Unknown Facility
Russia
March 2001
THE floor was dirtier here.
Semna wasn't sure what she expected. Her cell was, of course, a reflection of these people's treatment towards those they see as less. She was nothing more than a prisoner to them, here to fulfill a purpose only they knew. And it was clear from the start that she wasn't the only prisoner here.
She just never thought she would come face to face with him.
Upon closer inspection on their silent walk through the building, Semna noticed that this man's arm, which she had assumed was just covered in metal, was actually made of metal. Instead of being a small part to a larger piece, it was really an integral part to who he was; how he moved. As they walked along the arm shifted many times—sputtering, almost—to the point that he had to clamp his other, bony hand down on top of it to gain control again. It was nothing short of terrifying for Semna, who had to witness his rage each time it occurred.
He had brought her through many dark tunnels. Each one looked the same as the last: scuffed walls, all painted a shade of gray; floors with pieces of tile ripped out of the concrete; and doors upon doors, closed off with no sign of what was behind them. She remembered asking him where they were going, why she was finally getting out of her cell after 42 days of being closed off from the outside world. He never responded, but based on his attitude, she wondered if he even heard her at all. By the constant view she had been getting of his back, she guessed not.
"Soldat?"
The soldier stopped in his tracks. He whipped his head around so fast Semna flinched, jumping back and throwing her arms over her head. She stayed like this a moment, then lowered her arms slowly to get a look at his face. It was half covered, so she could only see his eyes, but she could still see that he looked...amused. In fact, she would even venture to say that he was laughing at her.
Why was he laughing?
"What?" she croaked, narrowing her eyes at him.
He only shook his head and resumed his walk, leading her down another dark hallway. She wanted to ask when they would get to wherever it was they were going, but she remembered what Madame B said once about restlessness gaining no respect. And as quickly as she had opened it, she shut her mouth once again.
The only people allowed to have no patience are winners, Semnadstat. You are no winner.
Truthfully, she was beginning to wonder if the Madame has been right about her all these years. Since arriving in this place, all she'd had time to do was think. About the Red Room, the fighting, her classmates.
About Natalia.
Why was it so easy for Natalia to follow the rules? Why couldn't I do that?
There was never a doubt in Semna's mind that Natalia was the Madame's favorite all those years. She did everything they told her to do and did it with precision on every occasion, earning the respect of the teachers and—whether she knew it or not—the fear of her classmates. Semna in particular had never been scared of Natalia due to the personal affinity they had towards each other, but she had always wished for the same treatment to come to herself one day.She thought that life might have been easier if she had been loved—or even liked—by those at the Academy.
When the man finally turned the last corner, they emerged into a well-lit, polished room. Semna had to avert her eyes against the brightness; against the light she hadn't been exposed to in weeks. Instead of the dull gray that filled the rest of the building, the walls in this room were painted a stark white color. On the wall across from her was a mural of some kind that was simple, yet caught her eye as mesmerizing all at once: a skull, painted a bright red, with several tentacles sticking out below it to create an arc. Around the picture was a perfectly drawn circle, and under this, Semna noticed a single, ominous word in Russian script:
Salyut!
She stared at it for a moment, wondering what it meant. Abruptly, she was pulled by the collar from behind and thrown to the side. She fell to the concrete floor, feeling a sharp pain in her knee as it scraped her ashen skin. Not daring to check the injury, she stood up quickly and adjusted the dirty nightgown from prying eyes, her own darting around.
After a moment they landed on an unfamiliar man a few feet from her. He, like the Soldier, was smirking at her, running his dark orbs over her body as if to evaluate her presence. She met his eyes, glancing briefly to the two larger men standing guard behind him. Just when she opened her mouth to speak, he cut her off.
"You know, when the Madame warned me you were a frail girl, I hadn't really believed her." His voice was sharp, sending shivers down Semna's back, pinpricks of needles all over her skin. He was a tall man and rather scrawny, and wore a uniform that displayed all of his weapons and tools in pouches along his belt. Semna stared at them, then looked up to him again. She said nothing.
"But my God," he continued, "I had no idea it would be this bad."
Semna took a long sigh, biting her tongue. She wanted to tell him that she was frail because she'd been fed one meal a day for a majority of her life, and ever since she got here, they seldom fed her once a day. If she was frail, she wanted to say, it was their own damn fault.
"Nothing to say?" he laughed. She looked away. Lately she felt that she had been laughed at more than actually spoken to in her life, and it was making her sick. People always had a lot to laugh about around her, but they would do nothing to fix the issue. It was somehow her job to live up to the standards they were setting.
It infuriated her.
Suddenly, the man took a large step forward. With one hand, he grabbed her chin, raising it until she was face to face with him again. Nowhere to turn, she met his eyes, taking a shaky breath. "Look at me when I speak to you!" he barked, spitting and breathing heavily onto her skin. He let go of his grip on her chin and stepped back, now admiring her at full glance when she held the position. "There," he said, more calmly now, "isn't this better?" He raised up his arms, sighing in relief. "Isn't it easier if we see each other in full view?"
He looked to Semna for a moment, as if waiting for a response. When she said nothing he dropped his arms and lowered his head in frustration. He brought his hand to his face, massaging the bridge of his nose, and sighed out a string of expletives. "Soldat," he commanded. "Let's begin to whip her into shape, shall we? I think it would do some good to hear that voice of hers today."
With that the man strode over to a row of three chairs. He took the middle seat, still watching Semna with an ambiguous intensity, his guards each taking a seat on either side of him. Semna stared back; she had no idea who this man was or what he was supposed to be to her, and it appeared he wasn't going to tell her himself. But somehow she knew that whoever he was, he had the most control over whether she would make it out of this place alive. He was what would dictate her future, and there was little way to control the outcome from here on out.
. . .
On the first day of her training, Semna was punched exactly eleven times by the Soldier: one time in the forearm, three times in the shoulders, four times in the stomach, and three times in the jaw. She had landed approximately zero hits to the Soldier, although she attempted it dozens of times. She went back to her cell that night with a bleeding chin and bruised limbs.
On the second day, she landed a kick to the Soldier's stomach. It was a small victory that she unfortunately took for granted. In her second attempt to land a kick, the Soldier had caught her foot and twisted it with a loud crunch that had Semna on her knees in an instant. Despite this the Soldier continued on, and was able to strike her in the face several times before the man in the corner told him to stop. Semna went back to her cell that night with a limp.
On the third day of her training, Semna was not awoken in the usual way. On any other day, she would have been woken up with the clanging of metal bars, or with the shout of a faceless guard as they slid her only meal under the slit of the cell door. This day, however, was much more concerning.
She woke up on her own.
For the first time in her life, her body had simply decided that she had gotten enough sleep for the night. It had reached the level of energy it thought she would need for the day, and this time, she discovered, was not until around ten o'clock in the morning. She knew this from the way the sun had passed the visibility of her cell, now out of sight until the next morning.
Some part of her wanted to embrace the freedom. It wanted to take the day to rest her aching muscles, catch up on some of the sleep she'd missed, take in the breeze from outside. But the other part of her—the sneakier, more irrational side—wanted to escape this cell, wander the halls, and discover all that made up this strange place.
In the end, with only a tiny bit of conflict, her irrational side won.
In the early morning light she could see everything in her cell; right outside her window lay heaps of snow, which she had to thank for the harsh glare of sunlight they reflected into her space. She could see everything she couldn't in the nighttime: the ticks carved into the wall, from the prisoners that came before her; the stain on the end of her mattress; and into the cell across the hall from her, which looked to have become storage for the extra equipment they possessed. And today she finally noticed why—
Some of the bars were bent.
They were haphazardly misshapen, done so in a way that made it clear it was the result of a person larger than Semna.
She felt dumb to have not thought of it sooner. With the small amount of food they were feeding her, she had shed off some weight since coming to this facility. She had gotten much skinnier and lost a lot of her muscle, which now meant that her torso, as well as her legs, had become much smaller. And the bars to her cell, she now realized, were engineered for someone a bit larger than her.
Quietly, she sauntered over to the bars. At first she tried to wiggle them on either side of the gap she had chosen to climb through, but they did not budge. It appeared that whomever had bent the rods in the opposite cell had possessed more strength than she did.
Instead of bothering with the bars, Semna decided to go back to her original, more simple plan. Sticking to the same gap, she slowly put her head between the bars, discovering that it did, in fact, fit all the way through. Next, she twisted her shoulders, allowing her body to follow suit. As each part went smoothly to the other side she continued, inch by inch, letting out sighs of relief along the way.
As soon as the last part of her foot went through the opening, Semna wasted no time in celebrating her escape. She turned instantly and ran, barefoot but silent, down the hallway. After traveling to and from for the last couple days, she needed no map to guide her in the direction she intended to go, and she needed nobody there to tell her which halls to avoid.
This level was dead quiet. The only sounds Semna could hear were the light tapping of her feet on the floor and the fuzzing of an old lightbulb here or there, but to her relief, they had seemed to forgotten about her. She jogged around on her toes, following the same path the Soldier had taken her on in the days prior. But instead of taking the final turn into the training room, she kept going, following the light of the windows.
When she turned the corner, however, she was struck suddenly by a large figure.
She fell back instantly, stumbling and struggling to regain her footing before she was gripped tightly by the arm. Her eyes trailed up, shivering at the sight of the metal connected to it, and landing on the face to which it belonged to.
"Semnadstat?" the Soldier whispered. She had her eyes fixed on his features; it seemed he had forgotten to wear his mask today. The lines of his cheeks were softly defined, with a bit of stubble showing around the edges. His hair hung around his face, framing his eyes in a way that made them appear softer and fuller.
"Tebe ne sleduyet zdes' nakhodit'sya. Eto nebezopasno." (You shouldn't be down here. It's not safe.)
She squinted at him with piercing eyes, making him loosen his grip and step back slightly. "Pochemu tebya dolzhno volnovat', v bezopasnosti li ya?" she hissed back. She regretted it instantly, seeing how oddly hurt he looked, but stood firm. (Why should you care if I am safe?)
He took her arm again, though with much less hostility than before. He lightly guided her behind him, glancing over his shoulders and around corners dozens of times. Semna couldn't help but gaze at him in wonder. Just the day before, he had been hitting her and kicking her around for his amusement. And now he was not only acting like no such thing happened, but he was being nice to her. She had never experienced such a thing with anyone other than Natalia.
Semna knew she should have been scared, but something about his tone and behavior made her trust his intentions and want to play the situation out. Things couldn't get much worse from here.
"Okay," he sighed and let go of her hand, beginning to walk with more frivolity. "There is nobody here. Come on."
Semna staggered, following behind him. He took long strides and she had to jog a bit to keep a steady pace alongside him. "Where are we going?" she panted.
"Outside."
"Outside?"
"That is what I said."
Semna let her mouth drop open, laughing victoriously to herself under her breath. After so many days, she could hardly believe he was going to let her feel the fresh air.
With the door to the outside just up ahead, Semna broke into a jog, looking back to the Soldier before grabbing the handle. He held up his hand, scanning the area behind him while Semna waited with restless feet. The pitter patter beneath her echoed slightly down the hallway. The Soldier sent her a nod, and the door flew open, sending the girl running out into the open air.
She hugged her arms across her chest. Looking out at the scenery she discovered that there was still not a clue as to where in Russia they were. The only thing she had remembered about That Day was the thick layer of snow on the ground and here, there was none to be seen.
A strong gush of wind swept across her like a tidal wave, blowing her nightgown around in an elegant flow of white. She held her arms out with the air, feeling it deep in her lungs and her mind. Her hair, copious and ruffled as it was, blew all around her face in a craze. All at once, the worries she had been harboring were whisked away momentarily, leaving the feeling she had always wished unto herself: hope.
And from behind her the Soldier smiled wearily, watching the innocent young girl and wishing her better as she laughed joyously at the sky.
A/n: I need to stop promising things...my brain gets blocked so easily.
Two or so more chapters until I start CATWS!
Like, comment, let me know what you think.
-sk.