the middle of the table, and then carefully poured herself a cup.

“The rest of the coffee is for you, from Uncle Boris. I talked him into it.” She paused. “Maybe he talked me into it. I’m not sure. But it’s coffee.”

“I appreciate it,” Nadezhda replied – mostly to the air, since she wasn’t sure exactly who she was thanking. “So, you live at this shop?”

“No. I call them Auntie and Uncle, but they’re not my real aunt and uncle. I live at the church.” The blonde girl took a sip of her coffee, winced, and began to add cream a little at a time, sipping and wincing until she’d gotten the ratio correct. “My name’s Sasha.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Nadezhda.”

There was a long pause, in which Nadezhda thought about how to broach her next topic. As always, her natural instinct was to be blunt and upfront about it. That was the kind of person she was. It wasn’t that she didn’t think about what she said, or how to say it; it was just that, in the end, her conversational armoury came with limited ammunition.

“So. Your ‘auntie’ told me a little bit about you. Said you’d served in the military. Whose command were you under?” she asked.

The girl frowned, her ears flattening as if she’d heard something unpleasant. Her tail swished under the table.

“Lieutenant Yastrebov,” she replied, a little sullenly.

“After my time, then. I was in the military myself.” Nadezhda grinned ruefully. “Are they looking after you?”

“Looking after me?”

“Yes. Once you’re in the forces, you’re one of us for life. We look after our own.” Nadezhda paused. “At least, we used to.”

The girl shook her head. “Nobody’s doing anything like that. They didn’t like me, so they leave me alone now.”

“Is that so. Well, you seem like a resourceful girl, but if you need anything, let me know.” She passed over a business card. It was plainly designed – business cards were and always had been an arms race towards flashiness – but well-made, with her name and the logo of her company, Hyperborea. Sasha looked it over as if having never seen one before. It was entirely possible she hadn’t.

“Mm,” Sasha nodded, and tucked the card into a pouch on the inside cover of her notebook. “Thank you very much, Miss Nadezhda.”

Nadezhda grinned ruefully. Usually when she spoke with ex-military, it was about this point that they tied the name, her appearance and the rumours of her exploits together, and got a lot more formal as a result. Or worse, they pitied her. Sasha didn’t seem like the type to pay attention to anything outside of her own squad, though, so she probably hadn’t connected the dots. It was better that way.

“Did you come here for sightseeing?” Sasha asked. “A lot of people come to see the church. It’s a very nice one.”

“That sounds a little biased, coming from somebody who lives there.”

“Maybe. I haven’t seen a lot of churches, but I think ours is a good one. We have soft beds.”

To Nadezhda, soft pews seemed like a better advertisement for a church than soft beds, but she wasn’t the religious type so she held her tongue. Instead, she sipped her coffee, and weighed up how much she was prepared to reveal about herself.

It was a bad habit. But moving into the world of business had trained her to be on the lookout for corporate spies. She very much doubted Sasha was one, but it was always worth asking herself the question.

In the end, she shrugged. “I’m just relaxing. Work is hectic at the moment, so I thought I’d take a ride into the countryside, drink some coffee, and look over my files in peace.”

“You came to the right place. We’ve got plenty of coffee,” was Sasha’s inscrutable response.

“What do you do for a living, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I hunt sometimes, and I make carvings to sell. And I draw things, but I don’t sell them.” There was a moment of hesitation, then the girl slowly pushed her notebook across the table. “You can look, if you like.”

Nadezhda carefully picked the book up, more to humour her new conversation partner than anything else. She’d never had very much appreciation for art, even as a child. Ironically, she probably paid for more art than anybody she knew, but it was all in the service of advertising, and she enjoyed none of it. Another potential pleasure lost to corporate necessity.

But despite her misgivings, the drawings in Sasha’s notebooks were surprisingly good. They mostly comprised of naturalistic, pen and ink sketches of herbs, flowers and sometimes even animals, much in the style of an almanac. It wasn’t the kind of art that would sell, but it had purpose, and following the flow of sketches almost created a diary of what the girl had seen in the forests and woods.

“I like it,” Nadezhda said, handing the book back. “More than a lot of other art.”

“What do you do?”

“Business,” she replied glumly. “We’re hiring, so I was looking through some potential candidates. It’s a chore, honestly.”

“Ooh. I can help. I’m good at things like this,” Sasha said, leaning over the table.

This sounded highly dubious, but letting her ‘help’ wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world in terms of entertainment value, so she turned her laminated files so that Sasha could see them.

“I think this one’s kind of lazy,” Sasha declared after glancing at the paper for a few moments. “He gives up too easily.”

Nadezhda raised an eyebrow. “Any particular reason you think that?”

“That’s the feeling I get. He’s not a bad person, but he doesn’t do a lot when he’s at work.”

This, more or less, was what Masha’s additional notes had indicated. But those notes weren’t anywhere on the paper that Sasha had seen; in fact, they were still stuffed in the bottom of Nadezhda’s bag, a little cheat sheet to look at once she’d mulled over all the information.

“I see. What about this one?” she said, swapping the paper with another that she’d only looked over briefly.

Sasha’s face scrunched up. “This one’s a bad guy. He’s good at stuff, but you’d need to watch him all the time to make sure he doesn’t do anything weird.”

She recalled Masha’s notes on the candidate: skilled operator, sordid personal history. Unfortunately, certain parts of their business were… sub-legal, and the people with the skills they needed didn’t tend to be the nicest bunch. She’d rather hire people without those problems, but it sometimes wasn’t an option. Some boots needed to be filled.

She continued to go through the papers, and Sasha continued to render swift judgements on them. Her intuition didn’t seem to be perfect; there were a few candidates that she simply had no strong thoughts on one way or the other, and of course she couldn’t back up a single thing she’d said with anything approaching logic. But her ability to sniff out the nastier specimens with a single glance at the attached picture was uncanny.

“What about this one?” she asked, turning over another sheet.

“Oh!” Sasha’s face lit up. “I know this one. That’s Ivan.”

She said this as though Nadezhda ought to know who Ivan was already. As though Ivan wasn’t a perfectly common name, and there weren’t thousands of other Ivans dotting the countryside like dead pixels on an old monitor.

“He’s from around here?”

“Mm. I’ve known him since we were kids. We used to take baths together, but then his thing got too big and our moms made us stop.”

Superfluous information about the candidate’s penis size aside, Nadezhda began looking through the profile with more interest. Ex-military, transferred hastily away from the front and into logistics after an incident in a mock battle. Too simple-minded to be made an officer, but praised for his observational skills and accuracy at mid-range. The logistics arm had noted that he had no passion for the work, but did it well enough; route planning was one of his specialities. He was, at that point in time, formally unemployed, but rumour had it he’d been making money by trespassing into thaumic exclusion zones and selling the artefacts to the highest bidders.

Thaumic exclusion zones were dangerous places, left over by the Exothaumic Emission Event that ended the previous global conflict. Too far away from humans and their settlements, which seemed to impose some kind of expectation that physics should work the way they did everywhere else, strange phenomena ran rampant in these wild, uncultivated spaces. Most people who went into them never came out; most people that came out left in an entirely different shape, either mentally or physically.

Anybody who could make regular trips inside an exclusion zone was a candidate for Hyperborea’s recruitment, and could provide artefacts that would be instrumental for their research and development team.

“Could you tell me a bit more about him?” Nadezhda asked.

Sasha thought about it for a second, before saying: “He’s got good hands.” This, apparently, was vital and relevant information for a potential employer to know. “They’re very steady. Mine are steady too, but they wobble a little. His don’t. And they’re warm. It’s very soothing.”

Nadehzda blinked. “I… see. I was more thinking in terms of personality…”

“He likes going on trains. He doesn’t usually like travelling if he doesn’t have to, but he likes it when there’s trains. The tunnels were his favourite when we were kids. He’d wait for it to go dark and then pretend to spook me. He didn’t spook me for real, though, because he knew I wouldn’t like it.”

“...right.”

“He’s usually really nice, and he’s got a lot of patience. But when he gets mad, he gets mad mad. We went into the army together, but he heard the rest of our unit talking bad about me one time, so he waited until the next mock battle we had and beat them up real bad. They moved him out of my unit after that.”

This was more along the lines of what Nadezhda had been looking for, so she made sure to nod appreciatively and make interested noises. “So he went a bit overboard?”

Sasha nodded. “He does that sometimes. Only when guns are involved, though. He likes to shoot things. When I shoot things it’s just because they need to be shot, but he enjoys it a lot more. His mom and dad were in the army too, so I think it’s genetic.”

“Interesting,” Nadezhda murmured. His mother and father would have been closer to her time. A little digging could turn up who they were. His face and last name were certainly familiar. “Anything else you think I should know?”

“He’s good at kissing,” Sasha said, looking oddly satisfied. “I practised with him until he could do it really well.”

Thankfully, Nadezhda’s coffee had been mostly forgotten about, because a line like that, delivered in the sweet if slightly deadpan voice Sasha had, would usually make her spit it out.

“You were an item, then?”

“No. He just lived near the church, so we played together a lot. We did all sorts of stuff when we were kids,” the girl said, almost wistfully. “If you see him, can you tell him I said hi? He’s been gone for almost a month now. He gets lonely, so I think it’ll cheer him up.”

Nadezhda pressed a hand to her head. Nothing about the day had gone as expected, and this was no different. Why not deliver a message from a weird country girl to her estranged not-boyfriend? After all, Sasha had already told her everything short of his shoe size.

“...If I get the chance, certainly,” she said at last.

The truth was that none of the other candidates she’d read about had spoken to her – and they didn’t seem to have spoken to Sasha, either. If nothing else, the girl’s instincts were on point. It seemed that, of all the candidates, Ivan was the only one worth doing the legwork of following up on. And if she was going to subject Masha to the extra work of information gathering on him, she’d probably end up conducting an interview in the near future.

“Everything’s really piling up,” she murmured, glancing out of the cafe window.

“That’s what snow does,” Sasha replied sagely. “Do you want to play checkers? I have checkers.”

There was still half a pot of coffee left on the table, and a stack of files destined never to be read. Nadezhda sighed.

“Go easy on me,” she said.

The snow continued to drift, quietly blanketing the sleepy town. A new and improbable friendship was being forged over coffee and cake.

One way or another, Nadezhda knew she would visit this town again.