Anastasia lunges and Eva’s right hand shoots out, grabbing Anastasia’s left arm and keeping her from clambering over the table and ripping out Dimitri’s throat. If it wasn’t for her, Dimitri probably wouldn’t have seen tomorrow.

Anastasia tries to shake off Eva’s hand, but Eva keeps a tight grip on the woman.

“Let go of me.”

“no”

“I need to kill him.”

“no you dont”

“Yes, I do.”

“we are going outside”

And just like that, Eva drags Anastasia through the doors and into the dusk air. The sun hangs low in the sky. Eva ‘borrowed’ Cyrus’s enormous ice cream sundae, the kid saying that “he’s had enough to eat.” Only took like, what, fifty bucks worth of McDonalds. Janissary metabolism, and teenage metabolism on top of that, means that he’ll probably be hungry again in a few hours.

Anastasia paces back and forth, muttering obscenities in Russian and Belarussian and Hebrew and English. Trying to will Dimitri’s death into existence via a sort of lathe of heaven.

“whats your problem” Eva asks.

“My problem‽” She almost seems offended that she’s the problem. “My problem is him!”

“He, fucking, I fucking, I hate him so fucking much,” she squeaks out, before dropping into a squat, knees together, hands joined at the back of her head.

She lets out a scream.

It rings through the air, bounces off nearby buildings and passing cars traveling on the six-lane roadway. People on the inside look out through the window.

Eva can almost taste the frustration held within. She drops low to the ground, nearly eye-level with Anastasia. But her hip flexors aren’t as loose as the former J-Games gymnast.

“Do you know what he told me when we broke up,” Anastasia mutters. “He told me that he could not wait to fuck prettier girls than me.”

Eva’s quiet. She never did relationships all that well. The last person was Tech and both knew that they couldn’t be for each other, as much as it killed them.

“He said that if I killed myself, the world would be a better place. One less deranged lunatic running around in it.”

She spits on the ground. Eva hands her the ice cream, and when Anastasia takes it she meets Eva’s brown eyes with her own.

“I hate him. So much. But he is all I have ever had since I graduated.”

“is there anyone else”

“Do you want me to say Jacob?” Anastasia asks.

“hes really the only one”

Both discount Tech as an option, because he clearly has another woman on his mind. Shame about that.

Anastasia exhales through her nose. She pulls the bullet-necklace over her head and hands it to Eva. The carvings are small but beautiful. It’s rural stuff, farms, a small church with an Orthodox cross, a river and a paddlewheel that turns a small windmill. The small crevasses are filled with a black resin that makes it all legible.

“He gave me that.”

“jacob” Eva asks.

“Do you think anyone else could make that?”

“shouldnt there be a synagogue”

“He did not know I was Jewish when he made it,” Anastasia admits. There’s a sheepish smile on her face. She takes a spoonful of the Oreo-laden ice cream into her mouth.

“He just gave it to me. He said that he was bored and made it. He said that it reminded him of me.”

“and now it reminds you of him”

“Yes, exactly.” She wipes her eyes. “I feel like I am Moses. I can see the promised land. I cannot get there. Because I pissed off God somehow.”

“how is bloody jacob gillman the promised land”

“I do not know. But compared to the other guy…” her sentence falls apart. “I have been nothing but hate and anger. ‘I cannot wait to fuck prettier girls.’”

“what a prick”

That is, if Dimitri actually said that.

“And he saw past that. I, I wish I could have him.”

“you should ask”

“You know exactly who his eyes are focused on. And I would have to get past fucking Sophia as well.”

“theres a but coming up”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Anastasia smiles at her, softly.

“Am I that easy to read?”

“absolutely”

“All right. But, I would be happier if I was with him.”

“maybe”

No response. Gives Eva a chance to continue. Some asshole leans on his horn on the nearest street.

“maybe you just need someone to talk to”

“I do not need some fucking robot therapist.”

“but”

Anastasia exhales again, hard, through her mouth like she’s trying to scream. She’s still in her crouch, trying to keep on her feet and curl up into an armadillo ball at the same time.

“But, fine. But, yes. I have not talked to anyone about this. Except for Jacob.”

“what was his response”

“He just said ‘everyone is lonely all the time now.’ Do you think he is lonely, too?”

Eva shrugs.

“youre not going to know unless you ask”

“How about you?”

“me”

“Yes, you. Evelyn Jackson. Are you just like the rest of us?”

Eva thinks for a moment. She’s never given it any thought. Tech and her had different expectations for themselves and of each other and when neither met them, they called it off. It was a bummer, but she never felt anger or hatred or anything negative towards him. And what does ‘loneliness’ even mean these days? Is it one-to-one with aimlessness, a sense of perpetual limbo? Having a purpose in life can cover up the fact that it’s just you. Having something to strive for can be a partner in and of itself. Is Anastasia just being selfish, telling Eva that all she wants is a hot guy who will fix her and make her better through the power of who knows what? And how long has she been stewing over Dimitri? The break-up was loud and only a few months ago. She heard bottles shattering from a few apartments over, to the point where the entire team made sure that neither of the two were trying to kill each other.

Instead of answering, Eva looks north. Across the street, the lot where the Southern Seas Company has it’s local offices filled with mafia dudes – allegedly – and across the Tigris sits Mosul, ever crumbling. The sun is low in the west, the last embers of Thursday burning on the horizon long after the sun has dipped below. Doing battle with the serpent Apophis, or Utu reuniting with Aya after a long day of observing the world below.

The crumbling buildings made it look like the end of the world. A world, at least. And at the end if it, everyone is lonely, all the time.

A gentle ache overcomes Eva’s heart. She doesn’t know why. It hurts, a dull throb that’s devoid of meaning or origin. The twenty-second century meant progress, right? But the world is just rehashing the previous decades and centuries. Extraction colonialism, apartheid, slow-motion ethnic cleansing, all for a culture that’s on its tenth day of reheating leftovers in the microwave. The big songs are all covers of songs from a hundred years ago. The big movies are all remakes of movies from a hundred years ago. The politics are the same. Culture is the same. The stupid neon lights to the south are the same. They’ve screamed future for so long now.

An old, semi-drunken lecture by Xiuying pops into her head. When she gets three or four beers in, Xiuying likes to turn into a university professor. ‘People don’t live very long,’ she said. ‘Systems of people usually live longer than they should.’ She talked about the slow falls of Rome, first in the fifth century then the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. About how the Ottomans reached their high-water mark at Vienna in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then spent two more centuries falling apart, limping its way into the twentieth, to where they had to make an alliance with the Hapsburgs who defeated them at Vienna. Each of the numerous Chinese dynasties would disintegrate into rump states, weak successors that claimed the legitimacy of the former dynasty until the usurping dynasty conquered them – Liao to Jin, Jin to Yuan, Yuan to Ming, Ming to Qing.

In the waning years of those empires, where the world was perpetually falling on people’s heads, how lonely did the dispossessed feel? Was everyone walking around with shattered hearts, knowing that there’s a good chance they’ll die in the coming disruption?

But comparing the collapse of a relationship to the fall of Rome or the Ottoman Empire seems solipsistic. A peasant in northern Italy had better things to worry about than getting his dick wet – the Goths marauding over his horizon, for one.

How close was the modern day, capital, hegemonic world to something like the 18th century Ottoman Empire? Sure, everything feels like its falling apart on the periphery. But if the wheels at the center of the machine are greased…

Eva stands back up, exhales. The air is cold and moving rapidly. Her breath turns to mist out of her lips and the swirling winds from the north take it on their journey. Her knees pop as she rises; the creaky body of a senior Janissary. Senior. She’s 28!

“i wish it couldve been different” she admits. “i think id be happier if i was with tech”

Anastasia looks up from her crouch,

“What happened?”

“i still dont quite know” she admits. “it was a long time ago now”

She doesn’t think that Tech knows, either. Not everything can be explained in a quantitative matter.

The door that leads to the McDonalds swings inward, and out steps Cyrus. He probably carries Tech’s words on his lips.

“whats up” Eva asks.

Cyrus looks at her, then at Anastasia, then at what used to be his ice cream, melting away as Anastasia doesn’t touch it. He bends down and gingerly picks it up and Anastasia doesn’t care. He takes a spoonful.

“Tech said that he wants the three of us to go over first,” the kid relays. “Him and Dimitri will go over afterwards.”

Eva looks at Anastasia, who nods and stands up. Her knees are in better shape than Eva’s, despite the years of gymnastic brutalization inflicted upon them.

“That is a good idea,” she says. “We shall get weapons prepared for everyone.”

“Are we really going to kill people?” Cyrus asks. “I’m, well, I’ve never killed someone before.”

“It’s easier than you think,” Anastasia replies.

“leave it to us” Eva tells the kid. All Janissaries face a trial by fire. This, tonight, doesn’t seem appropriate.

“No.”

Anastasia stares Cyrus in the eye.

“I want him to consider something.”

“consider what”

“What did your benefactors promise you?”

Cyrus thinks for a moment. Eats the ice cream. Kid’s still hungry.

“Bonuses. Free time. Meaningful employment doing, whatever. A chance to see new places, that sort of thing. Education stipends.”

“And yet here you are. You were trapped in box with no paperwork on same boat as weapons and food. How does that make you feel?”

Cyrus takes another moment to think. Eats more ice cream. He’s lucky he got the jumbo size because he’d be out and its clearly how he does all his thinking.

“Mad. Someone, or a bunch of people, lied to me, or some shit like that. Is this supposed to be a metaphor for something?”

He catches on quick.

The corners of Anastasia’s mouth upturn, ever so slightly.

“So, what do you want to do to these people? They stuff you into shipping container with poor fucking Bangladeshi or Nepali svolač and leave you to rot. Because some of them are right over there.”

Svolač isn’t quite Russian. Svoloch in Russian means people. Eva figures that svolač is Belarussian.

Cyrus exhales.

“I don’t know if I can kill them,” he finally admits. “But…I won’t be too upset if someone else does it.”

The two woman share a glance. Anastasia wears a sort of, evil grin. Hard to quantify it.

“That is the spirit!” she says. Eva tries to look underneath. Hopefully this doesn’t come down to her either killing Dimitri or getting a proxy to do it for her. Despite his flaws, the other Russian is a valuable team member. Who else would climb a rusty, decades old latter for good sightlines?

“Onward!” she continues, and takes off towards the other side of the street. Instead of following her, Eva waits for a moment, or two. Cyrus steps next to her.

“Is she always like this?”

“like what”

“Borderline? Or bipolar, or whatever that shit’s called.”

Eva shrugs.

“youd have to ask her yourself”