Valek
I'm twelve.
Or thirteen.
The years blur here and no one knows my birthday.
I sit on the concrete step outside the east wing with my back against the frigid wall, knees drawn up. From here, I can see the concrete yard that stretches all the way to the iron fence topped with spikes the older kids are daring each other to climb.
Across the yard, Ilya is crouched behind the maintenance shed.
He's already taller than most of the staff. Shaggy hair even lighter than mine hangs past his jaw in choppy layers, obscuring the straps of the gray gas mask covering his entire face.
He's had it since before I arrived. No one knows where he got it. No one asks, either, because asking Ilya questions requires patience nobody in this building possesses, and he can't answer anyway.
He's mute. The only sounds he makes are growls and the soft mechanical rasp of his breath through the filters of his mask.
I saw him without his mask, once.
It's not a surprise he can't speak.
Right now, the hulking, masked boy is cupping something in his huge, scarred hand. His head is bent forward, shoulders curved inward, his empty uniform jacket sleeve fluttering as his entire massive body shelters whatever he's holding from the wind.
I already know what it is.
He's been carrying it around all day.
A baby pigeon, ugly as sin, pink and bald with huge inky eyes. It fell out of a nest in the eaves above the dormitory window, and it was lucky enough to be found by Ilya before anyone else.
He's been protecting it ever since. During lessons, he kept it on his lap under the desk. I watched him feed it water from the tip of his finger, one drop at a time, his masked head tilted down while the teacher droned about mathematics neither of us will ever use.
Ilya keeps setting it in the bushes like its family will come back for it if he's patient.
But no one's coming for it. It will die. I give it two days, maybe three. It's too young. It needs its mother, and its mother is gone, because that's how it works.
Everything here is too young and its mother is gone.
That's the whole fucking story.
"Ilya!"
Ilya's head snaps up.
Cosima rounds the shed wall with her chin high, long platinum-blonde hair snarled by the wind into a mess she'd kill me for pointing out. She has a soft spot for Ilya and no one else.
"Let me see," she says, her violet eyes sweeping over him.
Ilya shifts, holding his cupped hand toward her. His glass eyepieces catch the gray light as he looks over at her—even crouching, he's taller—and even through the mask, the hope is pathetically visible in the tilt of his head.
"Its crop is empty," she announces. "It needs to eat."
Ilya makes a low sound of agreement through the mask.
"I'll get some baby food. Stay here."
She gives him a peck on the side of his gas mask, quick and careless, like it's his actual cheek and not Soviet-era leather. He stops breathing, the mechanical rasp of his mask going silent.
Then she stalks off toward the east wing, and Ilya watches her go like he's in love with her already.
He's fucked.
Cosima shoots me a look as she passes me. "Help him," she mutters.
"With what, exactly?" I ask, but she's through the door already.
Ilya's breathing starts up again, shaky and uneven through the filters, and he tilts his head down toward the pigeon like maybe if he focuses hard enough on the bird he can pretend the rest of him isn't vibrating from a two-second kiss on the side of a mask.
His hand moves like it's going to touch the spot she kissed, but it's full of baby pigeon and he doesn't have another hand. He lowers it.
I look away because there are things in this place I don't want to see and that was one of them.
Cosima's an omega, designated early because of whatever the fuck happened to her before she came here, like most of us.
She already has the typical soft omega look that catches the eye of the creepy fucking beta staff, who write her up as well-fed like it's a problem instead of a miracle in a place like this.
She'll get adopted one day because omega is more important than not being a baby, and then I don't know what Ilya will do. He's an alpha and he follows her around like a giant puppy. I don't believe in fated mate fairy tale bullshit, but if it's real, it's them.
He'll die from a broken heart.
Because he'll never get adopted. And neither will I.
Foreigners want babies, if they're not omegas. They come with translators and leave with a bundle they can rename and turn into one of them.
We're too old.
Too fucked up.
So we sit in this yard and we wait for nothing, and sometimes Ilya finds a hurt creature and we pretend, for an afternoon, that something small and fragile can survive in this place.
Cosima returns with a paper cup of strained pureed chicken. She sits beside Ilya and they work together, Ilya holding the pigeon steady while it flaps its stubby flipper-like wings and Cosima feeds it from her fingertip.
My eyes flick in the direction of footsteps before I've fully registered someone is coming.
Ivan rounds the corner of the maintenance shed at a half-jog, shoulders hunched, his rat face pinched like it gets when he's bored and wants to break something.
We were friends until last year, before he decided he was a big man and his showboating began to get on my nerves. Even had a blood pact, once. Cut our palms and shook on it with the thing he's clutching in his dirty hand, a sharpened piece of scrap metal wrapped in electrical tape at the handle.
Everyone knows he has it. Nobody does anything about it.
No one takes anything from Ivan.
His eyes land on Ilya.
"The fuck are you freaks doing?" Ivan says, stepping closer.
Ilya curls his body over the bird, turning his back to Ivan. The mask's breathing filter rasps faster.
Cosima steps between them. "Leave him alone."
"Wasn't talking to you, fat bitch."
A low warning growl rumbles through Ilya's mask.
Cosima holds up her hand to Ilya before he can put Ivan through the fence. She doesn't need it. "Call me that again and I'll shove that shiv so far down your throat you'll shit metal for the rest of your life."
Ivan ignores her, craning his neck to look at what Ilya's shielding in his one hand.
"You saved a fucking rat with wings? Disgusting." His lip curls. "Then again, so are you, freak."
Ilya flinches.
Cosima's violet eyes narrow to slits. "He is not disgusting."
"Hey," I say, standing. "Fuck off, Ivan."
Ivan shoots me a surprised look over his shoulder. He still thinks we're friends. Funny. "The fuck, Val? It's vermin. It's diseased."
"Like your shiv?" I ask dryly.
Ivan twirls it in his hand, flashing his teeth in a wicked grin. "You wanna find out after I'm done cutting the rat?"
The full height of Ilya unfolds in a single motion.
The breathing filter goes silent for one suspended second as he looms over Ivan, the pigeon still cradled against his chest.
Then the snarl comes.
Ivan freezes.
For one second, the yard is silent except for the wind and the vicious snarl roiling in Ilya's chest.
Ivan barks out a disbelieving laugh, high and strained, the laugh of a boy who's decided fear is worse than pain.
"What the fuck are you, anyway?" he spits, stepping forward instead of back, the shiv rising at his side. "Some kind of white knight?"
The shiv punches into Ilya's side.
Cosima's scream splits the air. "ILYA!"
Ilya's snarl cuts off into silence as his body buckles sideways, still cradling the pigeon against his chest even as blood blossoms across his uniform jacket.
Still protecting it.
I don't remember crossing the yard.
One second I'm on the step and the next, my arm's hooking around Ivan's throat.
He thrashes and the shiv swings wild, slicing the air near my face. I grab his wrist with both hands and twist, his tendons straining, and he screams.
We hit the ground.
The concrete slams the breath out of me and Ivan lands on top, his elbow cracking against my ribs. The shiv skitters loose across the wet ground.
We both lunge for it.
His hand reaches it first but mine closes over his, over the blade, and we wrestle for it. Ivan headbutts me. Stars explode behind my eyes. My grip loosens and he rips the shiv free, bringing it down toward my face.
I catch his wrist an inch from my eye.
We strain against each other. His weight bears down. The sharpened point trembles in the space between us, the metal lighting up in the last of the fading sun.
I twist and his arm goes with the momentum. The shiv reverses and plunges into the soft space below his ribs, angled upward.
A surprised, wet exhale punches out of him.
The weight of him sags onto me and the shiv handle presses against my palm, warm and slick now, and something crunches.
But he stops.
Everything fucking stops.
The yard. The wind. The rattle of the fence.
Just the panting, pained rasp from Ilya's mask somewhere behind me, Cosima crying, and the dead weight of a boy on top of me, hot blood running down my wrist and—
I wake up.
The ceiling is white, no stained tiles.
My bedroom in the pack house.
The sheets are soaked through with sweat, twisted around my legs, and my hand is clenched so tight around nothing that every tendon in my arm bulges. My chest is heaving so hard there's a sharp pain in my ribs.
The ghost of my first fucking kill.
I stare at the dark ceiling and listen to my own ragged breathing fill the room. My right hand slowly uncurls, finger by finger, and I hold it up in the faint light from the window.
No blood.