Mallet-Bompard International Academy
One Week After Initial Deployment
I don't count Adil as a friend; I know very little about him and he knows very little about me. But such is the nature of relationships like ours. Each only reveals as much as serves their individual motives. He wants his father free - and doesn't want anyone else all but dragged away from the way his father was - and so he needs me, as I can kill the very people he'd like to get his hands on without running the risks he would have to. I want to complete my mission and have been given orders to do everything necessary to do so. I need him because the information he has would be to my operation what water is to the living world. And while Sokolov might not have explicitly approved of my current actions had I asked his blessing, should he ever find out about them, he must be able to understand that I only ever act for the benefit of the directive.
I was sent here with a very specific list of targets, none of whom are even remotely as low-ranking as a local recruitment officer who mixes in with commoners and arranges for their sons, brothers, and fathers to be spirited away. And while the Chief would likely advise me not to waste time or bullets on a man like that, he's been made significant enough because he stands in the way of the fulfillment of my duty. Adil has sworn to tell me nothing unless I kill this man, the one person he holds chiefly responsible for his father's having to serve in duress. He has, however, promised to tell me whatever I ask to assist me in my efforts against our mutual enemy once I eliminate this secondary target.
In my view, that suffices as motivation.
He's told me a little, just enough to complete the task he's given me. Unable to focus on much else since his father was forced to leave his family to fight, Adil has spent what free time he has feeding his personal vendetta against the recruitment officer, engaging in a rather sophisticated operation that comes just short of outright stalking the man. He's managed to establish his regular travel patterns, his tight network of contacts, and has even narrowed down the number of places he might be disappearing to on the rare occasion he isn't in town. But most of that information - while being enough to furnish a respectable dossier, especially when one considers that it was all collected by a single person only about my age with no military or intelligence training - is extraneous for me. I've taken what I need and jettisoned the rest from my mind; I need all of that storage space.
Now I find myself lying flat on the roof of one of the more remote buildings on the school campus, partially hidden behind an air circulation unit and watching the sky turn from a pale blue to a deep, rich navy on its way to indigo. There's a certain beauty to it, and I'm sure there's something poetic to be said, but as I fight to keep still behind the aluminum circulation unit housing and wait for the first stars to show, all I can process are the sounds of the street floating up to me. The cacophony of high noon has subsided considerably and continues to wane. By sound alone, I can tell that the traffic in the streets is thinning. Adil emphasized that the best time to find his target would be around sunset, when he prefers to return home after the day's… activities. The slight cover of darkness, combined with the confusion of still-substantial civilian traffic, provides ample protection for him. Or so he's been made to believe.
The roof is surrounded by a concrete rim only about a foot and a half high, intended to do little more than remind maintenance workers that a careless misstep could send them plummeting to certain injury or death. I crawl to one edge until my nose is almost pressed up against the rim and ever so slowly inch upward to see over it. The street is still near capacity, but the calm of dusk has evidently taken its toll and what travelers are out are less energetic than those in bright daylight. I try my best to recall Adil's description of the recruitment officer's little transport convoy while paying attention to every possible detail of the scene in front of me.
I retreat to my previous position, only to retrieve the VS-121 that Sokolov entrusted me with and shuffle right back to the rim. I brace it against my right shoulder and balance it in my left hand, the elbow of that arm pressing into the rough concrete of the surface below me. I ignore the feeling and inch forward until I can just aim over the building's wall without being seen from below. Gazing through the scope on the gun, the street below looks mere feet removed from my position, and whatever part of my brain reconciles visual information with tactile sensations throws a momentary fit. I lean away from the sight, blink a few times, and return to the task.
A stray dog wanders into my crosshairs and I follow it until it trots out of sight behind a storefront. When I move the sight back into the road, I'm startled to find the olive-drab hood of an SUV filling my limited field of vision. I pull back from the gun and take the whole scene in at once. The dark green SUV trundles through the street at a speed that gives pedestrians barely enough time to get out of its way. Behind it is a beige-colored van of an identical model, and behind that is one of the quintessential white IS pickup trucks. They move at a hectic pace.
I settle myself with a few deep breaths, aim back up the street at the driver's seat of the vehicle leading the haphazard motorcade, and fire. The windshield shatters but stays mostly in place, the spidery fissures in it blocking any clear view of the road ahead. I can't know for sure if I've hit the driver - or even if the target is in this car or one of the other two - but it careens away from the column and up onto the sidewalk. The tan jeep behind it doesn't have enough time to react, and while I can hear its brakes screeching, it slams into the back of the green SUV, sending it spinning back out into the street.
I look up over the scope for a second, just for the gratification of seeing the world below me ground to a complete halt for the split second lapse between the initial shock and the moment when panic takes control.
The green SUV finally comes to rest meters away down the street, its tires ragged and its nose pointing in the opposite direction than when it first appeared. The beige van skids to a halt and the white truck rams into its back bumper at the sudden cessation of movement. I immediately aim again, firing at the driver, front passenger, and someone seated on the near side of the back seat in the tan car. The white truck's broken lights suddenly flare bright and it tries to back away, but a manic crowd of civilians blocks its path. It plows backward regardless and, as it recedes, I get a better angle at the driver. I target him first, and the pickup jerks to a stop in its tracks, its horn suddenly screaming in one constant tone and adding another layer to the chaos.
With the assistance of what amounts to a tiny telescope mounted on my rifle, I can see the front seat passenger contorted around his chair, frantically trying to do something with whatever - or whomever - is behind him. I catch him in the back before he can turn around and get his hand on the steering wheel, then pepper the entire area within the windshield's frame to ensure that whatever he was so concerned about in the back seat gets its fair share too.
The light brown SUV hasn't budged, but out of the corner of my eye, I notice the green van reversing at an ungodly speed. I turn and fire on it like a madman, making Swiss cheese of the hood and probably of the engine block, until the whole thing erupts in a ball of bright light, warm colors, and black smoke. I allow myself a grin as I study the vehicle's smoldering skeleton through the scope, confident that no passenger could have survived that blast.
Task complete, my nerves relax and I suddenly become conscious of my racing heart and the voices of the people caught in the middle of my little masterpiece. I pull back from the rim and peek over it. I only now notice a smashed storefront where the first SUV jumped the curb and the sea of glittering broken glass in the street. I take stock of the amount of blood there is on the asphalt. Most of my targets are undoubtedly pooled inside their metal mausoleums, but there's so much of it that I can't help but lean forward out of curiosity to see where it could have come from. There are civilians lying in the street - although that was to be expected - but I can only conclude from the stray red smears that some of the injured were dragged away in the middle of the action.
Almost automatically, my eyes jump between those wounded that I can see and catalog their injuries, particularly categorizing them as easily survivable or life-threatening. A few appear to be already dead, and a few others seem not far from it. One of this latter group catches my attention, and only when I consciously examine his face do I understand why. His name is Allen, but the friends he's made among the locals call him Safa. He's a French national who's also half Syrian, and he's the single best student in my morning geography class.
I stare at him until he stops writhing in pain and someone comes to tend to him, then I slide into the cover provided by the air circulation system and prepare to slip back to my dorm along a route I mapped out the night before. It suddenly crosses my mind that I could have done everything I just did much more neatly had I used the Chronos. I panic for a split second, feeling over my jacket until its cold metal presses against my skin and I know for certain that I still have it with me.
I shrug with a smirk and begin to make my way back toward the ground and safety.
Perhaps I'd just gotten caught up in the side mission. Perhaps I'd followed orders to a T without even knowing it.
Adil, in his passion, had voiced a desire to make quite a scene - a messy one - of the recruitment officer's death.
8 Days After Initial Deployment
I know that it's rather bold for me to assume that I'd be safe out on these streets - especially after what I've done - but restlessness has almost become the norm for me. I ought to be indoors, behind the school gate, where I know that I'll be safe; or, at very least, where I'd have ample warning if danger were to arrive. Regardless of the reason, I find myself back out on the sidewalk, slinking through the night like some sort of nocturnal predator. I seem to recall my father telling me once that he'd always done his best thinking at night; maybe it's a hereditary trait, because one of the largest reasons I can't sleep is because the gears in my mind refuse to stop turning. It's gotten worse since Adil's mission; I'm not haunted by the thought of it - although I assume that might be a reasonable assumption for any person not trained as I've been - but it certainly hasn't done anything to stop my thoughts from speeding along with a life of their own.
Adil doesn't have as much in this world as I do - not anymore anyway - and arguably has even more reason to stay quiet. After all, once this war is over, however it ends, he has to live here with the repercussions. For him to find it within himself to defy a power that could strike out and kill him at any time - to walk its streets while allying with and thereby essentially acting as a foreign agent - takes a kind of courage I can barely begin to understand. Of course, I won't sell myself short; but I've got a whole country behind me, and I know that whatever I do, my family will most likely be safe. He works alone because he has no other option; he does it precisely because his family and his home are under constant threat.
Between us, I suppose that's one common motivation: the enduring security of the people and land we love. In our own ways, we'd be willing to sacrifice anything for it. I don't know how much of a family he has left - and therefore I can't say how much of his courage is from vengeance and how much is lingering protectiveness - and that on its own makes his valiance all the more admirable. But whichever it is, I can't help but feel a similar spirit. I, of course, don't have to fight on my own soil for my very right to live on it - and hopefully never will - but there's still the perception that what I'm fighting against is threatening enough to my home to be worth the effort. It turns my blood to ice just to consider what it might be like to have this scourge that Adil and his kin must contend with anywhere near my own nation's borders. I couldn't care less really about what happens to the people of this region, but the fact that the threat looming over them, if not curtailed or altogether obliterated, could one day slither its way into Russia makes this entire conflict sufficiently personal.
I stop walking aimlessly to actually look around me and stop on a street corner. I've made it almost to the outskirts of town without realizing it. The homes out here are a bit larger than those closer to the city center, and warm yellowish light - as if trapped there during daylight hours and cured to a more comforting color - leaks out of every other window. There's motion in one front yard; a little girl sits on the front steps of her home, swinging her legs and watching the night. The door behind her is open, and voices and the clatter of dinner dishes ride out on the still air. Suddenly she goes still and leans forward a little, as if straining to watch the road. I look behind me and off to my left; a young man with slumped shoulders walks down the street from the heart of town. He looks to be a few years older than me, but perhaps that's just stress. He reaches the yard where the girl waits and turns into it. She leaps to her feet and flies down the steps to greet him with a joyous shriek; when he sees her, he straightens his back and does his best to smile. She grabs his hand and all but drags him up the stairs and inside. The door closes behind them and the yard goes largely dark.
The girl couldn't have been older than 10, and the boy - whom I'm assuming was her brother - must have been around my age. I feel something pulling at me again, but this time I can't just brush it off. I, too, have a little sister about that age, and even though we lead much more privileged lives than the people here, she rarely has the luxury of welcoming me home, of doing something so simple as leading me in to the dinner table. When I'm in Russia, I'm almost always at Suvorov; I'm practically never home. And now I'm here, fighting on behalf of my government for these people who can't fight for themselves, to prevent their being taken over by a power that could be a threat even to my great homeland, while my own sister…
For the first time, it occurs to me that I might die here.
I sigh and try to ignore the thought. Where'd that even come from? Die? For goodness' sake, Vasily, you're essentially a time magician. You can't die. Not here.
My hands in my pockets, I pull my arms in and feel the bulge of the Chronos under my jacket. I force my feet to turn away from the houses and their domestic comforts back toward the school and start moving in that direction. I just miss her a little, that's all; that's no reason to go moping around contemplating my own mortality. I draw gradually closer to the center of town and, with every step, feel my old resolve returning. You can't mourn, Vasily. She's not here; she's safe. And you're here to keep it that way.
I know that I'd do anything to keep Valda safe, even if it means dying in a wasteland like this.