Chapter 1
It is scratched. It is worthless.
It is all I have to give you.
You keep the souls of so many
who never should have lost them.
If you need names I can give them.
The girl who died right here because she didn't believe she could be one.
Her friend, who gave her life to a spirit she'd never meet and then swam into the ocean.
My once-friend, who went to prove himself in a pointless war so he could be respected.
The girl across the ocean who did nothing but sing for her village and got harrassed for it.
I can keep naming them for you.
They didn't deserve to die and I didn't deserve to live.
So please. I will give you my soul now.
I want to trade.
But though her gaze was fixed that night on the matchbox house in the hills of Keleykh, though she could not possibly have misheard his desperate entreaty, the new year found him in a hospital bed, rather than the Moon-Mother’s frozen embrace. His sleeves had been cut away with fabric scissors and replaced with gauze, but the rest of his clothing remained intact, soaked through with at least three individual strata of bloodstains. Where his skin wasn’t stained yellow with iodine, or caked with dry blood, or broken by new scar tissue and sutures, it was nearly translucent quartz sand, detailed with even starker white criss-crosses. His jeans, out of great sympathy for his skin, were in a similar condition, but his oversized hoodie remained far more loyal to its job of hiding everything and anything at all interesting about him in a sea of black, even despite its newly sleeveless nature.
Keleykh General Hospital was a reasonably competent establishment, but being located in a remote big city, their emergency ward was overburdened and understaffed. Alexey Pankratyevitch Balandin was lucky to have a bed, and admitted to himself that it was a comfortable place to wake up to another day of continuing to have to live his life.
He tried sitting up. He didn’t feel completely awake yet, but he already felt his attention and willpower being sapped by unwelcome sensations from his arms. He bore the pain with some pride; it was what he had been going for, after all, and he refused to feel sorry for it. But they were much more itchy than painful, especially where the gauze had clotted to the inside of a wound, which he barely even wanted to think about. And underneath the smell of iodine and alcohol, he could smell rotting blood, which brought back more than a few unpleasant memories. His head swam a little. He considered going back to sleep.
He took stock of the room. In typical Keleykhsky fashion, the furniture was a series of wooden plank boxes supported by rusting brass. The walls were papered over with something pastel and floral and peeling, and he had the luxury of his very own door, with a small, rectangular window of wavy glass. He had been in this ward several times before, for broadly similar reasons, but he’d always just had a curtain. He had had no idea there even were closed-off rooms.
A shadow passed over the door’s window, and a moment later, the sound of the doorknob shook all remaining stupor out of his senses and attempted to kick his heart into a higher gear, an action vetoed at the last moment by his common sense. This will be a nurse. They are not dangerous. They can help.
“Hello? Alexey Pankratyevitch? You’re awake?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Sorry.”
“No, no, you’re no trouble at all! Alexey Pankratyevitch, your mother is here to see you. Shall I let her in?”
His heart overrode the veto and put all its power into supplying his brain with the oxygen necessary to process the implications of this. He came up blank. He hadn’t seen his mother in… the quantity of time did not immediately spring to his mind. They had left on some of the worst possible terms. She had little means of finding out that he was here, and more to the point, she had no means of caring that he was here. As far as he knew, he was effectively disowned.
On account of turning out to be a guy. His bad.
“Uhhhh… sure. Let her in.”
He thought about what he might have to lose from this. …nothing? He couldn’t think of anything.
His mother slipped into the room and glid to his bedside. While she was a fearsome woman both in concept and reality, her wrinkled brow and stout, chubby physique betraying both a lack of vulnerability and a history of winning her battles, this was another side of her, where she masked it all for the sake of winning over her family.
It meant that she wasn’t mad at him.
“Alyosha?”
“…hi. Mother.”
The last he remembered, her hair had been sandy blonde, losing more of its pigmentation with each summer. Now it was thick with dye, patterned after her bloodline’s namesake auburn, drawn into a loose bun with a mess of curls hanging out. While legally none of the family had borne the name for the past century, and it had acquired a somewhat derogatory status in the modern social environment of Keleykh, there was no name that any stranger would have dared to refer to her by other than Sofia Nikolaevna Ryzhaya.
“I’ve been worried about you.”
It had been nearly four years.
“…thanks.”
“Look at you! I let you leave for a few years, and you get this fat? Come back home. I’ll make you some nice, healthy mushroom stew. You can stop eating fast food and shaved ice.”
“I’m paying rent on an apartment in the hills.” (Also, he was making his own meals most days. But mentioning it would have escalated the argument too quickly.)
“I know. It’s one of those little, freezing matchboxes, just waiting to catch fire from the poor plumbing. You sit here in this bed, your arms covered in bloody gauze and scars, fat, pale, and utterly miserable. Is this what you wanted, Alyosha? Is this the grand life without me that you were looking for?”
“Why are you even here? What do you care?”
“I’m your mother, Alyosha, of course I care.”
“Bullshit. You didn’t—you—it’s been four years. And you just… why do I even bother talking to you? You just want me to do what you want. And you dangle food and shelter in front of me like—”
His careful rhetorical poise now broken, Alexey struggled to prioritize every relevant thought from the past four years and arrange them into sentences. He knew this was an argument he couldn’t win, but what else could he do but keep fighting?
“Of course I want you to do what I want! What mother doesn’t want her child to listen to her? What, you think I will just stand by and watch you freeze to death in that house? What mother does that?”
“You were completely fine doing it for four years!”
“So, you wanted to move back in? Because the impression I got was—”
“No, I didn’t! And I still don’t! But now you’re here. And you weren’t here before, so, what changed?”
“…well, I suppose I’ll tell you, then. We’d already be discussing it if you weren’t so argumentative.
“I’m dying.”
Alexey had heard this one before.
“Yeah. Whatever. Are we done here?”
“How can you be this cruel to me? How can you do this to your own mother?”
“My ‘own mother’ told me that she’s dying years ago. Repeatedly. To emotionally manipulate me. Why don’t you come up with something original? I dunno, like that my sister’s dying instead, or something. Maybe that would work.”
“What nonsense are you on about? I would never do that! I can’t believe that this is how you’re reacting to finding out that your mother’s dying.”
“You’re not. Dying. Four years and you haven’t moved on! Four years and you’re doing the same routine on me! I thought you were supposed to be good at this. How did I ever fall for it?”
“…believe what you want. Don’t come to my funeral, then, and regret it for the rest of your short life. Die sad and die alone, because you didn’t even have enough love to give your mother. Here’s what I came to tell you, then: you’re in my will. You get Shtchavel House, and the riches that come with it. Provided you live long enough to claim it. You are the heir to the Ryzhaya name.”
Alexey paused. This was new. And it was a serious change in her attitude towards him, to entrust him with such an important legacy. Except…
“Oh, I get it. This is a new stage of denial for you. Sorry, but I’m still a guy. Better give it to my sister.”
There were no Ryzhaya heirs, only heiresses. For some reason, since decades even before his conception, his mother had decided that her firstborn would be the heiress. Alexey turning out to be a boy had not dismantled her aspirations, and thereafter he’d endured a lifetime of very uncomfortable disappointment, delusion, and possessiveness on the part of his mother regarding his body and his life, the sort that she’d normally only show towards a proper Ryzhaya heiress. It was as though she expected him to earn the legacy anyway, and he had to start by making up for her ruined expectations. She’d never given up and just designated him heir anyway, though. This was a new, high-risk gambit on her part, and a petty one at that, putting her inheritance on the line just to harrass him. His mind was already automatically calculating the political implications of this move, trying to anticipate the reactions of his extended family and what his mother might have to gain from them, but he resisted. Alexey Pankratyevitch was too good for Ryzhaya internal politics.
His mother crushed his thought process into a wreck with a new surprise.
“Of course you’re a boy. I gave birth to you, I know you’re a boy. You are still the heir.”
What—
She sighed. “Make of it what you will. You know where to find me, as long as I live. My lawyers know where to find you, afterwards. I welcome you back, at Shtchavel House. I will be gone by winter. Know that I love you. I expected as much from you in return, but… I don’t know. I must have done something wrong with you, I don’t know what. But you’re still the heir.”
Alexey barely even noticed her disappear through the door. He was still trying to figure out what any of this meant. His mother was trying to exert some kind of pressure on him, or otherwise draw him back into her control, but if it wasn’t about his body, then…? Alexey Pankratyevitch may not, in fact, have been too good for Ryzhaya internal politics.
“Alexey Pankratyevitch?”
He yelped.
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you. Alexey Pankratyevitch, would you mind if I took your vitals?”
It was the nurse from before. He relaxed, and rubbed his forehead. Then he noticed his hands had several new mosquito bites on them. He scratched at them a little. He really wanted to get out of here.
As it turned out, the hospital had the same idea. They were ill-equipped to treat or refer mental health issues, the nearest asylum in the neighboring locality of Dubrovka having been defunct for the past decade or so, so all they could do was make sure Alexey’s wounds were treated. Once he managed to get himself ejected to the crowded waiting area, Alexey borrowed some time on a faux-wood Bakelite wall telephone, heavily scuffed despite having been installed only months ago. As he fingered the rotary dial with the matchbox house’s number, he thought about how he should break the news to his friends. There may be no news to break. She doesn’t seriously intend for me to receive the inheritance… does she? I should get this in writing. I want to see that will. Even if she’s not dying soon, my family would take interest in me. He began to wonder if confusing him and setting his family against him was his mother’s plan.
Eventually, Alexey was rescued from the hospital by one Artemis Metchnikova, the only one of their four-membered friend group responsible enough to dare take the first shot at debriefing Alexey following an apparent suicide attempt. She brought a rusted cinnabar red Mitsubishi that served as the workhorse of the matchbox house, which received much more use than it had any right to in a city with a nominally functional public transit system. It was rude, after all, to direct your friend to come home from the hospital via a bus which only took him halfway up the hill, condemning him to trek outside in January weather with no sleeves. If your friend was in trouble, you were supposed to be there for him.
And that was what Artemis was doing, clad in dyed and embroidered reindeer leather, equal parts Siberian reindeer herder and 80s biker. All Alexey had to do was detect some black-brown pageboy hair and a matching mass of leather out of the corner of his eye, and he immediately wordlessly got up to see her out. He did not want to spend another second on what was quickly becoming his least favorite network of wall-to-wall linoleum.
Once they were safely in the car, Artemis opened with the most tried and true of all therapeutic phrases.
“Hey.”
“…hey.”
Intending to punctuate her next move with a start of the car, Artemis promptly flooded the engine instead.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here. …fuck. That was almost cool.”
“It wasn’t so bad. They gave me breakfast. There was jelly.”
“Yeah… jelly sounds nice. How are your arms?”
“Itchy. Bitten by mosquitos.”
“Figures. …do you want to talk about it?”
“What do you want me to say? It was the usual brain-worms.”
She knew she was about to make a mistake, ranting at Alexey after he’d barely said anything, but Artemis just couldn’t hold it back. Why was he acting like she already knew what was going on? Alexey didn’t exactly regularly attempt suicide.
“Alyosha, what usual brain-worms? We’ve talked so many times, but I feel like I still don’t know what your deal is. You’re not trans, fine, we’ve been over that. You don’t wanna be a girl, so we’ll stop bothering you about it. That joke started before we realized how much trauma you had about it, and I’m sorry that we played a part in that. I’m most of all sorry I played a part in that. I should have realized sooner. But please, if you want constructive conversations, you gotta let me know what you’re thinking. Because I haven’t had your experiences.”
“We were part of the same stupid cult, Temmie. What do you think my brain-worms are? They’re all about like… how not exposing myself to hatred and abuse is, like, intellectual cowardice or whatever. And how I need to personally save the human race, or else I’m worthless.”
“Okay, but… my brain-worms are all about being trans. Because they didn’t—”
“Yeah yeah, skip it, I don’t need to hear it.”
“Yeah. I can understand, like, how our background makes it difficult to deal with self-hatred. But my self-hatred takes the form of transphobia. Where does yours come from? Oh my god, lady, I’m not going to hit you! Can you believe this person? She’s holding her bag up and cowering at me like I’m mugging her, but all I’m doing is driving.”
Alexey slumped further down in his seat. This isn’t how these conversations normally went. He thought he’d been relatively forthcoming to Artemis about his mental health issues. But thinking back on it, he couldn’t really remember getting into what sorts of thoughts compelled him to carve barcodes into his arms, or into what it was that he’d experienced at the cult that almost destroyed him. What had it been…? It was only a couple years ago, but his memories of it were very foggy. He reasoned that that was normal for the worst period of his life, and he wasn’t inclined to pursue the question further, unless Artemis inquired.
“Well… you know my parents. They were always, like, punishing me for not living up to their standards, you know? Sometimes it felt like I was being punished for nothing more than not being a girl.”
“So… your brain-worms are about not being a girl? Uh, I know I said I’d—”
“That’s not what I mean. Let me finish my fucking sentences. So like, when I was a kid, I… ever since I was a kid, I’ve always thought, maybe I deserve it, y’know? Call it adaptive or maladaptive or whatever, but I always thought about people I’ve read about in way worse situations than me, who survived longer than I would have. I felt like a total loser.”
Artemis stayed silent and patient. This was exactly the kind of progress she was hoping to make.
“And then like, after I met you guys, I got to meet actual people like that! Actual people who had way more to deal with than me, and were doing better at it… and then some of them died anyway.”
Artemis bit her lip. Alexey was veering into letting his self-hatred do the talking for him. It was informative, but not exactly productive. She pulled into the matchbox house’s driveway and turned off the engine. Alexey kept talking.
“And so like… I get that it’s really just survivor’s guilt or whatever, but I feel like I haven’t earned my place among you guys. I’m cis. The only stuff that’s even happened to me was my parents abusing me, and yeah, that’s fucked up, but if I were in your place or Xenia’s or Olena’s or anyone’s, then I’d be fucking dead. And I hate that! I hate feeling like I’m lucky to be alive! I can’t deal with that!”
“Putting aside that it isn’t healthy to compare your traumas with others’ like that, which I’m sure you know… does this mean your plan was to, uh, fix a cosmic mistake? Balance some metaphysical karma scale by killing yourself?”
“…I guess. I made up a prayer before I did it, and said it out loud. To the Moon-Mother. The Nganasan goddess who can move the souls of the dead around. I told her to take my soul in exchange for sending back people who didn’t deserve to die.”
“Well, and, you’re alive. So what does that tell you?”
Alexey was silent for a bit. Then he got out of the car.
Alexey and company’s matchbox house contained a slightly smaller matchbox for the bedrooms and bathroom, and a narrow L-shaped hallway around the seam that served as a combined living area and kitchen. Squeezing past alternately burning and defunct copper radiators was a daily exercise for its inhabitants, and its main imports were large quantities of rice, and smaller quantities of fermented bean products to eat it with. The “kitchen” was a corner of the common area taken up by a cast iron storm kettle, detailed to resemble a vase tunicate, a stack of sooty cookware to its left, a bag of coal and a box of matches to its right.
Vasilisa Petrovna Mirnaya was hanging out in the common area, feet propped up on the dining table, reading a pulp novel. Her casual demeanor belied an intense nerdiness, more truthfully represented by her large round reading glasses, colorful and fuzzy socks and sweater, and sweatpants.
“Hey guys, what’s up? Goddamn dude, you’re gonna need a new hoodie.”
“…I’m fine. I’ve got spares,” said Alexey.
“This one was totally your fave though wasn’t it.”
“It still is! I just need to graft some new sleeves onto it.”
Alexey and Artemis represented the half of the household who knew how to sew fabric, although only Artemis applied this skill with any regularity. Alexey’s recent stitching experience was all the medical kind, which he was nevertheless quietly proud of.
“Word. Hey Tosha, come out! Alexey’s back from the hospital!”
Tosha (known by this mononym to just about everyone) stuck a headful of curls and a single bespectacled eye out of his room.
“H’lo. Sorry you didn’t die. There’s soup.” His rhetorical duty concluded, Tosha disappeared again.
Alexey cracked a smile for the first time since waking up. While it would have offended almost anyone else, Alexey felt that Tosha, in his bluntness, managed to show more understanding of his feelings than everyone else put together. What consolation prize could possibly make up for a failed suicide attempt, other than soup?
“What kind of soup?”
“Reindeer tripe,” replied Artemis and Vasilisa simultaneously.
Alexey maintained the smile. He felt more at home than he could possibly have felt in the frozen afterlife, and even more so than he ever did at Shtchavel House. Fuck that stupid will, he thought. I’m not part of your game anymore, mother. You have no power over me. I am never coming back.
The snow melted. The mosquitos came. And when they left again, a woman left with them.
A night in late October, Alexey was having a nightmare. He had nightmares every night, but this night there was a new tool in his mind’s shed of torture instruments: a girl his age and build, with auburn Ryzhaya hair instead of his usual black.
“Wake up,” she said. “We need to meet. It’s an emergency.” Or something along those lines; in his dreams, it was always hard to hear, because of all the high-pitched buzzing.
Half-lucid, he complied and awoke. Naked, he lumbered over to the bathroom. Wasn’t the girl inside mirrors, or something? Or did he just need to use the toilet? It felt like a fever dream. A healthy Alexey did not wake up sleepy. He woke up perfectly alert and functioning. Maybe he was still dreaming? He brushed against a radiator and burned his hip and hand. Yet, he still didn’t awaken properly. He just kept stumbling forward.
The bathroom, in one of the greater strokes of masterful architecture comprising the matchbox house, was one of the few rooms with a window. This night, just as it was the past New Year’s Eve, its purpose was to permit the fullest, brightest gaze of the Moon-Mother that she could afford to give. Everything in the room, Alexey included, was outlined in blue-silver light.
“Alexey?”
He frowned, then turned to look at the mirror the sound had come from. He saw a girl, instead of himself.
“Alexey, hello. I’m Sofia. …Pankratyevna. Do you recognize me?”
He recognized her.
“You were in my nightmares.”
The lucidity was quickly coming to him, dream-reasoning replaced with an altogether different and much more skeptical perspective.
“…yeah. Alexey, you need to get out of here.”
“No, wait. What? Sofia, who are you? My twin sister? What are you doing in my mirror?”
“I’m you, from a different timeline or something, I don’t know. Please, you have to get to Shtchavel House, or they’ll find you.”
Dozens of objections collided in Alexey’s mind, and only one won egress from his mouth:
“But… I’m not a girl!”
“Alexey, are you even listening to me?”
“Sofia, who’s coming to find me? This is very important. Can I take a car? Do I have to go to Shtchavel House, or can I go… literally anywhere else?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know any other safe places and I don’t know what kind of monsters are coming to get you. I don’t know! They killed Mom like an hour ago and they’re going to kill you too!”
“Okay, okay… are my friends safe?”
“No.”
“…are you safe?”
“…I’ll manage.”
“Like hell you will. What happens if I break this mirror? I’ve always wanted to do that, anyhow.”
“I don’t know. Mom told me our worlds are equally real, or something, and the mirrors are some kind of door from one to the other.”
Alexey outstretched a hand and pressed his fingertips against the mirror.
“Grab my hand.”
With some trepidation, Sofia Pankratyevna touched Alexey’s hand. This turned into a handshake, which turned into a firm handhold. Alexey grabbed her elbow with his other hand, and in one motion, wrenched her into his reality. The mirror shattered, and the sink collapsed under Sofia’s weight, the burst pipe washing silvered glass shrapnel off of the both of them with freezing water.
“…that wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it was gonna be, but still, I’m happy to see that piece of shit mirror go down.”
“…do you need clothes?”
“Yeah. Let’s dry off in my room. You wake up all my friends and then we can all get the fuck out of here.”
Twenty-three minutes and some frantic packing and yelling later the five of them were crammed into the Mitsubishi, Artemis at the wheel.
“Downtown. Near the lower school,” directed Alexey.
“Got it. Let’s roll,” said Artemis.
The Moon-Mother watched them depart into the frozen night.