The hinged piece reminded me of a breastplate, but it was too short, only covering the upper half of Katya’s torso; and, for that matter, it was not tempered in the manner of armor, but rather, forged from the quality of steel used for structural members, not armor plates. Any good mechanic learns to tell the difference quite quickly by touch; the qualities of structural strength and of resistance to penetration call for somewhat different metallurgical techniques, and they feel as different to the bare skin as a chair made from maple and one made from oak feel when you sit down in them.

It’s really quite obvious, but since most people don’t regularly work with good steel, they don’t really have the opportunity to accustom themselves to the difference. By contrast, something like the difference in the feeling between oak and maple chairs is something that many people will have the chance to familiarize themselves with; I should think that only someone living in an area without both types of trees, or someone opposed to sitting down entirely, would manage to avoid becoming familiar with the characteristic differences in hardness between the softer maples and harder oaks.

Rather than having the function of armor, the function of this breastplate-like object was to serve as a padded brace for an artificial shoulder to attach to. Short of bolting the artificial arm directly to Katya’s clavicle and scapula, I couldn’t think of a more elegant solution in terms of minimizing the bulk of the device, and with the artificial arm being stronger and heavier, trying to attach it directly to Katya’s skeleton would have been not only messy, but a risky piece of structural engineering (bone is simply not as strong as steel).

The miniaturized form-fitting cuirass braced the artificial shoulder against the entirety of Katya’s upper torso. The mechanical arm and hand themselves were a little more worn-looking. The mechanic had freshly polished them to make a good impression, of course, but they had obviously been already complete and on hand, with minor adjustments made to fit them to each other and to the newly-constructed mechanical shoulder.

Even with only the shoulder and the brace for it being of entirely new construction, the turnaround had been very quick – barely more than a week. It was likely that the mechanic had several talented apprentices to shop much of the work out to, but even so, it really was quite a remarkable piece of work. All this was running through my mind as I checked the fit on Katya. It fit very well. Of course, the mechanic had been very thorough with his measurements, to the point of undue familiarity. I felt a surge of jealous anger as I thought about the older man’s hands on Katya, touching and feeling. I opened the brace, taking it back off Katya and setting it on a workbench.

“Mine,” I growled under my breath, running my hands up and down her bare torso.

“Here? Now?” She blushed, gesturing at the door.

“Yes,” I said.

I shoved one workbench against the door to assure our privacy, and cleared off a second one with a sweep of my arm. She bit her lip and nodded, and I set to the task of laying a fresh claim to every inch of her body.

A slightly too short while later, we were interrupted by a loud crashing noise, and I was reminded in a very unpleasant manner that the door was hinged on the other side, and thus opened out into the hallway, not into the workshop. This meant that my barricade was completely ineffective at preventing the door from opening, though it did present an obstacle to graceful entry into the room.

As I was processing the startling reminder, Vitold picked himself up off the floor amid fragments of wood and machine parts (a mixture of the too-fragile crate he had been carrying, its contents, and the contents of the workbench he had just tripped over), and a stream of curses. Another soldier stared goggle-eyed from the hallway, holding an intact (and presumably full) crate. After Vitold had run out of angry curses, he added two non-profane words, in a tone of incredulity.

“Here? Now?”

It was my turn to blush.

“Sorry,” I said.

A wrench bounced off the wall near Vitold (a demonstration of Katya’s displeasure), and he ducked back into the hallway, closing the door behind him. Several more apologies and promises later, I left Katya to work on getting used to her controlling her new arm on her own, and went off with the intention of supervising some drills or dealing with some paperwork. I found myself having a discussion with Vitold.

“Mikolai, she’s bad for you.”

Vitold’s arms were crossed, and he had an unusually serious expression on his face. A mix of negative emotions had congealed and set into a firm and dire expression, by which indication I thought he was changing the subject from Katya’s effects on me to the state of our company.

“We can’t keep going on like this, it’s just not going to work out.”

“Why? Why not?”

I closed the door so as to ensure a little bit more privacy and lowered my voice, since I did not want to feed any rumors.

“Look, we’ve just gotten enough cash and credit to pay everyone, and if the troops are awash with rumors about the colonel and his lovely captain, well, we are for all practical intents and purposes a mercenary company. No regulations to deal with from up above, and if I’m hauled back in front of an imperial military court, charges of inappropriate fraternization would be the least of my worries.”

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“That’s not the point,” Vitold said. “Well, it sort of is,” he added, “but I was talking about Katya.”

“What about Katya?”

“She’s a patriot as well as a monster. As long as she’s hanging around your neck like a stone, you’re never more than two steps away from getting shot in the head, and never more than three steps from getting hauled in front of a tribunal. How long can you keep pretending we haven’t deserted? Katya has to be the only person in the whole company who thinks we’re still following orders from Tanais. If someone from one of the ministries came sniffing around tomorrow, she’d tell them everything she knew about us at the drop of a hat, and cheerfully. That if she doesn’t blow our original identity to the locals or foreign spies. I don’t think our charter could pass close inspection by a lawyer.”

“I trust Katya,” I told him.

“That’s a big mistake,” Vitold said.

I gave him a measured look.

“She’s a monster as well as a patriot. She doesn’t love you, she loves what her twisted little mind thinks you can do for the Golden Empire. She’s a remorseless killer. She doesn’t think like us, she’s hardly even human. She doesn’t hesitate. I think she likes killing people, Mikolai; she’s a sniper for a reason. We need to get rid of her before she decides to get rid of us. And if it’s the...”

He hesitated, and made some suggestive gestures awkwardly.

“Hire a courtesan or something. You’ve got the cash and they won’t kill you if you sneeze at the wrong time.”

At my shocked look, he cleared his throat and continued.

“Or just sell off all the hardware and get yourself a wife here. We could make a pretty nice new life here for ourselves in Silesia with that kind of stake, Mikolai. Just not with that red-headed bullet-spitting monster glued to your side.”

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I looked at Katya’s slumbering form. In sleep, she looked so peaceful; she breathed peacefully and evenly, a warm snuggly weight not quite heavy enough to impede my own breathing. She looked small, fragile, vulnerable; and innocent of the accusations Vitold had levied against her. Vitold’s words kept coming back to me, echoing in my mind’s ear. I had never known Vitold to be so passionate in declaring someone evil. He would talk about people being crazy, mad, pig-headed, stupid, or stubborn on a regular basis (he did love to complain); but I couldn’t remember him being so scathing even when he had been talking about our infamous general, a man with far more blood on his hands. Her own hands were far from clean, but...

Hand, singular, rather. I clasped it in mine, gently, careful not to wake her. Was this the hand of a monster and a patriot? It was true that she killed ruthlessly, and without hesitating, but her quick (and accurate) shooting had saved my life. In the service of our country, though. But she loved me, simply and purely, did she not? I could still remember her urgent and earnest whisper: “You are a good man and I like you.” I could also remember how much Katya had struggled with trying to pretend to be something, or someone, that she wasn’t; if she couldn’t lie smoothly to nobles at a party, how could she lie to me?

Do monsters love? What is a monster?

When I was young, a woodsman from the next village over was mauled by a bear. To him, the bear was a horrifying monster, one that first nearly tore his arm off before chasing him up a tree, tormenting him for hours through a long sleepless night for no reason but to delight in his suffering. When I talked to the bear, the bear told me that the horrifying monster with the axe had dropped a tree on her cub. She loved her cub, she told me, and it had simply infuriated her. The woodsman, of course, had been working hard all summer long to raise enough money that he might be able to make a bid for the hand of his beloved. What he had was enough to buy him a good funeral when his wounds went septic.

I can’t blame either the woodsman or the bear for calling the other a monster. Bears don’t really understand the idea of a careless accident, and the woodsman didn’t know (and never lived long enough to learn) the reason he was being tormented so. And there is something monstrous about killing the animal equivalent of a small child; something monstrous, too, about mauling a man and spending hours tormenting him as he clings, terrified and helpless, to a branch above.

What Katya was willing to do in the service of her country had no boundaries that I had yet found. Her job was murder – murder of our own officers, if necessary, or of civilians. I could remember her crying the other week, because she hadn’t been able to conveniently slit a young boy’s throat on suspecting he knew a state secret (to wit, my imperial affiliation, and a fabricated belief that she and the boy shared that I was up to some sort of sophisticated skullduggery on behalf of the less overt side of state service). If failing to commit an atrocity made her cry, what wouldn’t she do in the name of the Empire? Even if she did love me, well and truly, would that be enough if she realized I wasn’t following any orders at all?

I shivered in spite of the warmth of the blankets, and of the woman snuggled up on top of me beneath those blankets. She stirred, pulling her hand out of mine to tug the blankets higher, and mumbled something into my chest before settling back down. Her only dilemma might be whether or not to cry herself to sleep after she slit my throat. Maybe she would spent the rest of the night quietly mourning me, snuggled up against my corpse until it grew cold, I thought to myself, a sick feeling growing in my stomach as I pictured a far more sinister version of the scene at hand.

Vitold was right that I could not expect, not reasonably, anyway, that she would continue to believe in the delusion that we had not, for all intents and purposes, willfully deserted. I had a letter, sitting amongst my personal effects, calling for my arrest (or summary execution) as a confirmed enemy spy. (Why hadn’t I simply gotten rid of it? Well, it had largely escaped my mind, to be frank, buried as it was.) Sooner or later, the truth would come out, and it would mean my life – unless Katya died first. It would be easy enough for me to kill her first, while she was helpless and asleep in my arms, as she was now. Physically easy, anyway. But I could not bring myself to cause her death; not by my own hand, not by sending her out on a suicide mission. What might be easy for my arms was far too hard for my heart.

And as loyal as she was, she would not leave my side on her own; and whatever task I ordered her to, I could expect her to return. Even if I ordered her to go back to the imperial capital in Tanais, I should expect her to return (though in that case with a team from the capital with orders to ensure my capture or execution). If I simply absconded, or went away for a mission of my own, she would come looking for me when I didn’t return, to rescue me as she had done time and time again. Sitting there in the dark, holding warm and winsome red-headed death in my hands, I couldn’t think of any good options. I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want Katya to die. I didn’t want our time together to end, either, but that seemed a better choice than the death of one or both of us.

As that thought crossed my mind, the distinctive sound of a large piece of steam-powered machinery crashing through a wall deliberately sent me tumbling out of bed and onto the floor.