Chapter 1 • Dunya

Dunya’s eyes opened to the pale morning light, the dream slipping away in fragments, except for a dark bird flashing violet as it circled a tree whose branches had closed over the sky. Each turn brought it back to the same patch of air. The image stayed behind her lids, too sharp to belong to sleep. The VR headgear lay discarded beside her. Muscles heavy from sleep, she stretched, fingers working through a snarl of ginger hair turned wild by the night.

For a moment, she stayed still, waiting for the dream to fade the way dreams were supposed to.

Her gaze settled on the photo frame on the nightstand. As she did each morning, she straightened it with care. Her reflection slid across the cool glass and briefly joined his sandy-blonde hair and deep brown eyes, their warmth dimmed by time. Then she tipped the frame straight and left only him.

“Hey, you,” she murmured, the familiar words anchoring her back to something real.

Shifting her weight, Dunya drew herself closer to the window, using the mattress and sill to guide her forward. The chill of the glass met her palm as she leaned in and looked out. For a second, she half-expected tropical birds against a pink-hued sky, and the thought left a bad taste in her mouth.

But Gred was the same as it always was, a gray sprawl of tire-marked streets and towering pines rising through the low haze, the city grid washed in the cold light of its never-ending winter. Leninskaya and Pobedy stretched below in their usual lines, motorbikes weaving through the early bustle, their movements reduced to specks against the vast city.

The Grand Mariner’s Cathedral rose above the grove of white birches on the ground where the old Naval Cathedral of St. Nicholas had once stood. Hard to believe I used to pray there. Baba Fenya had brought her to the old church as a child. The Grand Mariner kept the domes and the site, then filled them with whatever the Syndicate needed.

She looked past the spires, toward the calm of Avacha Bay and the stoic rise of Koryaksky Volcano in the distance. She’d seen this view a thousand times, but this morning it felt more solid than most. It might have lacked the flare of virtual, but the bay and the mountain beyond still felt untouched, grounded in a way nothing else was anymore. Beyond the bay, the storm had rubbed out the horizon, sky and sea meeting in a white band so straight it looked built.

With a sigh, Dunya rubbed her eyes, dismissing the remnants of her dream. Too much absinthe and not enough sleep, she thought. That explained the bird. It did not explain why she felt as if someone had left it there. She plucked a mint leaf from the windowsill and chewed it to clear the lingering taste of anise from her mouth, then eyed the half-empty bottle beside it. One more sip won’t hurt. She took a quick pull, winced, and reached back for the headgear she’d left on the bed before hucking it on.

Work called. She had a mindgraft to prepare, and that meant tensor cores to program. A direct tether, no soft buffer, no room for sloppy hands. The visor hummed to life, the room dissolving around her as Lexicon VR booted up. She got right to it, tinkering her way through new pruning algorithms.

Flashes of the dream crept back as she worked: the giant spiraling tree, the mottled green men, that cheap, made-for-TV sheen straight out of some forgotten nineties rerun. Dunya grinned, trying to make it ordinary. Just a dream. She’d have to tell Yana about it later. Yana would have some theory, no doubt, then turn the ugly thing into art. She pushed the thought aside and focused on the code rendering before her.

Scrolling through lines of syntax, she corrected mismatches and trimmed loops until the graphs steadied into a clean rhythm that soothed her.

A trace pattern flickered in one of the logs, an echo of a collapsed zk-SNARK from her last cleanup job. The rogue had tried to fake its own verification, a recursive loop that signed phantom attestations faster than they could be pruned. That was how they earned their name on the contract board.

Dunya paused, watching the residual data fade from her display. Rogues always fascinated her, how even in failure they tried to hold their form, patching over decay with imitation. Sometimes the copy lasted longer than the thing it had learned to mimic. That instinct to preserve structure, to stay whole when everything frayed, felt familiar.

She’d spent her life doing the same, tracing patterns, coaxing order from chaos. Maybe that’s why she became a cryptographer, auditing the University’s network courses under a spoofed babachain credential right beneath Zakharovna’s nose.

But the pull started in childhood, with the worn paperbacks her father kept on the hallway shelf outside her room: Solara, Picnic by the Road, Neurodancer. If she still owned them, they’d be stripped and reissued under altered names, as if that could erase the past. Nothing touched those nights reading in bed with Dad, lying awake afterward imagining another world. Back then, space felt close, almost reachable, even from Gred.

Then The Limitless Horizon tore itself apart on ascent. Years later, the Board still described it as the work of ambitious Tarasov men who had hoarded Gred’s remaining aerospace resources and tried to leave the city behind. Dunya had read enough damaged records to distrust that version too. The surviving flight plan curved back toward Kamchatka, the payload was built to observe orbital traffic, and the guidance package included a descent corridor. Whatever the Tarasovs had intended, they had built Horizon to come home.

Whatever the mission, the Horizon burned with them aboard. After that, the stars became pixels on a display, her urge to cross the void reduced to a dream on her laptop.

The histories said not even Babushka, the most advanced AI ever built, could bring spaceflight back. Dunya never trusted that sentence. Couldn’t and wouldn’t were different failures, however neatly the Arkyv filed them under the same result.

Everything lived behind glass now. Dunya drifted between digital worlds and whatever jobs kept her going, chasing the boundless potential of inner space. Highquest had hooked her with one promise: “Just say the words.” Even now, its retro Soviet synth-pop and neon login flare could make her smile. Sometimes she imagined weightlessness, the pull of Earth’s twin moons, the warmth of a foreign sun on her face. In the versions she pictured now, she was always alone.

The apartment door swung open, and Vesna’s cheerful voice sang through. “I’m back.”

Dunya slipped off her headgear, blinking as the room came back into focus. “Didn’t hear you come in,” she said, closing the last of her mindgraft routines with a flick of her hand. “You’re early.”

“Early?” Vesna grinned. “You just lose track of time when you’re wired in.” She glanced at the terminal, then back at Dunya. She stood tall in the doorway, a wild mane of amethyst hair catching the morning light.

“Remember when we first met? How we chased that rogue all over the city?” Dunya said.

“How could I forget? Like bloodhounds, you and me,” Vesna said.

Dunya gave a low laugh, the memory flashing before her eyes. “Yeah, you swooping in on that warehouse. Headsets flying.”

“Always a scheme with you, Dunya. What’s today’s play?”

“Does a girl need a reason to love her work?”

“Love’s fine. Obsession isn’t. Promise me you’ll breathe.”

“When the world stops needing me.”

“That’s what scares me.”

Vesna crossed the room and came to her side.

Dunya squeezed Vesna’s hand, hard enough to feel the cold in Vesna’s fingers before their warmth answered back. “I know my limits. You know I do.”

Vesna let out a quiet breath.

“Just the new client’s data, right?”

“Quick in and out. We’ll catch up after,” Dunya said.

“Dinner’s on you,” Vesna said.

“Deal.”

Dunya cleared enough space to work, pushing the bottle aside, lining up her graft tools by habit more than need. Each piece clicked into place under her fingers. Clean desk, clean job. That was the theory, anyway.

She rolled toward the corner where the Skelet waited. The frame gleamed faintly under the room’s cold light, all lightweight alloy and joints shaped to mirror her own body. She steadied herself, shifted from the chair, and locked in. A low hum rose as the joints flexed around her, the frame syncing with each small movement until it felt almost natural again.

She stood up, taking a moment to find her balance. After ensuring everything felt right, she snapped on her helmet.

“Locked in,” Dunya said, sending Vesna a crooked wink. “Don’t fall asleep waiting for me.”

“Oh, I’ll be resting up, but only so I can give you a hard time when you’re back. Just...stay safe, okay?”

“Always the worrier, huh?”

Dunya crossed to the rack by the door, slipping her railgun into its magnetic holster along the Skelet’s hip. The coil lights blinked to life, soft blue against the alloy. A quick systems check flashed green across her visor. Good to go.

Dunya adjusted her helmet and caught Vesna watching in the hallway mirror. A seam in the glass divided their reflections, but Dunya’s railgun crossed it, its dark length lying along Vesna’s side. Beside them, the painted crest flashed, its lacquered shell glinting like a beetle’s back against the dull metal.

“Well, with that thing, you look like you’re ready for a space invasion,” Vesna said.

“Maybe I am, off to save the universe,” Dunya teased.

“Just make sure you find your way back from it,” Vesna said softly.

Dunya gave a small wave and keyed the door. The panel sighed open, letting the corridor’s cold air wash across her face.

The lift hummed at the end of the hall. Dunya crossed toward it, the Skelet’s servos murmuring at her knees and hips. The doors opened with a soft chime, and when she stepped inside, their vibration ran through the frame as they sealed behind her.

The suit’s weight settled around her like borrowed muscle, steady power thrumming beneath every movement. She’d long since stopped marveling at it. The Skelet was part of her now, something to manage rather than admire. Still, that faint mechanical pull brought back a Vory scuffle: one kick, one thug sprawling, her chest plate folding under the impact. She hadn’t meant to hit that hard, but the machine never cared what she meant once momentum took over.

In the lift’s mirrored wall, neon light slid down the polished alloy, flickering like the pruning algorithms she’d spent months perfecting. Her reflection looked whole only because the frame supplied the missing lines. Precision, control, complexity. It was all there. But today felt different. One bad signal, this close to the body, could follow her back before she had time to cut it loose.

The lift began to descend. The Skelet caught the shift through her hips and knees before her balance could slip. Too many people in Gred would kill for a frame like this.

The lift doors finally opened on the ground floor, releasing her into a lobby all poured concrete, tinted glass, and dead plants in steel planters. Thirty floors above, her apartment might as well have been another life. Down here, the building felt even more anonymous, one more slab in a district full of them.

Sergey looked up from the bank of security monitors by the entrance, gave the exposed Skelet one quick look, and decided not to make it his problem. Dunya let him look. Baggy clothes were for slipping through crowds. Today she was entering a client’s apartment for the first time in person, with a direct tether waiting inside. She wanted the frame seen before the door closed behind her.

With a double blink, her ocular display flickered on. She called her motorcycle from the building’s storage bay. It rolled up from the curb a moment later, black tires hissing over the thin crust of street ice. The brace at her hips locked into the chassis with a click, and then she was moving, shot out between steel towers and tinted windows, into Gred’s pale morning streets.

Cold wind stung her face as she leaned forward on the bike, eyes steady on the road ahead. The streets were quieter than normal, the few cars leaving faint tracks that vanished under drifting snow. Pines along the median bowed under the weight, their branches heavy and still. White and black streaked past as her tires crushed the thin crust of ice, the sound folding into the steady thrum of the engine. The ride steadied her nerves, until the building came into view. It looked like most in Gred, grey, uniform, forgettable, yet something in its outline tugged at her. She eased to a stop, the remnants of that strange dream still snagged in her thoughts. Something about it felt off, though she couldn’t say why.

As she slowed her approach, she spotted a lone figure waiting outside, posture unmistakable even through the veil of snow. Maria. Years of shared jobs and near misses hung between them, as solid as anything outside the Arkyv.

Dunya had taken a while to get used to Maria’s real-world appearance; their first job of this kind was at a proximity that allowed for a touch of network lag, mere building blocks away. In the realm of mindgrafts, there was no avatar to design; users appeared as they did in flesh and blood. The real-life Maria, now in front of her, looked the same as their first “real” encounter: the brown leather jacket, square jaw, olive skin, and dark hair beneath a hood that concealed two prying blue eyes.

No awkwardness, just the quiet ease of something long understood. Maria gave a small nod that said took you long enough, and Dunya swung off her bike.

“Ready to get this done?” Dunya said. Her pulse still hadn’t settled from the ride, but at least her voice knew how to lie.

“More than,” Maria replied, too quickly. Her eyes flicked past Dunya to the building entrance, then back. Fear, maybe. Or just the calm of someone too used to risk.

Even though Dunya asked, she wasn’t entirely ready herself. Working in the flesh still felt raw, sharpening her senses in ways virtual never did.

Nothing like their usual meeting spot, the Night Café, a haze of encrypted whispers that had long been their shared ground. Inside its simulated walls, avatars mingled and deals shifted hands under layers of code. Virtual had its limits, too tight for what they needed now. This job demanded proximity, low latency, and a direct tether to the pulse of a wet inner world where every microsecond mattered.

“You sure you’re good?” Dunya asked.

“Yeah, just a little on edge,” Maria said.

“Same. We’ll be fine. Once this is done, we’ll kick back for a bit. It’s been too long.”

“You got it, Dun. Pockets with Van Gogh?”

“Always.”

Dunya pressed their client’s number on the outdoor keypad. Through the glass, she saw the elevator doors slide open inside the lobby and an old woman with blue eyes and gentle features step out. A white shawl rested on her shoulders as she unlocked the glass barrier and let them in.

She smiled faintly. “So this is what you two look like outside the chain. I’m Anna, in the flesh.”

Anna. Two neat little Ns. The name sat too cleanly on her, like a shawl folded to hide a stain.

“Dunya,” she said, though Anna already knew that. “This is Maria.”

Maria gave a small nod. “Good to finally meet you.”

Anna’s smile held for a second, then thinned, as if the effort had cost her. She turned toward the inner hall. “Come on. It’s better if we don’t stand around.”

A heavy melancholy clung to the building. Only a few weary elders moved through the dim halls as Anna led them down a narrow corridor to a small apartment buried deep inside. When Dunya stepped through the doorway, the room felt sealed shut. Plastic-wrapped furniture crackled under the smallest shift of air, and blackout curtains held the stale dark in place.

“This how you’ve been living?” Dunya asked, though not quite surprised.

Anna glanced at the window, its edges sealed with weathered tape and smudged with grime, the glass faintly rattling in the wind outside. “I avoid going out,” she said, arms wrapping around herself. The words came with a half-shrug, like she’d long accepted it.

Dunya sighed. “The bombings have everyone on edge. Safety feels like a distant dream.”

Anna’s puzzled gaze met hers. Dunya quickly feigned a cough, trying to take back the words that slipped out. Should’ve kept that to yourself, Dun.

Maria, quick on the draw, presented a small, clinical jar in her hand. “Before we start, you’ll need to take this, Anna. It’s a specialized formulation of exovegeta,” she said, “just a small bump. It’s designed to tune your neurons, make the mindgraft more efficient.”

“Like I do every morning, right?” she said, the smile brittle but trying. “Old habits keep the gears turning.” Her voice wavered through a tight-lipped smile as if trying to find humor in the daily routine that kept her from aging out.

“Exactly,” Maria said, twisting the lid off and tipping a small measure of powder into Anna’s open palm.

Anna drew a sharp breath, pressed the powder to her gums, and after a moment, exhaled slowly.

Dunya watched the powder vanish against Anna’s gums. A morning dose should have felt ordinary. This didn’t. It felt like the first locked door before a much deeper room.

Here goes nothing.

“I hate to have called you in again, especially in person,” Anna said as she settled onto the couch. The plastic cover gave another brittle crackle, loud enough to set Dunya’s teeth on edge. “But something’s wrong. Everything feels off lately, like the world’s seams are coming loose.”

“We’re here for you, Anna. Whatever you need,” Dunya said.

“The nightmares keep getting worse,” she said quietly. “Last night was a mess of blood. I don’t even know whose anymore.”

“We’ll figure it out with the graft,” Dunya reassured her.

“I’ve heard about people ending up in comas even before the operation starts. How can you ensure that won’t happen to me?”

Dunya exchanged a glance with Maria. We can’t, she knew. “The process has come a long way. We prioritize your safety. At the first sign of trouble, we stop.”

“I just need these dreams to stop. Do you think you can help?”

“We’ll do our best.”

Dunya watched Maria rummage through her backpack and pull out the compact VR terminal. The black cube was scuffed at the corners, but the old decal still screamed across one side in hot pink and baby blue: DATA ANGELS.

Dunya’s mouth twitched. Audacious, stupid, very Maria. The kind of thing the ANGELS had done before they learned secrecy was worth more than myth. Half the city wouldn’t know the mark. The half that did would either look away or try to take it.

“Subtle,” Dunya said.

“Vintage,” Maria replied.

Maria handed Dunya a pair of goggles. After syncing with the terminal, Dunya helped Maria attach the device to Anna’s forehead with a pair of electrodes.

It’d been months since her last full dive, long enough for her to pretend she’d forgotten the aftermath: the dizziness, the ringing headache, the sour dislocation that lasted for days. Her hands wanted to shake. She made them still. This time would be smoother. It had to be.

Maria activated the device with a look.

The room broke apart. Static, light, the crackle of plastic under Anna’s body, all folding inward until only Dunya’s breath remained. Then even that felt borrowed.

Darkness pressed against her eyes. For a moment she couldn’t tell if she still had hands, lungs, weight.

Then the ground shuddered beneath her. Her fingers sank into damp soil. Ash thickened the air.

She lifted her head.

A tree loomed through the haze, massive and wrong, its twin trunks, one pale as birch and the other black as burned metal, twisted together as if they had grown by strangling each other. The branches forked apart above the pool, then knotted back into a single canopy. Crimson ran down both trunks and gathered at the roots, feeding a black-red pool ringed with metal restraints. Warm rain threaded through the ash, stippling the pool without thinning its color.

Bodies strained along its edge. A machine pulsed among them, tendrils buried deep in skin and sinew.

Before Dunya could understand what she was seeing, something dropped from the branches and hit the ground hard. It crawled toward the pool in broken jerks.

Then a flash of violet.

Anna stood at the base of the tree, still as stone, the same dark bird clinging to her shoulder. Violet moved through its feathers when it turned. Its beak came away red.

Anna screamed.

The bird lifted, crossed the air in one slow circle around Dunya, then returned to Anna’s shoulder and fixed its cold eyes on her.

“The feeder forgets,” it croaked, “but the hunger does not.”

To her side, Maria struggled, movements frantic and disjointed, as if she were reaching for a command that kept sliding out of range. Dunya had never seen her slip like this.

“Emergency Override!” Maria shouted.

Dunya lurched forward, her body seizing as the world around her broke apart. The drowning figures, the tree, the rain—everything—bled into streaks of color and vanished. The small, stoic room came back into focus. She tore off her goggles, breathing hard, her pulse hammering in the silence. Anna sat on the couch, head tipped back, eyes glassy, mouth slack. A thin gash cut across her cheek, blood seeping into her shawl. Dunya stumbled toward her, the last static still crawling at the edges of her vision.

She seized Anna’s wrist, pressing her fingers to the skin in search of a pulse. “Anna, please,” she whispered, giving her a small shake. “Wake up.”

This isn’t real. She can’t be dead. Not like this.

Dunya turned, and her stomach dropped. Maria sat frozen, eyes open but vacant.

“Maria, what the fuck happened?” Dunya tore the leads from the terminal and checked her vitals. A faint pulse. A shallow rise and fall of her chest. “Maria, stay with me.”

Every instinct told her to stay, but protocol was clear. She looked once more at Maria’s pale face, then turned and ran. Behind her eyes, the bird completed another circle.