Age 17 — Deployment to Averikan Territory
The transport plane droned through the grey sky, carrying Netoshka west across the continent.
Three months had passed since the ritual in the frozen north. Three months of reprogramming, conditioning, preparation. The symbols on her skin had faded beneath the surface—still there, still watching, but invisible now to anyone who didn't know where to look.
Her new identity was clean.
Mimi. Trade delegation attaché. Linguistic specialist. A young woman with perfect documents and no past.
Her mission was simple: infiltrate Averika's eastern seaboard, establish a cover identity, and wait for activation. The Directorate wanted eyes inside the Commonwealth. With civil war brewing, with factions forming and lines being drawn, Riyue needed to know which way the wind would blow.
Netoshka sat in her seat, watching clouds pass beneath the wing.
She thought about the ritual. The symbols. The thing watching from beyond the sky.
She thought about the Family in the Higane village. His face. His courage.
She thought about nothing at all.
The plane began its descent.
---
Port Victory — Averikan Commonwealth
The city rose from the coast like a dream of glass and steel.
Port Victory was the jewel of Averika—a sprawling metropolis of towers and bridges, of ships crowding the harbor and trains threading through the streets. It smelled of salt water and industry, of money and ambition.
Netoshka walked through customs without incident. Her documents were flawless. Her demeanor was calm. She was just another young professional arriving for work.
The first week passed quietly.
She rented a small apartment in the Riverside District. She reported to her cover job at the East Continental Trading Company, a legitimate import-export firm that served as cover for Riyue intelligence operations. She attended meetings. She filed paperwork. She smiled at colleagues.
At night, she walked the city streets, memorizing routes, identifying surveillance points, cataloguing the rhythms of Averikan life.
It was almost peaceful.
Almost.
On the twelfth day, she accessed a restricted terminal inside the shipping intelligence office. A routine task—pull manifests, cross-reference shipments, identify patterns. Nothing that should have triggered any alarms.
She didn't see the trap close.
---
The Capture
The black vans arrived at dawn.
No sirens. No warning. Just vehicles sliding into position around her apartment building, their doors opening silently, figures in dark clothing moving with precision.
Netoshka woke to the sound of her door being breached.
She was on her feet in an instant, reaching for the weapon hidden beneath her mattress—
Too slow.
The first figure through the door was already on her, an injector pressed to her neck. The chemical burned through her veins. Her muscles turned to water. Her vision blurred.
She collapsed.
The last thing she saw was a face above her—calm, professional, utterly without expression.
Then darkness.
---
DSI — Directorate of Strategic Intelligence
She woke in a steel room.
White walls. White light. A table bolted to the floor. Two chairs. No windows.
The air smelled of antiseptic and something else—something that triggered buried memories of Zeta-9, of RedBird, of every white room she had ever inhabited.
The door opened.
A woman entered. Mid-forties. Sharp features. Dark hair pulled back severely. Eyes that had seen everything and judged most of it worthless.
She sat across from Netoshka and placed a folder on the table.
"Welcome back," she said.
Her voice was calm. Almost pleasant.
"I'm Director Hale. You're in a DSI facility. That's the Directorate of Strategic Intelligence. We're the people who clean up messes other agencies make."
She opened the folder.
Inside were photographs. Documents. Reports.
Netoshka's face. Her real face. Her real name.
Netoshka Nezvany.
Rosalvya. Zeta-9. Sokolov.
RedBird. Voss. Thorne. The Curator.
Riyue. The White Dragons. The ritual. The symbols.
It was all there. Every moment. Every betrayal. Every layer of programming.
Director Hale leaned back.
"You've been busy," she said calmly. "Rosalvya asset. Riyue ritual candidate. White Dragon collaborator. Sleeper agent for three different nations, none of whom actually control you."
She tilted her head.
"You're a mess, Netoshka. A beautiful, dangerous, utterly unstable mess."
Netoshka said nothing.
Hale nodded.
"Yes. That's what we suspected."
She pressed a button on the table.
The lights flickered.
"We can't fix you here. We don't have the facilities. We don't have the time. And frankly, we don't have the patience for another round of reprogramming that someone else will just undo."
She stood.
"So we're sending you somewhere else. Somewhere that specializes in cases like yours."
Netoshka finally spoke.
"Tsk,Heh you think you can hold me down huh? Where do you think you can do to send me again huh?"
Hale smiled. It didn't reach her eyes.
"Sombiro Island."
---
Sombiro Island — First Impressions
The transport was a military cargo plane with no markings.
Netoshka sat in the hold, restrained, watching through a small window as the continent fell away and the ocean stretched beneath them. Hours passed. The sun set. The stars emerged.
Then, through the darkness, she saw it.
An island.
Dirty coal-mined. Jagged. Surrounded by black water and jagged rocks. Lights flickered along its coast—not the warm lights of civilization, but the cold, functional lights of something else.
The plane descended.
Sombiro Island.
It was not a prison. Prisons had rules. Prisons had oversight. Prisons had the possibility of release.
Sombiro was an erasure facility.
Officially, it was a labor rehabilitation colony—a place where problematic individuals could be reformed through hard work and discipline. The Averikan government had used such places for decades. Political dissidents. Foreign agents. People who needed to disappear.
Unofficially, it was something else entirely.
A black site for broken assets. A dumping ground for spies who had outlived their usefulness, for operatives whose loyalties had become too tangled to trust, for weapons that had turned unstable.
A place where people were not imprisoned.
They were processed.
---
The Intake
The processing took three days.
Fingerprints. Photographs. Medical examinations that left her feeling violated in ways she had almost forgotten. Interviews with bland-faced administrators who asked the same questions over and over.
Name.
Origin.
Affiliation.
Why are you here?
Netoshka gave them nothing. Or everything. It didn't matter. They wrote it all down and filed it and moved her to the next station.
On the third day, she was issued a uniform—grey, shapeless, stamped with a number on the chest.
Prisoner 734.
She was assigned to a barracks and given a bunk.
The barracks was a long, low building made of concrete and corrugated metal. Forty bunks, twenty on each side, most of them occupied. The air smelled of sweat and mildew and something else—something that made her think of fear.
The other prisoners watched her as she entered. Evaluating. Calculating.
Netoshka met their eyes without expression.
She had been in worse places.
She lay down on her bunk and stared at the ceiling.
The war was over. The programming was complete. The mission had failed.
And now she was here.
---
The Island
Sombiro Island was larger than she had expected.
Twenty kilometers across, volcanic, covered in dense jungle and sharp cliffs. The facility occupied the northern coast—a sprawl of concrete buildings, guard towers, and electrified fences. Beyond the fences, nothing but jungle and ocean.
The prisoners worked in the mines.
Deep beneath the island, veins of rare minerals ran through the volcanic rock. The prisoners extracted them—twelve hours a day, six days a week, with minimal safety equipment and minimal supervision. The tunnels were unstable. Collapses were common. When they happened, the guards didn't dig.
They simply marked the location and moved on.
Netoshka worked in the mines for weeks.
Her body, conditioned by years of war and experimentation, handled the labor better than most. She didn't complain. Didn't slow down. Didn't draw attention.
She watched.
She learned the patterns—guard rotations, shift changes, supply deliveries. She memorized faces, names, hierarchies. She identified the prisoners who had been here longest, the ones who ran the black market, the ones who had given up.
And she waited.
---
The Horrors of Sombiro
But the mines weren't the worst part of the island.
The worst part was the prisoners themselves.
Sombiro didn't just break people physically. It broke them morally. The guards encouraged it—looked the other way when violence erupted, reduced rations until hunger became desperate, pitted groups against each other until survival meant turning on your own kind.
Netoshka watched it unfold.
The prisoners had organized themselves into cliques—territorial groups that controlled different parts of the compound. The White Caps, named for the white scarves they wore, ran the black market and controlled access to extra food. The Sunken, named for their quarters near the flooded lower levels, were the enforcers—brutal, desperate men who had been here so long they no longer remembered the outside world. The Unaffiliated were everyone else, scattered and weak, surviving on scraps and hoping not to be noticed.
The violence was constant.
Fights broke out over bread, over blankets, over perceived slights. Prisoners disappeared during the night—taken by the White Caps for debts, by the Sunken for sport, by no one at all because the island simply consumed them.
Netoshka kept her head down. Stayed unaffiliated. Watched.
Then the hunger came.
---
The Cannibalism
Winter hit Sombiro like a fist.
Supply ships couldn't reach the island for weeks. Rations were cut in half. Then half again. Prisoners grew thin. Grew desperate. Grew animal.
Netoshka saw the first sign in the mess hall.
A fight over a piece of bread. Two men, both starving, both beyond reason. They tore at each other with teeth and nails, and when it was over, the victor didn't just take the bread.
He took something else.
Netoshka looked away.
But she couldn't unsee it.
The next week, it spread.
The White Caps began controlling more than just the black market. They controlled the weak. Prisoners who couldn't pay their debts, who couldn't fight back, who simply vanished from the barracks one night—their bunks empty, their names forgotten.
No one spoke about it.
But everyone knew.
The Cannibalism War erupted in the spring.
Two factions—the White Caps and the Sunken—turned on each other over territory, over resources, over the right to decide who lived and who became meat. The fighting lasted three days. Prisoners died in the yard, in the tunnels, in the barracks. The guards watched from the towers, guns ready, waiting to see who would survive.
When it ended, the White Caps had won.
But the cost was written in the faces of every prisoner left.
Sombiro had done what it was designed to do.
It had stripped away everything human.
And left only animals behind.
---
Tunnel Nine
Netoshka survived the war by staying invisible.
She was fast enough to avoid fights. Quiet enough to go unnoticed. Empty enough that the predators sensed something wrong and left her alone.
But survival wasn't living.
It was just waiting.
The collapse happened on a Tuesday in Tunnel Nine.
Netoshka was working deep beneath the island, pickaxe in hand, when the ground began to shake. Not an earthquake—something else. A structural failure somewhere in the network above.
The ceiling groaned.
Dust rained down.
Prisoners screamed.
Then the world came apart.
Rocks fell. Supports buckled. The tunnel collapsed in a wave of darkness and debris. Netoshka dove for cover behind a mining cart, covering her head as the mountain came down around her.
When the shaking stopped, she was buried.
Not completely—there was space above her, air moving from somewhere. But she was trapped, pinned by debris, alone in the dark.
She tried to move. Couldn't.
She tried to call out. No answer.
She lay in the darkness and waited to die.
---
Ruzina
The debris moved.
Not by itself—something was digging from the other side. Hands. Arms. A voice calling out in the darkness.
"Hello? Can you hear me? Keep talking—I'll find you."
Netoshka forced words through cracked lips.
"Here."
The digging intensified. Rocks shifted. Light appeared—a small lantern, held by a figure crawling through the gap.
Then hands grabbed her, pulled her, dragged her through the narrow space.
They emerged in a pocket of air, surrounded by collapsed tunnel on all sides.
Netoshka looked at her rescuer.
A girl. Young—eighteen, maybe. Short dark red-orange hair plastered to her face with sweat. Sharp blue gray eyes that missed nothing. A narrow, intelligent face marked by the same exhaustion and hunger as everyone else on the island.
"You're welcome," the girl said dryly.
Netoshka managed a nod.
"Thanks."
The girl studied her for a moment.
"You're the quiet one. The one who survived the war without joining anyone. I've been watching you."
Netoshka said nothing.
The girl held out a hand.
"I'm Ruzina."
Netoshka took the hand.
"Netoshka... Nezvany."
Ruzina's eyes flickered with something—amusement? recognition?—but she said nothing.
They sat in the darkness, waiting for rescue that might never come.
---
The Friendship
Rescue came eight hours later.
They were pulled from the rubble, dehydrated and exhausted, but alive. The guards didn't congratulate them. Didn't offer medical attention beyond the bare minimum. Just sent them back to the barracks and told them to be ready for work the next morning.
That night, Ruzina found Netoshka in the yard.
"Walk with me."
They circled the perimeter together, staying away from the guards, keeping their voices low.
"You're not like the others," Ruzina said quietly.
"I can tell."
Netoshka looked at her.
"Neither are you."
Ruzina smiled faintly.
"No. I suppose not."
They walked in silence for a while.
Then Ruzina spoke again.
"I used to be someone else. Before this place. Before everything."
Netoshka waited.
"I worked for them. The Averikans. Signals intelligence. I was good at it—really good. I could find patterns in noise, trace communications through layers of encryption, predict where people would be based on what they said and didn't say."
She paused.
"Then I found something I wasn't supposed to find. A pattern that led back to people I wasn't supposed to know about. People high up. People who didn't want to be found."
Netoshka studied her.
"And they sent you here."
Ruzina nodded slowly.
"They sent me here."
She looked at Netoshka with those sharp blue eyes.
"What about you? What's your story?"
Netoshka considered the question. How much to tell? How much to hide?
"I was a soldier," she said finally. "Different war. Different continent. I did things. Saw things. Made enemies."
She shrugged.
"Now I'm here."
Ruzina nodded as if that explained everything.
"Enemies. Yes. I know about enemies."
They walked to the end of the yard and back.
That was the beginning.
---
The Bond
Over the following weeks, they became inseparable.
Not out of friendship—Netoshka didn't believe in friendship anymore. Out of survival. Ruzina was clever in ways Netoshka wasn't. She mapped guard rotations, tracked supply shipments, memorized wind patterns and tide schedules. She saw the island as a system, and systems could be understood.
Netoshka handled the rest. The violence. The intimidation. The moments when cleverness wasn't enough.
In the mines, they worked side by side, watching each other's backs. In the barracks, they slept in adjacent bunks, taking turns keeping watch. In the yard, they walked together, sharing information, planning.
Ruzina told stories about her past—always half-truths, always leaving something out. She spoke of operations in distant cities, of codes and ciphers and the people she had outsmarted. But she never gave names, never gave locations, never gave anything that could be verified.
Netoshka did the same. Fragments of truth wrapped in silence. A childhood in a place that no longer existed. Training in facilities that had no names. Wars that blurred together into one endless conflict.
They understood each other without needing to understand completely.
At night, in the darkness, Ruzina would whisper.
"They think we're broken. Discarded. Nothing."
Her voice was soft but certain.
"They're wrong."
Netoshka listened.
And somewhere, deep in the frozen part of her heart, something stirred.
---
The DK-Ultra Sessions
Three months into her imprisonment, Netoshka was removed from labor detail.
Guards came for her during the night, pulling her from her bunk without explanation. Ruzina woke instantly, her eyes sharp with alarm, but Netoshka shook her head slightly.
Don't. Stay.
She was taken to a different part of the island—an underground facility hidden beneath the main compound. Concrete corridors. Fluorescent lights. Doors that sealed with pneumatic hisses.
The Medical Wing.
But it wasn't medicine they practiced here.
Averika had identified her anomaly again. The glitching. The neurological irregularities. The ritual markings beneath her skin that no amount of examination could fully explain.
DSI had sent instructions.
Phase Reimplementation of DK-Ultra.
The sessions began immediately.
Isolation tank. Days in complete darkness, floating in salt water, nothing but her own thoughts and the distant hum of machinery. The ritual markings pulsed faintly in the dark, responding to something she couldn't sense.
Sensory deprivation. Ears covered. Eyes covered. No sensation but the cold and the weight of her own body. Hours stretched into days. Time lost meaning.
Repeated command sequences. Recordings played directly into her mind through neural induction. Phrases repeated thousands of times, burying themselves in her subconscious.
"The dragon sleeps beneath the grass."
"The river returns to the sea."
"Liberty through control."
Electromagnetic stimulation. Currents passed through her brain, disrupting old patterns, creating space for new ones. The pain was immense. She screamed until she had no voice left.
Hallucinatory drug cycles. Chemicals flooded her system, dissolving the boundaries between real and unreal. She saw things that weren't there. Heard voices that had no source. Lived entire lifetimes in the space between heartbeats.
They were trying to overwrite the Riyue triggers. Erase the conditioning implanted by Dr. Shen and their Colonel. Replace it with something new.
"Liberty Through Control."
The sessions blurred together.
Sometimes she woke screaming.
Sometimes she woke laughing.
Sometimes she woke not remembering who she was.
---
The Return
When they finally returned her to the barracks, she was barely conscious.
Ruzina caught her as she stumbled through the door, guided her to her bunk, held her while she shook.
"You're still here," Ruzina whispered fiercely.
"Remember, we are Sisters, we are the same, Don't let them take that."
Netoshka stared at the ceiling.
The symbols on her skin pulsed faintly beneath the surface.
Something on the other side was watching.
---
The Plan
The plan took shape over months.
Ruzina was the architect. She had been watching, calculating, waiting for the right moment.
The Objective: Escape.
The Method: The airstrip.
There was a small landing strip on the island's eastern edge, used for supply flights and medical evacuations. A cargo plane sat there most of the time—old, battered, but functional. If they could reach it, if they could get it started, if they could take off before the guards reacted...
Ruzina had been tracking its maintenance schedule, its fuel levels, its flight patterns.
"They fly out every two weeks," she whispered one night. "Supplies in, nothing out. But the plane stays. It's always there."
Netoshka listened.
"We need to be on it when it leaves. Not as cargo—as pilots."
"You can fly?"
Ruzina smiled faintly.
"I can learn."
They spent months preparing.
Stealing tools from the mines. Hiding them in caches around the island. Mapping blind spots in the guard rotations. Memorizing access codes overheard from careless conversations.
Step by step:
First: Create a diversion. Something big enough to draw guards away from the airstrip.
Second: Reach the hangar. Access the plane.
Third: Start the engines. Take off.
Fourth: Fly east. Toward Rosalvya. Toward freedom.
It was insane.
It was impossible.
It was the only chance they had.
---
The Night Before
The night before the escape, they sat together on the roof of the barracks.
Not supposed to be there. But Ruzina had found a way. She always found a way.
The stars were bright above Sombiro—brighter than anywhere Netoshka had ever been. No city lights. No pollution. Just endless points of light, watching, waiting.
"If we make it," Ruzina said quietly,
"what will you do?"
Netoshka considered the question.
"I don't know."
Ruzina nodded slowly.
"Neither do I. But I'd rather not know it somewhere else than know it here."
She looked at Netoshka.
"Whatever happens tomorrow... thank you. For being here. For being real to me."
Netoshka met her eyes.
"Same."
They sat in silence, watching the stars.
---
The Escape
The diversion worked perfectly.
A fire in the warehouse district, timed to coincide with the guard rotation. Alarms blared. Guards scrambled. The compound descended into chaos.
Netoshka and Ruzina moved.
Through shadows they had mapped a hundred times. Past fences they had tested for weaknesses. Toward the airstrip, toward the hangar, toward the plane.
The hangar door was locked.
Ruzina produced a keycard—stolen weeks ago, tested on doors throughout the compound, never used until now.
It worked.
The door opened.
The plane sat before them—old, battered, but intact. Ruzina ran to the cockpit, her fingers finding switches, her eyes scanning instruments.
"Fuel's low. But enough."
Engines coughed. Sputtered. Roared to life.
The hangar doors began to open—slowly, too slowly.
Shouts outside. Guards running.
Netoshka grabbed a fire axe from the wall and stood at the entrance.
The first guard through the doors never saw her coming.
Neither did the second.
The plane rolled forward, picking up speed down the runway. Netoshka ran after it, leaped, caught the edge of the open cargo door. Ruzina's hand grabbed hers, pulled her inside.
Gunfire erupted behind them. Bullets sparked off the fuselage.
Then the ground fell away.
They were airborne.
---
The Flight
The plane limped through the night sky.
One engine sputtering. Fuel gauge dropping. Ruzina at the controls, her face pale with concentration.
"I've only done simulations," she said tightly.
"Good enough," Netoshka replied.
They flew east.
The ocean stretched beneath them, dark and endless.
For the first time in months, Netoshka allowed herself to breathe.
They had made it.
They had actually made it.
Ruzina glanced at her, a wild smile on her face.
"We did it. We actually—"
The engine died.
The plane spiraled.
Water rushed up to meet them.
---
The Crash
Netoshka woke in wreckage.
Floating debris. Burning fuel. Cold water filling her lungs.
She gasped, coughed, forced herself to swim.
Around her, fragments of the plane drifted on the waves. Smoke rose from scattered wreckage. The sky was grey with dawn.
She searched desperately.
"Ruzina!"
No answer.
She swam through the debris, calling out, searching.
A figure in the water. Floating face-down.
Netoshka reached her. Turned her over.
Ruzina's eyes were closed. Her face was pale. Her lips moved—faintly, barely—forming words Netoshka couldn't hear.
"Ruzina. Ruzina, stay with me."
Ruzina's eyes opened. Just barely. Just enough to see.
She smiled.
A strange smile. Not the smile of someone dying. Something else.
"You... made it," she whispered.
Netoshka held her.
"We both made it. We're getting out of this. Together."
Ruzina's hand reached up, touched Netoshka's face.
"No," she said softly. .
"Just you."
She pushed.
Not hard—Netoshka was holding her, supporting her. But the push was enough. Enough to slip from Netoshka's grasp. Enough to sink beneath the waves.
Netoshka lunged, grabbed, caught nothing but water.
"RUZINA!"
No answer.
The water was dark. The body was gone.
Netoshka floated alone in the wreckage, staring at the empty ocean.
---
The Boat
Hours passed.
A fishing boat appeared on the horizon.
Netoshka was too exhausted to swim toward it. Too exhausted to call out. She just floated, waiting, watching it grow closer.
Hands reached down. Pulled her from the water.
She lay on the deck, staring at the sky, seeing nothing.
"Ruzina," she whispered.
No one answered.
---
The Journey
The boat was small. The journey was long.
Three weeks became four. Four became five. The fishermen didn't ask questions. Didn't demand payment. Just let her exist in the space of their vessel, watching the horizon, waiting for land.
Netoshka spent the days staring at the water.
She thought about Ruzina. About the escape. About the crash. About the moment she slipped away.
Just you.
Why had she said that? Why had she pushed?
Netoshka didn't understand.
But somewhere, deep in her mind, a small voice whispered.
Nothing is what it seems.
She pushed it away.
---
Rosalvya — One Year Later
The fishing boat reached the Rosalvyan coast in early spring.
Netoshka stepped onto the dock at Port Mirny, her legs weak from months at sea, her mind a fog of memories and questions. The fishermen waved once and sailed away without looking back.
She stood on the dock, watching them go.
Then she walked into the city.
For months, she drifted.
Small towns. Remote villages. Places where no one asked questions, where no one looked too closely at a young woman with empty eyes and strange markings beneath her skin.
She worked when she needed money. Slept where she could. Moved when she felt watched.
The hallucinations continued.
Ruzina appeared in reflections. In crowds. At the edge of her vision. Always watching. Always silent.
Netoshka learned to ignore her.
But she never forgot.
---
The Train Station
A year after leaving Sombiro, Netoshka found herself in a quiet town called Krasny.
She sat in a train station café, nursing a cup of tea, watching the rain fall outside.
The door opened.
A man entered.
Older now. Grey in his hair. Lines on his face that hadn't been there before.
Yevgeny Nezvany.
He saw her immediately—walked to her table, sat across from her without asking.
No uniforms. No ceremony. Just two former soldiers, meeting in a place that belonged to neither of them.
"You're alive," he said softly.
"Yes."
He studied her for a long moment.
"I heard things. About where you've been. What they did to you."
Netoshka said nothing.
He reached across the table—not to touch her, just to be close.
"You deserve peace, Netoshka."
She almost laughed.
"I don't think that's possible."
They sat in silence, watching the rain.
After a while, he spoke again.
"There's something you should know. An organization. Private military. They're recruiting people like us. People who've seen too much, who've been used by too many nations."
Netoshka looked at him.
"Who?"
"Synarchy. Led by a string charismatic man named Kersnik. You should meet him, he will take care of you. He will be your new Handler from now on."
---
Kersnik's Synarchy
The compound was hidden in the Valley of Mists, deep in the Rosalvyan highlands.
Netoshka arrived with Yevgeny, walking through gates guarded by armed men in unmarked uniforms. The compound was a collection of low buildings, training grounds, and barracks—functional, efficient, anonymous.
Yevgeny led her to a central building.
A man waited inside.
Kersnik. Mid-forties. Sharp features. Eyes that had seen empires rise and fall and learned to trust none of them. He wore no uniform, no insignia—just simple clothes that somehow commanded more respect than any military attire.
"Netoshka Nezvany," he said.
"I've heard your name many times. From many sources. All of them afraid of you."
Netoshka said nothing.
Kersnik smiled.
"Good. Fear is useful. It means people take you seriously."
He gestured to a map on the wall—a continent, divided and subdivided, with markers showing conflicts and flashpoints.
"The old order is dying. Rosalvya is fracturing. Riyue is overextended. Averika is tearing itself apart. The world is becoming chaos."
He turned to face her.
"We don't serve any nation. We serve order. Not the order of dictators or ideologues—the order of people who know how to survive. We take contracts. We run operations. We make things happen."
Netoshka studied him.
"And me?"
Kersnik's smile widened.
"You're exactly what we need. Trained by everyone. Loyal to no one. A weapon without a master."
He extended his hand.
"Welcome to the Synarchy."
---
Krovka Squad
The squad was called Krovka.
Eight members. Four Rosalvyan. Four Riyue. Split evenly between men and women, all between eighteen and twenty-two. All survivors of the wars, the purges, the endless conflicts that had shaped their generation.
Netoshka met them in the training yard.
The Rosalvyans:
· Zimor — Twenty-two. Broad-shouldered, quiet, a former infantry sergeant who had lost his entire unit in the Dongba campaign. He moved like someone who had learned that survival meant never stopping.
· Volna — Twenty. Sharp features, sharper tongue. A sniper from the northern front who had killed more people than most soldiers saw in a lifetime. She laughed easily and trusted no one.
· Kedr —
Nineteen. The youngest of the Rosalvyans. Fast, clever, with the restless energy of someone who had been fighting since childhood. He talked constantly, mostly to cover the silence in his head.
· Sova — Twenty-one. A medic who had seen more death than healing. She carried herself with a stillness that reminded Netoshka of herself—the stillness of someone who had learned to feel nothing.
The Riyue Defectors:
· Qi-7 — Twenty-two. A former White Dragon operative who had fled after the purges. His eyes held the same emptiness Netoshka recognized—the emptiness of someone who had done terrible things for a cause they no longer believed in.
· Yunyan — Twenty. A communications specialist who had worked in the Directorate's propaganda apparatus until she saw her own family's village on a list of "pacified zones." She spoke rarely and listened always.
· Honglian — Twenty-one. Demolitions expert. Wiry, intense, with a smile that never reached his eyes. He had planted the bombs that killed his own commanding officer during his escape.
· Lotus — Twenty-two. Former intelligence analyst. She had access to files that would have gotten her killed a hundred times over if anyone knew she had copied them. She joined the Synarchy because it was the only place that would take her.
Netoshka stood before them, Kersnik at her side.
"This is Netoshka," Kersnik said. "She's survived things none of you can imagine. She's been Re-programmed by three different nations and broken free of all of them. She's the closest thing we have to a weapon without equal."
He looked at the squad.
"Your job is to make her part of this team. Her job is to keep you alive."
Netoshka met their eyes.
Zimor nodded once. Sova studied her with professional interest.
Kedr grinned. Volna showed nothing.
Qi-7 gaze was flat, assessing. Yunyan watched without expression. Honglian smile didn't change. Lotus eyes widened slightly—recognition, perhaps, of someone else who had seen too much.
Kersnik clapped his hands.
"Get acquainted. You ship out in three days."
He walked away.
Netoshka stood alone before her new squad.
The first mission was coming.
The Synarchy was waiting.
And somewhere, in the back of her mind, a woman with short red-orange hair watched from the shadows.
Waiting.
---
The cycle continued.
Netoshka had escaped Sombiro—but at what cost? Ruzina was gone. Dead in the water. Lost forever.
Or so she believed.
Far away, in a dark room filled with screens, a woman with short red-orange hair sat watching from a distance in a disturbing manner.
Ruzina—alive. Whole. Watching data streams from implants Netoshka didn't know she carried.
She leaned back in her chair.
"Sleep well, Netoshka," she murmured.
"You're going to need it."
The screens showed vitals. Locations. Neural activity.
Netoshka was exactly where DSI needed her.
Inside the Synarchy.
Inside Krovka.
Ready for activation.
The screen went dark.
Ruzina stared at the blank monitor for a long moment.
For just an instant, her face showed something—regret? sorrow?—before the professional mask slid back into place.
"Goodbye, Netoshka."
She turned away.
The war was over.
But for Netoshka Nezvany, the real battle had just begun.