Kyiv, Ukraine

  Grace checked into her hotel, kicked off her shoes, and flopped onto the bed. She needed a nap. She didn’t have time. Her eyes strayed to her shoulder bag where she was keeping the copies of Mackenzie’s drawings. Every time she thought about those papers, it gave her a thrill of terror, a roller coaster stomach flip. 'Terrified' indeed. Grace could see that grid on the backs of her eyelids, she’d stared at it so long, wondering, is this anomaly or this crack the key to identifying what this is? Or was this crack filled in five years ago? It was just as likely that this crack hasn’t even happened yet. What did 'ground water' signify? Should she give up on the pattern and go check out Kyiv’s water treatment plant? She might as well take a walk around the area of her hotel and hope to get lucky and come across a stone walkway or sculpture or something that matched the copies Mackenzie had given her. She doubted it.

  Her phone pinged and her heart tripped over itself trying to beat three times at once. Her notifications had had her on edge for the last twelve hours because it was the best chance of having any success at all. Grace considered what Louis would have done in this situation (and part of her wondered why he wasn’t here in Kyiv instead of her). He’d probably be in his office using his knacked sight to pick out details Grace would never find until he got a lead. She admired Louis for his ability to trap a problem in his head and corner it until it gave up its secrets.

  Grace was not Louis. The first thing she did after booking her flight was post the images online.

  She hadn’t been cleared for that, but when Saturn ops were completely off the books, the priority was to get it done and clearance could get a little dicey. Mackenzie had already broken protocol by letting Grace see her notes, let alone take copies to another continent. And they were squares at an angle, for fuck’s sake. Whatever meaning they had was held elsewhere. She wasn’t tweeting out state secrets.

  Scans had been uploaded to a handful of niche forums. Eastern European Architecture. Ask A Historian. Soviet Architecture. Geo Guessers. Lost Architecture. She had explained that she was a Medieval Studies grad student working on a paper and had come across these drawings but couldn’t use them if she couldn’t identify them. What Mackenzie would think of that, she had no idea. Maybe she already knew that’s what Grace would do.

  The notification had come from the Soviet Architecture board.

  Hate to break it to you, but that looks like it could be a study of the Refectory Church of Saints Anthony and Theodosius in Kyiv. Hard to say for certain in greyscale, but the guidons at the top are distinctive. Sorry to say, if that’s the case, it was built in the 1890s, so far from medieval. Good luck with your paper!

  The first thing Grace did was look up what the hell a guidon was (a pennant with a forked tail) and then search for pictures of the church.

  “Brav-fucking-o, internet.”

  The gigantic green dome of the Refectory Church was covered in a diamond grid of tiles and gold ribbon accents (guidons, if you’re fancy) extending down from the top and had to have been several feet wide. The shapes on the drawings could very likely be the bottom edges of those and not Ws at all. Surrounding the large dome were several smaller reflective gold onion domes with the same grid pattern, but their more extreme curves warped the lines, just like in the drawings. She checked her map. The Museum of Water was two miles away from the domed church.

  Well, that’s that. Grace put on a more comfortable pair of shoes and grabbed her camera and guidebook. She didn't have any time to spare.

  ---

  SolCorp LAHQ. Company Housing.

  Saturday morning, Darwin woke, groggy and slow, to a strange repetitive sound. When his eyelids blinked heavily, it was as though they stuck together like two strips of tape. It was bright in his bedroom. He must have overslept. It felt as if all the gravity in the world had rotated to keep his head on the pillow.

  He grunted, despondent. That small exertion kicked off a killer throbbing in his head that went on and on. Was he hungover? He didn’t remember drinking. At the pain, he scrunched up his face, but his skin was tight and pulled uncomfortably.

  The noise stopped and then restarted. His phone. His phone was ringing. Darwin dragged his hands up toward his face to push himself up. His pillowcase stuck briefly to his cheek, then fell away. With a groan of shame, he settled into a sit, forced his eyes open, and ran the back of his hand across his mouth. It felt strange. Papery. Beginning to panic, he looked around and spotted a splotch of blood on his pillow right where he’d been laying. Darwin wiped at his nose and his hand came away with dark red flakes on his fingers.

  The noise seemed like it was going to swallow him up, so Darwin shook his head and answered his phone just to make it stop.

  “Hello?”

  “Jesus, Darwin,” came Ollie’s voice in a frustrated yell. “Finally!”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, doing his best to claw his way out of the fuzz in his head. Did he drink too much last night? He must have really been stressed to have given himself a nosebleed. What on earth could he have done to get a nosebleed? He wasn’t exactly the partying type. He couldn’t remember what happened the night before, but he felt certain whatever it was, he hadn’t snorted it.

  “‘What’s wrong’?” Ollie yelled in his ear. “You asked me to meet you at Griffith Park and I’m here. Where are you?”

  “I did? It must’ve slipped my mind. When?”

  “Ten minutes ago, you doofus!”

  “No.” Darwin squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “When did I ask you?”

  “Yesterday.” His tone changed. “Darwin, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he stammered, looking fervently around the room for any sort of clue. “I’m fine.” What happened yesterday? He knew he’d worked, the kids are good. They got his lunch order wrong in the cafe, but it was fine. Evening in, reading. “Just been a little forgetful lately. I’m not sleeping great.” He put his phone on speaker to check his texts. No messages, just a text confirming his upcoming hair trim. Definitely no bender in a bar or hookup that got out of hand. He looked around. His quarters gave him no clues other than a corner of a food wrapper left on the coffee table. He rubbed the soft fur of his ear. “Remind me what it was about?”

  Ollie huffed in a way that made Darwin shrink. “You wanted to run something by me, something about a spreadsheet? That’s all you said. And you said it had to be all the way out here. ”

  “Right, yes. It’s nothing really.” He hated lying to a friend. He had no idea what spreadsheet he could be talking about.

  “I drove in LA, Darwin.”

  “I know. I’m really sorry,” he pleaded. “I’ll make it up to you.”

  There was a sigh. “Okay. I’m gonna bomb around for a while since I’m already here. Talk to you later?”

  “Yeah, definitely. Monday’s lunch is on me. All next week.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You sure you’re okay?” He sounded worried.

  “I’m fine.” Darwin tried to make his voice sound sure.

  “Alright, I’ll talk to you.”

  “Bye.” Darwin hung up and crumpled. What was going on?

  He touched the dark, hardened spot on his pillow. Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised. He knew he could be a little flaky, especially when flustered, and he’d been real flustered this week. But what about? It must have been something about student placement. It usually was.

  Darwin took a couple of deep breaths, then walked into the bathroom to wash his face. Avoiding looking in the mirror, he ran the water. It was fine. It was silly. He’d bring up the nose bleed to Pluto at his next checkup. He was sure whatever he had wanted to talk to Ollie about would come back to him. Everything was fine.

  ---

  Kyiv, Ukraine.

  Kyiv was a beautiful city. She had to give it that. Grace had walked until her feet couldn’t carry her and had to return to her hotel to sleep. Her second day was turning out to be a wash as well. She’d attended a crowded mass service at the Refectory, which was breathtakingly gorgeous. The walls, the floor, the columns, the ceilings were completely covered in patterned mosaics or paintings. Deeply intricate illustrations of whole scenes with reflective gold accents. Part of her wondered if the sheer overwhelming sight of this place was why Louis wasn’t here. It would have sent him into a coma. She hadn’t been able to get too close, with all the attendees, but she figured she’d come back later.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The Museum of Water was…informational. And huge. There were caves and models and live fish and taxidermied animals and a significant number of toilets on display. It took more of her day than she’d have liked to go through it looking for anything that might be significant, but unless Mackenzie was being haunted by an oversized novelty toilet, she was at a loss.

  With the sun well into its descent in the sky, she went back to the Refectory when their schedule said it was between services. Thankfully, it was empty. It gave her more room to move around, smiling and stumbling through offensively-mispronounced Ukrainian. Her mouth was exhausted from not speaking correctly and it made her want to schedule a vacation here when this was all over to talk to everyone correctly, to make it up to the language she was butchering.

  She made her way to the front of the church. The dome was dizzyingly massive above her, every inch of it either painted or studded with long windows. An ornate chandelier the size of a small car hung down from the center and she couldn’t help but imagine what sort of damage it would wreak if it were to fall. Intricate gold barricades kept her far away from the pulpit and its gaudy background of saint portraits. A tall scaffolding against one wall made her wonder just how long it must take to clean this place. Grace made her rounds of the space, eyeing an iron spiral staircase that led up to the small balcony space. When nothing jumped out at her, she sighed. She was going to need to get higher. She glanced back and forth from the staircase to the scaffold. Both with a flimsy rope barring entry. Both a bad idea. Both would be loud. She could only do one.

  The scaffold went higher, closer to the dome.

  Doing her best impression of a tourist suddenly realizing they’d lost something, she began digging through her purse until she came up with another SIM card for her camera along with a small glass vial she’d palmed in the same hand. She left the front of the church to go change the card in her camera, dropping the SIM card on the floor near a heating vent. As Grace bent to pick it up she uncapped the vial and poured it into the vent. It was amazing how cheap ethyl mercaptan was. She held her breath and rushed back to the front of the church, ducking behind a partition to the left of the pulpit. The shouts started quickly. It wouldn’t have taken long for the telltale smell of a gas leak to fill the room. There was no way for them to know they were only smelling the odorizer typically added to odorless natural gas to make it easy to detect leaks. Shouts to evacuate went up and she heard people rush outside, doors slamming. One man did a quick pass to the clear the room, but he didn’t linger.

  Grace didn’t have long. Mercaptan would empty a room fast, but it also filled it with responders fast, too.

  She rushed to the scaffold and began to climb. It shifted under her, but the scaffold could do whatever it wanted; she wasn’t slowing down. The actual height didn’t hit her until she reached the top platform and she groaned as her stomach flipped.

  It was high. If she stretched on her toes she could see out of one of the tall paned windows set into the green dome above. Through the window, the landscape stretched out in front of her down to the river and to the east bank of Kyiv. She could see other monastery buildings in the complex to her right. The bridge stretched over the river to her left. What was she meant to see? She stared, finally, at the tiled dome through the glass, so perfectly replicated in the drawings in her bag. What is it? Movement caught her eye as a fly landed to sun itself just behind the glass and she laughed with wonder and terror.

  Grace stretched to her left, leaning over the railing, to align her head even with the fly and gazed out. There was a stretch of woods between the Refectory and the river. It was in the shadow of the church with the sun setting in the west. There was a commotion outside. She didn’t have long until people came back inside. What is it? She stared hard at the forest and noticed two breaks in the trees, roads, maybe walking paths from the size of them. They curved their way through the trees, touched at one point, and continued on their way. The one closest to her ended much sooner while the other stretched on in an undulating line..

  Wait.

  Her breath caught and she strained to get higher to get a better view. The longer line was a draw out almost-M that ended vaguely up on the right. The shorter road swooped up and down almost like a cursive r with a curling tail.

  Ground water. It was the shorthand. Or the shorthand was the roads. If she’d come up ten minutes later it would have been too dark for her to see, but it was just dark enough that she could see a flicker of lights in the woods between the two roads. That’s where she had to go.

  The monastery staff were understandably furious when the person who came in to shut off the gas found her clanking halfway down the scaffolding. She apologized profusely saying that she’d just needed to get a picture because the view is so beautiful. They asked her to leave. That was fine by her.

  They watched her go until she’d gone down the cobblestone path and through the gate of the white brick wall that surrounded the church. It took a little doing to find the right road to get her into the woods, the winding one that tapered off into a walking path. The way started out wide with well-packed grit but as it went on, the path narrowed and the trees closed in overhead.

  It would have been breathtakingly beautiful if her heart wasn’t ready to pound out of her chest and the sun wasn’t getting low. But it was and it left an unsettling dark that seemed to rise up from the ground, eating the last of the light. She walked as far as she could in the dark, trying to hold the map in her mind, the curves of the lines. Grace knew she was walking along “ground.” “Water” was running vaguely parallel to her left. The flickering light had been somewhere in the place between the two. It was time to stray from the path.

  Camera in one hand, Grace stepped off the path and into the brush. Leaves and sticks crunched under her feet and the unseen stones threatened to turn her ankles. The sky above her, what she could see through the leaves, was still a light grey so why was it nearly pitch black down here under the trees? The third time a branch smacked her directly in the face, she resorted to pulling out her phone’s flashlight. So much for sneaking. It’s not like she hadn’t been leaning pretty hard on the nosy, inconsiderate tourist persona.

  The flashlight made it easier to walk, but more nerve-wracking to see. The narrow light cast long, distorted shadows, creating a false sense of movement all around her. From time to time, she would turn off her light and strain her eyes in the dark, hoping to catch sight of the flickering out there in the pitch black but she found nothing.

  She almost walked past it. The little stone shed looked a hundred years old and made her think of some fairytale woodsman living out here in the dark, sprawling forest before the city and civilization had spread its arms all across the region, blotting out the old way of life.

  There was no sign of activity but the round hovel had no windows, just a wooden door and sloped roof. At least that also meant anyone inside couldn’t see her approaching. There couldn’t have been room for much more than a narrow cot and maybe a small wood stove. Keeping half an eye on the door, Grace turned her light to the ground. A path had been beaten down, going from the doorway and leading ahead of Grace, coming from the opposite direction. The footprints were oddly deep compared to her own, with the sort of pressure she’d expect to see if they’d been running. But the impressions were flat and even and closely spaced for an unhurried walk.

  Well, are you just going to walk around it? she asked herself. Pointing the flashlight at the small outbuilding one last time, she brought up her camera and took a photo. Let’s go. She would have liked to have a gun, but that was the nature of the work. Grace could hold her own.

  She knocked on the door, though it felt like a horrible mistake. She couldn’t go this far and turn around and go home. There was no answer.

  “Vybachte,” she called, apologizing, and pulled on the door handle. It moved in her hand, unlocked. She shone her light inside and went cold.

  Five, no, seven faces—eight? There were too many staring back at her and very quickly her mind told her that she shouldn’t stick around to get an accurate count. They were standing, shoulder to shoulder, in the shed like mannequins in storage, but they were not mannequins. They moved, though not nearly enough as a person should when a stranger opens their door and shines a light in on you. Then again, what people stand in a dark, closed space like that in utter silence? Something wasn’t right.

  “Vybachte,” she repeated, stuttering. She shut the door and backed away. The “water” path behind her would get her back into the city faster. Just as she was about to turn, the door opened and figures began to file out, their eyes catching the light of her flashlight and glowing a sickly yellow.

  “Nope,” Grace muttered and turned to run. Heedless of branches catching in her hair and whipping her in the face, she made for the opposite path. The commotion of sound behind her made her blood freeze with terror. That gun would have been really nice right about now. A log snared one foot and she stumbled, going down. Throwing her hand out, Grace managed to catch herself by throwing a desperate grab with her right hand on the trunk of a tree. Most of her weight landed on her hand and a blaze of pain burst through her palm as the phone took the brunt of the impact, causing its light to go out.

  Grace shut her eyes and rushed forward blindly. She couldn’t see anyway, and with no light, she was scared she’d lose an eye running headlong into a branch if she kept it open. The sounds were closer and her palm hurt with every movement, like she was stuck through with needles. Belatedly, she thought for the first time to call in an extraction, but her phone wasn't responding and she was more and more sure that the pain in her palm was the shattered glass of the screen. Grace stumbled out of the treeline, disoriented by the sudden lack of lashing from branches on all sides. The path. Before she could even process if she needed to turn left or right, she bashed into a figure. Stepping back, she opened her eyes and saw the bright glow of a lantern.

  “Oh my god,” she breathed, falling back into her cover on instinct. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to get some pictures but I got lost and can you—”

  “Grace.” A voice said her name with condescending affection. “Please.”

  She froze and felt her stomach drop at the sound of someone using her real name. The din of snapping branches erupted from behind the path as the group of people from the shed spilled out on the dirt next to them. She tried to run, but couldn’t move. The people went still, too.

  The man set the lantern down on the ground and the diffuse glow allowed her to see his face. Marcus Adler. He pointed back to the trees. “Go.”

  The people went back the way they came, silent, without hesitation or a word. Mackenzie, she thought desperately. She had been right about Kyiv. ‘Terrified.’

  Grace finally recognized that her frozen stature wasn’t from shock or fear. It was telepathy. She hadn’t even felt him break into her mind. She'd been too distracted. Marcus Adler stepped over the lantern, closer to her. Backlit now, he was a faceless black form and as incapacitated as she was, nostrils flaring with halting breaths, he seemed like the deadliest sleep paralysis demon she could imagine.

  “I had hoped it would take longer before Sol started sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong.” Marcus Adler touched her cheek and it stung like fire. Branches must have cut her. She couldn’t even flinch away. “You are exceedingly lucky that Mackenzie chose to send someone so high profile. Killing you would bring too much attention to our city here, so I suppose we’re both lucky I felt you go into the woods as I was leaving. My friends back there wouldn’t have been as concerned with that sort of thing. Penn would have been finding pieces of you for weeks.” He shifted his hand to hold her chin with a vice grip. “But what to do with you now?”

  ***