Natalya Zamyatin

Natalya stood in the compound kitchen, watching her tea steep and winding her still wet hair into a coil against the back of her head. She slipped three bobby pins into it to hold it there before moving to retrieve a spoon from a drawer. Her hair hadn't been so long in, probably, ten years. Until she'd been recruited, she'd worn it in a straight blond sheaf, all one length, always tucked behind her ears and falling to the small of her back. Then she'd cut it to her chin and kept it there, a sleek bob that worked as well under a helmet as at an important function.

Hair cuts. Those used to happen. She mused on the nature of how mundane her life on the island was compared to how mundane her life in Russia had been, at least in between assignments. In some ways, Russia actually won.

She turned from the drawer to lift her mug and slipped the spoon into the steaming water, metal scraping gently against the porcelain, and when the tip of the spoon hit the bottom of the mug she went blind.

Or she thought she had, for a moment. All she could see was white. She was lying in the snow on a hillside, among drifts and heavily-laden trees. There was a low concrete building half buried in the stuff in the small box canyon below her. Seven figures, barely discernible against the ground in their white snowsuits, white and grey encasements on their guns and flashbombs, moved toward it. For a moment, as her body acclimated with ready ease to the cold and the gear and her hands fitted themselves more comfortably, naturally, against the weight of the rifle that was butted up against her shoulder, that she was completely mad. And then Llyumzhinov stepped on a landmine. The white lit up even more brightly, although the spray of red and black char and the orange-hued smoke that billowed upward quickly tempered the brilliance.

This wasn't happening, this couldn't possibly happening. Two doors of the compound kicked open, and enemy combatants rushed out, the muzzles of their AKs already flashing. The forward four were dropping to their knees and returning fire. She put her eye to the scope, knowing she'd see two go down quickly, recognizing the faces of her first away team as she did. Zacharov, KIA, Demichev, KIA. Eight Spetsnaz versus a militia. There were worse odds.

It became problematic when one factored in the presence of the Special Air Services. Four mercenaries Natalya knew were going to poke their heads out any minute. Three Chechen insurgents came out of an upstairs doorway to lay down fire on her remaining teammates. She shot the first through the eye. She shot the second through his left cheekbone. She shot the third more cleanly through the forehead.

It was as easy as breathing, although breathing, at the moment, felt very, very hard.

As far as dreams went, this was one of the more horrifically vivid she could ever recall. Scanning the rest of her team to take inventory, it became immediately and immensely more so. Faces that should have belonged to two of her fellow Vympel did not. She was so startled she sat back, up into plain sight, before leaning down and refitting the rifle to her shoulder.

Yorick Brown pushed his goggles up onto his forehead, and her stomach lurched.

This absolutely could not be happening.