Chapter 2
During the first of those twenty-three minutes, Alexey had gone back to his room and gotten dressed.
“Wake Vasilisa and Tosha, in those rooms,” he instructed, pointing. “I’ll wake Artemis in a sec.”
“…right, okay,” said Sofia. “They’re both okay with being woken by a stranger?”
“I dunno. Introduce yourself.”
“Great.”
Sofia walked over to Tosha’s room, and opened the door.
Some words drifted up from Tosha’s mattress. “I’m awake.”
“Oh. Um. Hi. I’m Sofia Pankratyevna Ryzhaya. Alexey’s… twin sister. Pleased to meet you, sir. You are… Anton?”
Tosha did not keep track of Alexey’s family tree. Alexey might have had a twin sister for all they knew.
“H’lo. Pleased to meet you. Just Tosha, not Anton. Did you make the big noise that woke me up?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
Tosha shrugged. He rolled back over and closed his eyes.
“No, wait, T— Tosha. You need to pack up and leave. Really quickly.”
They got back up and frowned. “Why?”
Sofia struggled to come up with a summary for what she saw as an infinitely complicated political situation with more dimensions of depth than she could count. “Alexey and I… there’s lots of people who hate us because we’re Ryzhayas. They want to kill us, and anyone who’s friends with us. Even if Alexey and I leave, they might kidnap you to use against Alexey. Or just kill you. We have a safe place. Could you please, please come with us?”
Tosha rubbed his eyes. “Can you help me pack? Never packed on my own before.” It then occurred to them that they were, in fact, not comfortable letting a stranger near their belongings. “Never mind. Please just get one of my friends for me. To help.”
Sofia nodded. “On it.”
Meanwhile, a newly dried and clothed Alexey barged into Artemis’s room.
“Temmie. Temmie!”
Artemis had perfected the art of falling asleep while holding a pillow on top of her head, to muffle any sounds that might disturb her. She was historically an extraordinarily light sleeper, but in the present day, her medications sowed doubt in the hearts of onlookers of a sleeping Artemis that she was even alive.
“Temmie!” Alexey poked her.
Artemis instantly stood all the way up on her matress, in some sleepy approximation of a fighting stance, and immediately slipped on a pillow and fell onto her side, on the hard wooden floor.
“Holy shit, Temmie! Are you okay?” asked Alexey. Some part of him did appreciate the odd slapstick routine he’d just witnessed, and supposed that through a combination of PTSD and drugs, anything was possible.
“No, Alyosha, I’m not. What the fuck?”
“You weren’t waking up!”
“Why do you need me awake at all?”
“Pack your things and start the car. We need to leave now.”
It was as if Artemis’s nightmare hadn’t been interrupted at all. She did not need more elaboration for her panic to start unfolding.
“Oh. Oh my god. How? Who is it? Did they—”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Could be nothing. But my interdimensional twin sister appeared in a mirror to tell me that they’re gonna kill us, and—”
“Wait, what?”
“Look, Artemis, everyone has to leave this house as soon as possible. They’re not just looking for two losers who escaped from a cult, they’re looking for Ryzhayas. This is a shaman war.”
Artemis knew just enough about shamans, magic, and the reputation of the Ryzhayas to be the appropriate amount of both credulous and terrified.
“…okay. I’ll get Tosha, you get Vasilisa.”
“Actually, my sister’s already on that.”
Then the yelling started.
Emboldened by how smoothly her first cold call had gone, Sofia went to go knock on the door to Vasilisa’s room, forgetting her urgency for a moment as she replayed the successful social interaction in her head and imagined how this new one might go.
Hearing no response, she opened the door to find a naked Vasilisa sitting up in bed. They both froze for a moment. Then Sofia promptly slammed the door shut, aghast at herself.
“Sorry! I’m so sorry! I’m sorry! I just need to deliver an urgent message!”
“Who the fuck are you?” responded Vasilisa angrily from behind the door.
“I don’t know! Wait, sorry, I do know! I’m Sofia Pankratyevna Ryzhaya, Alexey’s sister! Pleased to meet you, Miss Vasilisa.”
“I don’t care, get the fuck away from me!”
“You’re going to die!”
There was a short silence.
“…that a threat?” responded Vasilisa with icy caution, yet daring to hope that this stranger might care for her well-being.
“No, there’s um, people hunting me and Alexey, and they might kidnap or kill you if they find you. Please please come with us. We’re going to a safe place. Pack as fast as you can.”
“…I suck at packing.” The last bits of vigor were slowly evaporating from Vasilisa as the seriousness of the situation hit her, replacing her blood with limp slush.
“Medication if you have it. Toothbrush. Clothes and makeup. Personal items. In that order,” recited Sofia from memory.
“…okay.”
“We need to be gone in, like, ten minutes.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want me to pack for you?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, hold on, I need to go check on Tosha. He needs help, too.”
Sofia bumped into Alexey and Artemis on the way back.
“Tosha and Vasilisa both need help packing,” Sofia explained to Alexey. “Hello, you must be Artemis? I’m Sofia Pankratyevna Ryzhaya, pleased to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you and yeah you’ve got my name right,” said Artemis hurriedly. “Alexey, I’ll do Tosha and you do Vasilisa?”
“I’ll do Tosha. You get everyone’s stuff from the bathroom, and also please stop the sink’s pipe from flooding everything if you know how.”
“…what?”
“I… broke the sink.”
“How?”
“Go!”
The two of them departed in opposite ways, leaving Sofia to awkwardly shuffle over to the common area. She decided to prepare the storm kettle for transportation while she waited.
A muffled voice came from the bathroom. “Oh my god!”
“Deer.”
While Keleykh’s downtown enjoyed basic electric lighting, its hills had to make do with moonlight filtered through pine needles. Artemis’s car brought a new and foreign element to the scene: piercing blue-white fluorescent headlights, imported from Japan. Aggressive, invasive predators situated in a much more delicate ecosystem than they had come from, their current victim was the terrified wild reindeer that Tosha had just pointed out.
Artemis swerved around it, momentarily illuminating stray, naked concrete staircases among the pine trees in the countryside, and a portion of a large, partially buried sphere whose tarnished metal still glared back at her in places despite untold centuries of lichen growth obscuring most of its sheen. Much of the landscape in Keleykh’s suburbs remained undeveloped, partially due to politics, and partially due to the inconvenience of dealing with these structures whose express purpose often seemed to be to obstruct settlement, covering all surveyed land in Siberia. It was nothing that new theories of architecture couldn’t fix, however, and any Siberian architect, by this late age, had pored over at least one book describing how to build stable houses and roads on fields of concrete rubble deep enough to invade multiple soil strata, or on mountains of empty steel drums tall enough to be mistaken for natural members of the local cordillera. It merely came with the territory. Not that it wasn’t still massively expensive for any structure more complicated than a tent.
Most of the passengers were uncomfortable with even short two-person excursions by car, concerned about the stability of a vehicle that travelled at these speeds by some means other than a pair of rails. Certainly, the first sheets of ice of the winter had already been lain on the roads over the past October, inherited from a frozen mixture of slush and rain. With all five people packed into the car at once, their adrenaline heightened by the panicked yelling that had sent them there in the first place, it was hard for anyone to trust that Artemis had the titanic, alien machine under control, least of all for her.
“Um. Are we driving on the wrong side of the road?” asked Sofia.
“No, this car just has the steering wheel on the wrong side. It’s an import,” said Alexey from the passenger seat.
“Yeah, that’s… not what I mean. Shouldn’t we be on the right?”
“…aren’t we? We are.”
“Oh… I guess it’s a mirror thing. This side of the road looks like the left for me. I’m, um, from inside a mirror,” she explained for the benefit of Alexey’s friends, who hadn’t seen her stagger out of the bathroom mirror in a shower of metallic shards. None of them immediately volunteered a question.
Alexey pressed his hands into his face to relieve some stress, and recoiled. They smelled of blood. Breaking the mirror had been heroic, but dangerous.
So Sofia saw the world backwards. Or thought of it backwards. Did she also taste and smell it backwards? He thought of how he could test that. He would need…
“I’ll get you some peppermint to chew on,” said Artemis, finishing Alexey’s thought. “If it tastes like spearmint, you’re mirrored relative to us, which is gonna be a pain in the ass if we’re gonna have to feed you, because we don’t have mirrored food. If it tastes like peppermint then everything’s okay. Uh, I guess I shouldn’t have told you in advance which is which, but hopefully that won’t affect the outcome.”
“…I’ve never really been good at telling apart mint, but I’ll try.”
“Well, it might taste more like caraway or dill anyway. Maybe I should get you one of those instead and see if it tastes like peppermint.”
“Deer. Three,” said Tosha. They were visible on the side of the road, a ways up ahead. Artemis slowed down.
The deer took this as a cue to cross the road, but, unusually, stopped in the middle, barricading the way forward in an almost military row formation.
“Fuck,” groaned Artemis. She honked. This stirred up some birds, but the deer remained in place, eyeing the car curiously.
“Yeah, we don’t have time for this,” said Alexey. He got out of the car, and started waving both arms animatedly, approaching the deer. “Hey! Get the fuck out of the way! This is our road! Fuck off! Get lost!”
The deer closest to him took a few steps in his direction, appeared to think for a moment, then lowered its horns and charged straight at him, knocking him onto the ice. His head bounced off a frozen puddle and put a dent in it. Alexey went limp.
“Shit, fuck! Vasilisa, you’re on the right side to haul… are you sleeping?”
She was not sleeping. Vasilisa was frozen with anxiety. There was a fine line between high-stress situations that put her into action, and high-stress situations that made her shut down. Getting into the car had piled the stress high enough that she couldn’t even control her eyelids.
“I’ll do it,” said Sofia hurriedly. She climbed over Vasilisa and opened the lefthand back door, just in time to accidentally block another charge from the reindeer. Its horn shattered the window, and the deer tripped and fell over, lodged awkwardly into the window frame. Artemis, Sofia, and Tosha all yelped. Vasilisa sank into her seat.
“Augh, you asshole! You know how long that’s going to take to fix?” yelled Artemis.
Sofia started tearing up. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
“What, no, Sofia, not you. I’m talking to the deer. Fuck you, stupid animal,” Artemis said, pointing at the deer for emphasis.
The deer metamorphosed into a man, who stood up. He had short, black hair, and the aged, angular, sort of gaunt face where it was hard to tell if the dents were scars and formerly broken bones, or if they were natural contours. He wore an expensive-looking longcoat of black dyed cotton and brass buttons, and matching leather gloves and boots.
“My apologies, ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒ Ilyitch. It was an accident. I am only here to apprehend the Ryzhaya,” he said to Artemis, in a tone that was clearly trying to be suave but was somewhat undercut by his quiet, reedy voice.
“Wait, what? Artemis, do you know this idiot?” Vasilisa finally found the strength to speak.
“…yeah. Hi, Nikolay Nikolaevitch. What do you want with my friend?”
“The Sump has decreed that the time of the Ryzhayas is at an end, and the Keleykhsky council agrees. The whole town is looking for him. He is the only Ryzhaya left alive in Keleykh, now that we have executed his mother.”
Artemis had only met Alexey’s mother once. She had seemed deceptively affable to her, but the effect she’d had on Alexey, both in the moment and on the long term, was far more telling. She could not find it in her to care that Sofia Nikolaevna was gone. She wondered if Alexey would, unaware that he’d already heard the news from a different source.
“Well… what makes you think you’re going to be able to take him? I have a car. What do you have?”
“We are Gvezdins. That, over there, the one with the short but very branched antlers, is my younger brother, Kostya. The other one, with the darker grey coat, is my cousin Alexey Arkadyevitch. All three of us have the favor of the Sun-Mother. Should we ask for it, all the metal in your car will return to the stars it once came from.”
Artemis considered. Magic had only recently achieved widespread popularity in Keleykh, and the average person had, at best, a single idol-spirit to ask questions of and request assistance from, a power whose full implications had yet to be understood or taken advantage of by most people. Artemis and her friends didn’t even have that, partly out of leftover habit from her and Alexey’s time with the Sump, a powerful cult that heavily controlled the usage of spirits and people’s relationships with them. Having the favor of a goddess was a nearly meaningless boast to her; the only religious person she’d ever known was Alexey, and the Moon-Mother had never seemed to do anything in return for his erstwhile devotion. Hearing the Gvezdin family name meant even less to her, except that she knew they were important to the Sump.
“…okay? Try it, I guess,” she said. “While you’re doing that, I’ll run you and your two guys over.”
“Wait.”
Sofia got out of the car, shutting the door behind her, and put herself between Alexey and Nikolay Nikolaevitch.
“Alexey is not the only Ryzhaya left in Keleykh,” she said.
Feeling more secure with all the car’s doors closed and unhindered, Artemis calculated the possible costs and benefits of just hitting the gas like she’d threatened. She couldn’t see Alexey’s body from where she sat, so she was wary of moving the car much, and she wasn’t sure what Sofia was planning either. Was there some strange Ryzhaya magic she could pull? Or was she just providing a distraction? She slapped away a mosquito attempting to snack on her exposed left wrist, between her jacket and gloves. As oversized an SUV as her car was, she doubted it could tank two entire adult reindeer to the grill, as well as a human. But her other option, flight, didn’t seem appealing either, unless Sofia could nab Alexey and get back in the car. She felt that she could probably maneuver around her adversaries in that case.
“You are going to have to explain yourself,” said Nikolay Nikolaevitch. “Are you perhaps Anna Pankratyevna? You seem a little old, —”
He started coughing, and bent over and held up a finger. His brother and cousin looked on in mild concern, but did not break form.
“No,” said Sofia. “I’m not. I am Sofia Pankratyevna. You were led to believe that Alexey is the heir to the Ryzhaya line, yes? He isn’t. Did you really think the heir would be a boy?”
Nikolay Nikolaevitch, finished with his coughing fit, replied, “Sorry about that. A bug flew right into my windpipe. Anyways: Sofia Nikolaevna’s will is of public record, and the city council seemed to be of the opinion that it clearly named Alexey Pankratyevitch as the beneficiary of the title to the Ryzhaya estate, however extraordinary it may seem. So–” He swatted away a mosquito buzzing around his face. “So, unless Alexey Pankratyevitch is already dead, and he isn’t, he’s right there and I can see his breath, no, you’re not the heir. Could you maybe ask ▓▒▓▓▓▓▒ Ilyitch to turn the lights down? I feel like I’m swimming in midges and mosquitos here.” He swatted the air around his face some more.
“Her name, as I understand it, is Artemis Ilyinitchna. How much, exactly, do you know about the Ryzhayas?” asked Sofia.
Artemis stared at Sofia. She was having trouble reconciling this commanding figure with the girl she’d made burst into tears just a minute ago. She also wished Sofia hadn’t brought her identity into it. Why did cis people always seem to think that it was an argument they could win? Even as… herself, Artemis had trouble defending herself. She had no faith in Sofia’s ability to do so, and whatever happened, Nikolay Nikolaevitch would say a lot of hurtful things that Artemis would rather not hear. The best thing she could hope for was that he would just ignore Sofia’s clarification. This was all assuming that Sofia even knew what a trans person was, and wasn’t just correcting Nikolay Nikolaevitch because she thought he was genuinely mistaken about Artemis’s identity.
“I know… enough… not to trust you, please, can we seriously turn the lights off? I swear, it’s October, there shouldn’t be this many mosquitos around at this time of the year. I’m trying to be nice, here, but if you won’t do it for me, I’ll do it for you. …no, I’m not going to wait, I’ll just do it.” He closed a hand into a fist, and the lights shut off, as did the car’s engine. Artemis’s eyes widened. Her only plan of escape had just been cut off. She turned the ignition key back and forth. The engine wouldn’t come back on.
Sofia continued the dialogue as if nothing had happened. “It wasn’t the lights. And if you are surprised by the mosquitos, then you will be surprised by this, too: as a Ryzhaya, they are my friends. Maybe if you let them drink a little of your blood, they’d be your friends, too. Wouldn’t that be nice? Come on. Share a little. Don’t you want a gossipy network of tiny friends all around the world? It doesn’t cost much.”
Nikolay Nikolaevitch straightened up. “Ah, I see.” He paused either for effect or to sneak an unobstructed breath in. “I thought you trafficked in abominations, disease spirits, and mythical monsters, not… pests. If this is all you can do to intimidate me, then… color me… goddammit… unimpressed. Unimpressed, but very annoyed.”
His two allies reverted to human form to start swatting away mosquitos around their own selves. “Hi,” said Kostya awkwardly. “Hello,” said Alexey Arkadyevitch.
Nikolay Nikolaevitch turned to them. “No, you guys, it’s just a Ryzhaya thing. Don’t bother, I’m about to waste her if she doesn’t cut it out.”
“Easy for you to say. You have hands,” said Alexey Arkadyevitch, in somewhat hoarse bass. “What’s more intimidating, a human standing in place and swatting mosquitos? Or a reindeer pacing around and shaking its head and body like a fool?”
Nikolay Nikolaevitch groaned. “Fine, whatever. We can handle her either way. Sofia Pankratyevna, why don’t you come with us, to the Sump? We’ll get to the bottom of who you are. If you don’t come with us, then… well, we don’t have explicit orders to kill you, but I don’t think anyone would complain, other than your friends, of course.”
Sofia opened up the car’s rear side door and started hauling Alexey inside. A surprised Vasilisa and Tosha quickly finished the job. Sofia shut the door on them, remaining outside.
“Now, see, that’s not the reaction I wanted from you. I’ll make this quick, then.” Nikolay Nikolaevitch closed his hand into a fist again. Sofia and her friends, already struggling to see in the moonlight, were struck blind.
Sofia shouted, “Artemis! I’ll push the car! You make it roll!”
“What NO—”
Sofia started running to the back of the car and slipped on the ice, unknowingly dodging a strike from Nikolay Nikolaevitch with a knife. Meanwhile, Artemis begrudgingly put the car in neutral. The hill wasn’t steep enough that the car would start moving on its own, but Sofia could conceivably get it moving, and their destination was downhill. However, the roads were also very twisted, and Artemis did not have them the least bit memorized. At least it would be a good kilometer or so before that mattered… at which point the car would likely become wrapped around a tree. Had she thought about it, Artemis would have supposed that between that and capture by the Gvezdins, she preferred the latter, but time pressure was never conducive to intelligent decision-making. Then again…
Sofia scrambled to the back of the car, and gave it the biggest shove she could. It started rolling remarkably easily, and she stepped up to stand on the bumper. She blindly kicked once behind her, which turned out to be a mistake, as one of the Gvezdins (she couldn’t tell who) caught her leg. Fortunately, the weight and speed of the rolling car pitted Sofia’s grip on it against the man’s grip on her, and the man decisively lost the struggle, falling over onto the icy bricks.
The next few seconds found Sofia opening the trunk door, squirming her way to the front of the car, and—
“MAKE A RIGHT HURRY HURRY!”
Artemis was astonished. “Did you—”
Sofia grabbed the steering wheel and, after a split second of thought to consider chirality, wrenched it to the right in the fashion of someone who had no idea how to drive an SUV. There was screeching, screaming, and yelling. The car briefly stood on its left two wheels, then miraculously fell back down to a quadrupedal stance. The trunk door slammed shut from inertia.
Artemis slapped Sofia’s hand away from the wheel, cursing her blindness for not noticing more quickly that someone was trying to interfere with her driving. “You— y— I’ll drive, just talk, you lunatic!”
“Left left now now now!”
Artemis patiently pumped the brakes, and took as hard a left as she felt comfortable with given her estimated speed and the road conditions. There was a huge crash as the right side of the vehicle was violently bumped up onto the curb. Tosha yelped, Sofia screamed, Artemis gritted her teeth, Vasilisa closed her eyes, and Alexey awoke.
“What? Artemis, what the hell? Why—”
“KIND OF IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING HERE, ALYOSHA. PLEASE SHUT UP.”
“But, why are we on—”
“Wait! Oh my god! Alyosha, can you see?”
“What? Yes, of course—”
“Here, you drive! The car’s in neutral but—”
“I have no fucking idea how to drive, Temmie!”
“Just turn the steering wheel and pump the brakes when you turn!”
“Where are the brakes?”
“EVERYBODY shut up,” Sofia interrupted. “Artemis, just get off the curb and you’ll be fine. This road continues straight on forward until we literally hit the sea.”
Artemis took the car off the curb, but she wasn’t finished. (Tosha, who had been quietly chanting, “Curb. Curb. Curb,” finally knew peace.) “Okay, Sofia, tell me: how the hell do you know any of this? Do your little ‘friends’ tell you? Or…?”
Sofia became her more natural, shy self again. “No… I just have it memorized.”
“…why?”
“Well… my mom made me learn it. I could draw a map of Keleykh from memory. She made me walk down every street in the city, several times. It took years. I must have drawn, I don’t know, a hundred maps.”
“…why.”
Sofia was silent for a bit, and then said, “I think this is why.”
Vasilisa piped up. “If you’re from Mirror Keleykh, did you have to reverse the map in your head before giving directions?”
“No… your map is backwards, yes, but your names for the directions were also backwards,” said Sofia. “I just had to change which direction I turned the steering wheel.”
“Which I’m never letting you do again until I can give you a proper driving course,” said Artemis.
“Fair,” admitted Sofia.
“So… I wasn’t completely unconscious, and I did hear most of what went on,” said Alexey. “…didn’t know you guys went fucking blind though. But… you fought the Gvezdins?”
“Yeah. Nikolay Nikolaevitch was there,” said Artemis.
“I know.”
Artemis shrugged. “Sorry. Anyway, he’s still an asshole, is what I gathered.”
All of a sudden, the blindness spell ceased.
“Oh… neat. My eyes are back,” said Artemis.
“Mine too,” agreed Sofia and Tosha in turn.
“So let me see if… AUGH”
Everyone, even Alexey and Vasilisa, reflexively yelled, groaned, or hissed when Artemis turned the ignition. The headlights had come on.
“Goddammit I hate having eyes again,” moaned Artemis. “Oh that’s horrible. Okay, I think I’m adjusting. Okay, I’m good. I guess we got out of the Gvezdins’, uh… area.”
Sofia was struck with the inexplicable urge to softly rub Artemis on the head, like she would a dog or a particularly tame reindeer. She decided that this would be diplomatically unwise. Artemis did not give the impression of someone who liked being touched.
“So, uh, Alexey… you think you can direct me to the house now?”
“…yeah. I can.”