From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 65
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
Millie looked up at her. "Are you joking?"
"No joke. Nice day."
True, it was only partly cloudy rather than completely, as was usual, but it only seemed to be letting the warm air out, leaving a freezing cyclone to blow in and take its place. A sudden gust buffeted Millie sideways and she stumbled.
It was only now, on their first patrol together, that Millie put together that being as tall as Inga was meant her strides had to match, and Millie was having difficulty keeping up without looking ridiculous. Was this how Elise felt when they walked together? Millie would have to remember to be more aware of that from now on.
"Is Siberia as cold as I've heard?" Millie asked, as moving her lips felt like the best chance she had against them freezing. She had an exceedingly hazy, general sort of impression of what Siberia was, having read about it somewhere or other, but if everyone who came out of it was a hardy as Inga, it must be like another world.
"More cold. Always cold."
"Even summer?"
"No summer. Only longer daytime," Inga said.
It made a certain sort of sense, Millie supposed. With Inga's hair cropped so closely on the sides, she must have quite the tolerance for cold for her brain to still be working. Millie had more hair than just about anyone, and it still felt like it wasn't enough.
Still, she felt churlish for even saying anything. She wanted so badly to treat Inga like she would anyone else, to make things 'normal,' whatever that meant anymore, but the more she learned about Inga's past, the more Millie felt not only intimidated but small.
The horrors Millie's brothers had seen before they were killed, Inga had seen too, but she was right here, real as life. She'd come back. Even though she had fought for a different country in only a single battle, there was a bizarre sort of connection Millie felt to her now because of it. None of her three brothers had come back to describe to her what they'd seen, or what they'd done, but Inga could.
And yet, Millie couldn't bring herself to ask the questions. Elise talked about the men she visited in the hospital every Sunday, and none of them wanted to talk about what they'd seen or done. Unless they brought it up first, it was taboo to ask, and though Inga was physically unharmed, Millie felt the weight of that taboo pressing on her every time she looked up into those keen black eyes. She wanted to know. What Vickie had tried and failed, Inga had actually done.
Vickie had wanted to go because her brother had; Inga went because the men wouldn't. Four years of horror had flipped things completely upside-down, and Millie couldn't blame any of them for feeling as they had.
Whether it was because Inga had lived to come home or because she'd shared an experience with her brothers, Millie could feel a sort of need for familiarity with Inga. However tangential and distant it might be, there was something she could share that might bring some vicarious sort of closure that Millie had long thought her need for buried.
Maybe.
As they walked along, Millie had to consciously remind herself that Inga was a person, just like anyone else, regardless of what her outsized history and proportions may make her seem. Millie couldn't help but recall what Svetlana had said about Inga needing a friend. That was more important than any nebulous wants Millie could come up with.
But outsized proportions, at least, were something Millie could relate to Inga with safely, and build out from.
"How are the new shoes?" she asked. The ones Inga had arrived in had been falling apart, and rather than even attempt shopping, they had gone straight to having them custom-made.
"Very good. Walk all day," Inga said happily.
Whether she was making a joke about her Manifest intentionally or not, Millie smiled at the wording. "Good. I'll take you to the seamstress I go to when you're ready to buy trousers. Or skirts, if you want to try that."
"No skirts," Inga said.
"Well, you and Vickie have that in common," Millie said.
"Smart."
"Oi! There's nothing wrong with dresses and skirts! Some of us like them!" Millie kicked her leg out and immediately regretted it, as the wind stole away the pocket of warm air that had kept her legs from seizing up. "Maybe not today, but normally…"
They made the turn at the remotest corner of the airfield directly into the wind, which tore away the curse that Millie let loose at being blasted full in the face with a wall of ice.
The turn brought them to a length of fence that was directly across from the main hangar, and Millie could see Juno lurking inside through the partially-open doors.
But she wasn't the only one.
Between two hedges on the other side of the fence was a camera on a tripod. Behind it, under a black hood, was… someone.
"Can we help you?" Millie asked as they approached.
In a sudden, spastic swipe, the hood was thrown off and a bespectacled man looked through the fence at the two women who now loomed between him and his obvious subject.
"I, erm… was just taking a few pictures," he said.
"I gathered that," Millie said. "Any particular reason?"
"Well, I'm, I suppose I would have to say an enthusiast," he said, dabbing under his hat with a handkerchief.
Millie crossed her arms. "Of what variety?"
"Aviation, of course. The Longs' newest airship is quite the curiosity."
"So you thought you would sneak a few photographs? And do what with them?"
"I… well, that is… uh…"
"Sell them?"
Millie might as well have jabbed him in the arse with a pointed stick, the way he jumped at that word. Inga walked closer to the fence, which she would have been able to look over if not for the barbed wire on top.
"Yes!" he squeaked, looking up at Inga like she was about to reach over the fence and pluck him out of the hedge. Maybe she was.
"You know about the Circus, don't you?" Millie asked.
"Of course," the man said, sounding offended that she would even intimate that he didn't.
"It's next week. How are your pictures worth anything when the whole world is going to see it soon?" Millie wasn't even trying to be confrontational, it genuinely didn't make any sense.
"What does it matter? A hobby is a hobby."
"Because we work security for the Longs, and if you're taking photos for their competition, we're going to have to confiscate that," Millie said, pointing at the camera, which looked terrifically expensive. Industrial espionage, even sabotage, was something Millie had a hard time getting her head around, especially after the war, but it was very real, according to the Longs. Without the German threat, Britons were happy to go back to turning on each other, Millie thought sadly.
"This is public property," the man protested, pointing at the ground below his feet.
"Not technically," Millie said. "The Longs own every inch of Longstown, which you are standing in. If you want to take pictures from Bedford, be my guest. Otherwise, please remove yourself from company property," Millie said, the officially-sanctioned threat sitting oddly on her lips.
The man looked up to Millie, and then more up to Inga, then down, defeated. "Very well," he said, and quickly began to pack up his equipment. As Millie couldn't prove anything and the hangar doors were barely open, she didn't feel like dealing with the paperwork breaking his camera would generate.
"Thank you," Millie said. Then she remembered her position. "Sir."
When the man had scuttled far enough away for her taste, Inga turned to Millie. "You talk well."
"I don't think I needed to, he just saw you and knew not to argue."
Inga laughed. "Good partner."
"I try to be," Millie said before pointing the way they'd been going before they stopped. "Come on, we have a ways more to go."
As they set out again, Millie knew that it wasn't as far as she'd feared.
Having already prepared for bed, Victoria sat at her desk in her nightclothes. Flush with positivity from her time with Yekaterina, she finally had the courage to open a book that she had never been able to bring herself to unpack since coming to EVE.
In the steady pool of white coming from the witchlight hovering above her, Victoria flipped another page. In the margins were several notes, mostly observations that were documenting a thought process, rather than any sort of actual insight. But the words themselves didn't matter, Victoria had read them dozens of times. Not because of what they said, but because of who had had written them.
Colette.
Her hand was flowing and beautiful, even when constrained to the limited dimensions offered on the blank fringes of a book. Interspersed here and there were a few words in Victoria's cramped, space-saving scratches. It had been a way of communicating in a stream-of-consciousness way when they weren't in the same room. They would answer each other's observations, only bringing up the biggest or most insightful when they met face-to-face.
The entire book she was holding had been written on the underlying principles that made Victoria's ghosting magic possible. Table after table of hideously complicated maths that amounted to the assertion that much like between the stars, there was space between atoms, and that solid didn't quite mean solid anymore; that matter was mostly empty space.
Their response?
Still just theory.
For now!
That Victoria had been proven right beyond a shadow of a doubt didn't stanch the flow of blood to her cheeks that resulted from seeing her hubris written out in such stark black-and-white. How old had she been when she'd written that? Nineteen? Barely at ADAM a few months, and she had already been convinced she could pummel the life's work of the greatest geniuses the world had yet produced into a different shape with magic. She hadn't even made her first witchlight at that point, yet she had already convinced herself she was going to single-handedly win the War to End All Wars by combining physics with magic.
Idiot.
Looking down at the tattoo emblazoned on her left arm, the pain that had driven her to such brashness was still there, but had been dulled by time and everything that had happened since the end of the war.
The '11' on her opposite arm was much the same, but it was more so the one that kept her fires burning, the one that would make sure she wouldn't rest until EVE had succeeded.
There would be no tattoo for Colette. There certainly wouldn't be one for attempting suicide. They would have to remain on the inside, forever. It had been her burning fear of forgetting why she was at ADAM that had led her down to the docks to get her tattoos in the first place, but it had been the constant reminder, the inability to let go of what they represented, that had led her to put a gun to her head and forget everything.
Not again.
Yekaterina was right. Victoria was only going to forgive herself by remembering. Her time as that other woman she had had to call November had been horrific, and she had to remember how she'd wound up there: she'd made herself that way. She'd tried to do everything herself, to work out everything in her own head, and become trapped there. Stuck in a loop of bad choices, misinterpretations, grief and loss, suffocating guilt, and yes, the inability to forgive herself for it.
Hating herself wouldn't bring anyone back. Hating herself wouldn't undo what she'd done. Hating herself wouldn't un-choose the choices she'd made. Hating herself wouldn't move her forward, it would only anchor her to the past and force her to re-live it over and over again until she learned her lesson.
The lesson she'd taken away the first time was that life wasn't worth living and that the world was better off without her in it.
Then it was. For a week.
She'd seen the result first hand, lived it, and had to see the look on her best friend's face when she learned about why.
Not again.
Slowly, Victoria traced her fingers over the words Colette had written. Physically they didn't feel any different, but they did in her heart. There, she felt them acutely, and for the first time since Colette's death, Victoria let herself feel them. She absorbed them within her, the results of a life lived, a life shared. Page after page, book after book, Victoria let herself feel, to remember, to hear the lilting, French-tinged accent that belonged to the hand that had written them.
When she got to the last page of the last book, Victoria read the last message. A message that, in her grief and guilt-stricken madness, she had forgotten. Now that the words were there for her to read again for the first time, she allowed herself to take them more deeply within her than any others. As she did, a single tear rolled down her cheek to splash upon the page, where the response she never wrote would have gone.
I'm very proud of you.
When the entirety of EVE gathered in The Shed once more, they weren't arranged in lines of battle ordered against one another, they were all standing in a circle. All except Alexandra, who was sitting in the centre staring at the floor while around her tension slowly filled the massive space like invisible hydrogen, waiting for a spark to set it off.
This time it didn't feel like a Vaudeville sideshow, but a courtroom, and Selene was the prosecutor. And the judge. Going by the look in her eye, Millie imagined it wouldn't take much to get her to also act as executioner.
"How could you have brought her here?" Selene hissed, her grey eyes as dark as thunderclouds, ready to unleash a torrent of flesh-stripping hail and lightning.
But if Zoya noticed the storm bearing down on her, she was slow to put up her umbrella. "She is safe among her sister witches. Who better to protect her?"
The call to assemble in The Shed had been sudden and frantic. To now know that Alexandra was the subject left a hollow pit in Millie's stomach. Was this her fault? Alexandra looked just as lost as ever, and didn't seem frightened of what was happening around her. That meant whatever it was, she knew about it.
I should just learn to keep my mouth shut, Millie thought.
"We don't even know if we can protect ourselves yet! What happens if they find out she's here?" Selene asked.
Zoya remained unmoved by the tornado spooling out of Selene's assault. "This is all a secret. No-one knows any of us are here."
"Because no-one has had a reason to come looking! Now they might. If there is a trail to pick up, if you haven't been as careful as you say, then it will lead them right here and put all of us in danger."
Millie shot a look to Vickie, who looked just as in the dark as to what that could mean. Svetlana looked concerned, but equally ignorant, and if she didn't know, then no-one did.
"So what then, will you turn her away?" Zoya asked.
"No, but you will no longer have a say in what witches become a part of EVE. This was a shocking lack of judgment on your part, and I will not have these women, this program, our identity endangered by such recklessness again." Millie had never heard Selene so upset. To look at Ivy, neither had she, and Millie felt a pang of regret at dragging her into this. It was clearly not the outcome she had foreseen, either.
So much for being able to see the future.
"What would you have had me do, turn her away?" Zoya asked, "Turn her in to the Bolsheviks to be shot again?"
Again? Millie thought, looking at Alexandra. She seemed physically fine; nothing about her said she'd been shot. Then again, she would have said the same thing about Vickie. Or herself.
Selene's eyes were hard, unyielding granite. "You didn't have to bring her here. Any one of those boltholes you used along the way, any number of witches in France, Belgium, anywhere else could have taken her and kept her hidden away in obscurity indefinitely. This is the largest single concentration of witches in the world, Zoya, and if you have made it a target, then Morrigan help you."
"I don't understand, who is she?" Yekaterina asked, reminding Zoya that there were others in the room, as she suddenly looked about at the rest of them like she'd forgotten they were there.
Alexandra, for her part, was unchanged, seemingly unaware of the eruption happening around her; the quiet eye in the centre of a hurricane.
"No-one as important as Selene thinks," Zoya said, but with a weak conviction that was being pulverised into doubt by Selene's intensity and a collection of witches rapidly losing their patience. She dabbed at her forehead with a handkerchief.
Selene looked offended. "No-one…? Can you hear yourself?"
The tension was unbearable, and Victoria could no longer sit idly by and wait for it to explode. "Who is she?" she demanded sharply. "Who could possibly be so important that Selene is afraid for our safety?"
All eyes turned to the two oldest witches, each of whom looked to be daring the other to answer the question. If Selene answered, she would only further endanger them by increasing the number of people who knew the secret. If Zoya did, she ran the risk of proving Selene right and turning the nine most powerful witches in the country, maybe the world, against her.
But Selene's gaze was withering, the sheer force of her presence eroding Zoya's confidence in her own proclamations before their eyes, and she broke.
The first words out of her mouth were probably curses, but to Victoria, a lot of Russian sounded like cursing.
"Her name is not Alexandra Smirnova." The reality of what Zoya was saying settled onto her face like building had landed on it. She sighed and crossed her arms. Was she bracing herself?
"Her real name is… Anastasia. Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova."
"What!?" Yekaterina shot to her feet. What little colour she had in her face evaporated in an instant and went as white as her hair. "That's impossible!"
Svetlana and Inga both wore combinations of horror and disbelief on their faces, turning to look at the woman Victoria knew as Alexandra as if she was some kind of spectre that had manifested from nothing to terrorise them all by doing little else than sitting perfectly still.
That she was succeeding was disconcerting.
"Who is that?" Elise asked on behalf of the local witches.
"Tell them," Selene commanded.
Regret suddenly found life on Zoya's face. "The Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. His sole living child and rightful heir to the throne of the Russian Empire, such as it is."
