From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 37
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
She mounted three steps to a narrow platform that had been erected in front of the group, looked out over them and smiled. This part she had gotten used to quickly.
"Good morning, ladies!"
There was a murmur of agreement that this was probably true, but not the unified response that Millie expected. She cleared her throat. "Good morning, ladies!" she repeated.
"Good morning, Miss Brown!" they said as one this time.
"Better!"
Following their usual call-and-response, Millie led them through their morning exercises, starting with a few stretches and moving up to breaking just enough of a sweat to get them woken up and limber for the day.
Completely voluntary, this sort of communal activity had worked well in other factories to build morale and make the working environment more pleasant. It also decreased the injury rate suffered by the more labour-intensive workers, for which Elise was thankful. It hadn't been terribly popular at first, but had grown as time went on, and productivity had been boosted as a result. Millie had no idea how the Longs actually quantified that, but she was happy to have had a part in it.
She wasn't exactly a taskmaster, and tried to keep the levity up as they progressed through their routine. As hard as it was to be someone else in front of them, Millie couldn't help but be proud of what she managed. It was fulfilling in its own way to have a life outside of EVE, even if it meant putting aside her real life with Elise while she was doing it.
The all-female workforce the Longs had used during the war had carried on after it, and seeing them assembled together, laughing and encouraging one another was heartening. They still had purpose, and had been allowed by the Longs to maintain their dignity and self-worth. These women knew they were lucky and it showed. They worked hard and supported one another, each and every one aware of what waited for them outside the boundaries of Longstown.
"I see you slacking, Katherine! Get those arms up!" Millie shouted good-naturedly at a fellow redhead near the back. "You too, Emily!"
None of them knew she was a witch, and none knew about her relationship with Elise, but they were coming to respect her all the same, and Millie found it was getting easier to be that person. Not a lie, it was more withholding a truth or two, and she was learning to accept that, for their sakes.
When the exercises finished, there were a few more shining foreheads than before, many more rosier cheeks, and quite a few more smiles.
"Very good, ladies! Have a good day today. Work safe, work well, and let's get that monster ready for her maiden voyage, eh?" Millie exclaimed, pointing past the gigantic open doors behind her.
Like some kind of long-dead leviathan, the exposed bones of the newest Long airship lay partially assembled along the length of the 'real' hangar. To Millie, it was an enormous puzzle, and she had not the faintest clue how it was going to be put together. Mostly wood, but with great swaths of fabric, it was a colossal undertaking, and her admiration for the women responsible went up every time she looked inside to see it that much closer to being finished.
However, her next responsibility didn't lie with the ship or the hangar, and so she left the swarm of activity that rose up in her wake to wander over to the nearby administrative building. As she approached, she saw a line of women waiting outside, all of them wearing faces of weary apprehension.
Smiling a noncommittal smile, Millie pushed her way past while trying to avoid eye contact.
On her desk, shoved into a tiny space which had itself been carved out of a slightly larger tiny space, Millie found a small mountain of personnel files stacked neatly in the centre. Sighing, she stared down at the one on top and wondered which of those women outside it belonged to.
As another part of her job, she had already helped sift through dozens upon dozens of applications, but however many they had whittled down, there were still twenty left out of over a hundred they had started with.
For a single position.
As glad as Millie was to help, it made her glad she wasn't responsible for the final decision; the candidates had all seemed equally qualified to her.
But she wasn't there to judge ten months of manufacturing experience against twelve, she was there for her more clandestine purpose, the one that melded her two worlds: to see if any of them carried the Talent for witchcraft.
If EVE's ranks were to expand, why not save some time and money recruiting by seeing if any potential witches came to them? It had been decided that the Talent should count in the favour of new hires, if she found it. Much of the current workforce had been hired during the war before such screening had ever been thought of, but now that the Longs were in the business of training witches as well as welders, it had fallen to Millie to help figure out who was which.
The files were just to fill her in on their backgrounds, and to provide a pretence for being close enough to make the determination. She would sit in on the interviews for 'security reasons left over from the war,' but what Selene had taught Millie to really be on the lookout for was so subtle that she had to be close to sense it. The Talent was akin to a thrum within someone, a sympathetic feeling that echoed the magic within a witch. But as it was latent, and not active yet, it was vanishingly weak in anyone who had never practiced. The more exposure, and the more they'd used it, the stronger it was, but those types were few and far between. Time and persecution had devastated the witch community, leaving it up to essentially random chance that a practicing witch came across a woman with latent Talent. When they did, they were to be treasured more than gold.
Now that Millie knew what to look for, and having sat in on so many interviews already, she realised why. It was shocking to see first-hand just how few in number they really were, and it reinforced to Millie just how important EVE was.
There was a reason witches very quickly started thinking in terms of family when it came to other witches. They had to.
Meredith Johnson, the one who would be conducting the actual 'interview for the job' part, came round to Millie's desk. "Are you ready?"
"…and so my mother is back home with my twin brothers. I need this job to support them."
Edith Baker sat across from Millie, her frayed flat cap crushed under her calloused fingers. She was the twentieth interviewee of the day, and the twentieth one that desperately needed a job to support a family that no longer had any working-age men in it.
Millie had to consciously keep from asking how old the boys were. The temptation was just as strong every time she heard the same story, but her ears still burned as she remembered how angry Meredith had been the one time she'd done it, stepping over her authority as the decision-maker on behalf of the Long sisters. Millie was an adviser and observer, nothing more, she had to keep telling herself.
If you weren't, you'd be the one having to tell nineteen of them to go home, she thought. Or worse, sitting on the other side of that desk.
All three of the youngest EVE witches had lost everything in the war, but they had been lucky enough to have each other when it was over. Discovering that there were countless other women who had suffered the same as them was heartbreaking enough, but even more so how many had been left with less than nothing. They had obligations they couldn't meet, debts they couldn't pay, and children they couldn't feed.
Millie knew it was impossible to hire all of them, but that didn't make it hurt any less to turn them away.
"Thank you Miss Baker, I think we have everything we need. We will contact you when we make a final decision."
Edith rose and shook both of their hands before slipping out the door, closing it silently and politely behind her.
They both sat in silence, and Millie could only imagine what was going through Meredith's mind. It was an impossible choice. To say that she liked Meredith would be a stretch, but she did respect her for having to make such choices day after day.
"What about her?" Meredith asked, her voice flat and devoid of energy. She didn't look up.
"She has it," Millie said. She should have been overjoyed. She'd found a Talented woman, a potential witch, but it meant the others wouldn't get the job for reasons that were entirely out of their control. Edith had no idea she even carried the Talent, going by how weak it felt. She probably believed, like Millie had at one time, that magic was a myth, that witches were just stories people told each other to frighten them or make their children behave. She hadn't done anything to deserve the job any more than the others had done to lose it.
Blind luck.
"Very well," Meredith said, and pushed away from the table. "I will inform the Longs. Thank you for your assistance, Miss Brown."
As quietly as the woman before her, Meredith was gone as well.
Alone with nothing but her thoughts, Millie held the pasts of twenty women in her hands, knowing that she had guaranteed only one of them had a future.
Katya remembered from her only trip to America the phrase, "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses."
Leading the five Russians bringing up the rear in a train of souls that were all three, she couldn't help but feel that in Dover it was something more akin to 'shut up and don't jump the queue.'
Not at all like her first trip to Britain.
On that trip, it had been more akin to how it had been in New York: positive and buzzing with hundreds of new possibilities with every ship that docked. The sense that those around her had arrived. The air had rippled with the sense of completion, that things were going to be all right. Her memory of that trip had kept her spirits afloat even as the ship she was standing on felt like it wanted to do anything but. The last time she had docked in Dover, she had felt like a welcome guest—that all she had needed to do was ask and she would be off to see the King.
Now? King George V was there all right, looking down from his frame on the wall, finding her wanting.
Just one more thing the war had changed for the worse.
Now, no matter which side of the 'border' they were standing on, as far as an island could have one, no-one looked happy. The Aliens Officers would clearly rather be anywhere else, and Katya guessed it was because they were called Aliens Officers. English was not her first language, but a half-dozen better names sprang to mind in the time it took to process the first person after she'd joined the queue.
Her paperwork was in order, yet she still felt like a criminal. Following the rules was more humiliating than if they'd simply jumped off the ferry and washed up on a beach somewhere. Behind and all around her were the others who had been on her ferry from the Continent, and every set of eyes she managed to catch looked poor and tired, indeed. And scared. The Officers didn't have to let any of them in, it was entirely up to the discretion of the person she talked to who had the rubber stamp. If he picked up the black stamp, her long journey would be over, and she might allow herself to breathe. If he picked up the red stamp, it would continue, and it may very well come to pass that she would be sent straight back to Russia.
That couldn't happen, Katya told herself, scratching her left wrist.
Would the letter from the Longs she clutched in her good hand even matter? It was a firm offer of employment, and that's what was required to get in. On top of that, she was also a refugee, from a place that even the most world-affairs-ignorant person knew was producing them by the thousands. She had those and her name, if it came to it. It was hubris to assume that anyone in Britain who hadn't had direct dealings with her family's company knew of it, and how many Aliens Officers were involved in the trade of Russian luxuries? Not that it would truly matter, since her assets had all been seized by the Bolsheviks and liquidated before the royal family had been. As long as the last year had seemed, time was passing with a speed that had no regard as to whether she could keep up.
Poor. Tired. Huddled.
Katya's fall from grace had been sharp, sudden and painful when she hit the bottom. She wasn't alone, she knew, but never had she felt it more acutely than waiting in a queue for yet another stranger to decide her fate.
The men who hadn't pulled the trigger on her when they had done to her father, the child amidst the bombed-out, smoking ruins of some godforsaken village who hadn't sold them out to feed her family, the man who had bandaged her rather than let her bleed out when she— no, it wasn't the time for that. She'd had nearly a year of thinking of nothing but that. They had been lucky to make it as far as they had with as few incidents as they had. Near miraculous, in fact, and Katya knew it had been in part by keeping their hopes up. Not that she'd had much choice; it was believe they were going to end up somewhere safe or roll over and die in a ditch.
She tried not to think about how many they had come across who had chosen the latter.
"Next!"
"Katya, go," Zoya said.
The wizened face that had shepherded them across the whole of Europe to get them this far peeked out at Katya from under a threadbare headscarf that may have once been colourful. Every line in her face was an indelible mark of a year of her life, it had always seemed, and though the crow's feet that crinkled around her eyes made her look the part of a benevolent babushka, the grey irises within were like granite, and just as hard. They had made it this far because Zoya hadn't left them any choice.
In spite of that look, and whatever the differences there may have been between Katya and the other four witches, no matter how wide the gulf that still separated them, Katya hesitated in taking the step away. If she was first, what if she failed to get through? Would that doom the rest of them? What if she was the only one to get through and she had to leave the rest behind? A sudden, terrible anxiety seized her and she froze.
"Next!"
Someone shoved Katya from behind, and suddenly she was face-to-face with fate, in the form of a balding man in an ill-fitting uniform with the name of 'Higgins' in block text on his breast pocket. Wire spectacles magnified how much his eyes narrowed as he appraised her like she was on an auction block and he was deciding whether or not to put in a bid.
"Passport."
The confident, graceful Katya of old was impossible to summon in that moment, and she dumped all of her documents on the counter at once. Luckily for her, her passport ended up on top. The most precious thing she would ever own, it was the one object she had managed to keep out of the hands that had taken everything else. Seeing it in someone else's, she couldn't stop staring at it. What if he just kept it, or held it for ransom? What could she do? Anxiety built within her again, a bubble that only burst when pierced by the nasally voice of Officer Higgins.
"You speak English?" he asked as he flipped it open.
"Yes," Katya said in that language, "I do."
"You've gotten around, Miss Gurevich." JURY-vich. He wasn't the first to say it that way. Katya ignored it, letting the man peruse the garden of stamps that bloomed in a dozen colours across the back of her passport. There were enough to account for maybe half of the countries she'd actually been through, and there was no sign of any sort that she had left her home country legally.
Slavering wolves and stinking, toxic shell holes weren't much for stamping passports.
"I traveled a lot on business with my father," Katya said, her eyes still locked on her passport.
"What kind of business?"
"Trading. Textiles and art, mostly." Beautiful things that made me proud to be Russian, she didn't say. Gold so bright and colours so rich as to leave Dostoevsky without words to describe them.
"You've been to the UK before?" Higgins asked, knowing it was true by the stamp he was looking at, as if he expected her to lie about something as banal as that.
"In 1914, just before the war. Russian luxuries were in demand before we couldn't make them anymore." It hurt to say, being even more true than they had thought at the time. The war had decimated Russia's economy, which had helped lead to the revolution in the first place. Now, if the country even existed in a few months it would be a miracle, let alone with an economy that was exporting anything other than what they could dig out of the ground.
"Your English is very good," said Higgins.
"Thank you, sir. It was important in our work."
"Your family's? Where are they now? Back in Russia?"
"They're dead." It was too blunt, Katya knew, but the words had been repeating in her head for so long they were automatic, even in English.
Higgins' eyes fell, and he looked genuinely remorseful at his question. "I'm sorry to hear that."
"Thank you, sir."
"In the revolution?"
Katya nodded. "Yes." It was half true.
"So that means you're seeking asylum from it, not here to spread it?" Higgins asked pointedly, in marked contrast to the contrition of a few seconds earlier.
"They killed him and took my home," Katya said flatly, tearing her eyes away from her passport for the first time. What little dignity remained her, that truth called the faintest spark of the fire within her to her eyes, and she met those of Officer Higgins without hesitation or fear.
Following that, he looked away to flip through the rest of her papers in silence, and Katya stood there awkwardly watching. Luckily, she only had to figure out what to do with one of her hands: clutch the ends of her ratty shawl together and tremble with the rest of her body in anxiety, exhaustion and cold.
Years of training and experience told Katya that this, the moment of decision, was when to press her charm, to flutter her eyelashes and curl her lips into shapes that made men adjust their ties and reach for their handkerchiefs. To be, quite literally, as the newspapers put it, a 'desirable alien.' But that wasn't who she was anymore. That Katya had died in the revolution, too, and the one that was left would live or die on her own merits.
Just having to let slip that little bit of honesty was enough to force her to see the reality of where she was all over again.
Poor. Tired. Huddled.
