Hazel

Hazel woke and looked around herself. She had a mini freak out she didn’t recognize the room. She sat up in the bed and leaned down face in her hands. She had to remind herself she was safe again. Sometimes past caught up to her in dreams. She was so used to fighting for survival even when she was safe in the 29th century she would sometimes wake up and pace. This time it was being thrown into the fire in Rome. She looked down at her arm where she had been burned. It was flawless, of course it was. Her body was like her mothers, she healed so fast she would never scar, only for her it had been that way since birth. She looked outside and it was still dark. She had gotten a hold of some work out clothes, they weren’t the skintight fabrics of the future, but they would do, she put the jogging pants, runners and heavy sweatshirt onto the bed.

Her morning routine was simple when she could, she would get prepped and go for a run. The difference this morning was the contacts. She pulled them from their charging and cleansing holder and put them in she blinked and let them settle. They shaped themselves to her eyes and she tapped her wrist to sync her mother’s holo-phone up to it. She hadn’t removed her translator since she’d been given it. It might as well be part of her body at this point, she selected a play list and let it play through it. She tied her hair up, she felt kind of naked without the braid still, but it was what it was. She didn’t run because she needed too, she did it because it cleared her head. She stretched out her legs and left her room. She was surprised to bump into Olga dressed similarly.

“You run too?”

“When I can.”

“Would you like to go together?”

“Please? I have no idea if I can find this place again.”

Olga laughed and nodded.

“Put on another layer, it will be a bit chilly. Bring gloves.”

Hazel nodded and retrieved them, apparently, they had been part of the government sponsored kit she’d received along with the workout clothes. Olga nodded and started towards the door. Hazel followed her. Olga glanced over at Hazel as the rode the elevator down.

“If I’m being honest I hate going for runs this early but the KGB has a very strict physical training regimen for us to follow.”

Hazel smiled.

“I do it to clear my head.”

“Wasn’t it hard to run in the wilds of Siberia?”

“Running in the untamed wilderness is the best. You have to be on your toes, and you can’t beat the fresh air.”

Hazel didn’t mention when she really wanted to clear her heard she’d do her running as a wolf.

“I’ll try to keep up with you.”

Hazel shook her head.

“I’ll match your pace. Otherwise, I’m going to get lost.”

Olga laughed. The started their run. Hazel noticed the same brown car kept showing up around them. Same two people in it. She stopped and stretched at the kilometer mark.

“Have you noticed the car?”

“Yes. Probably keeping an eye on you to see what you’re going to do in the city. Make sure you don’t have any surprises.”

“I guess that make sense.”

“Good eye through, they’re doing a decent job of being discrete. Part of our training at the school is to notice surveillance.”

Hazel shrugged.

“Well, if you don’t pay attention you could end up eaten by a bear in the wilderness. Also ambushes by…umm undesirables. We should wave to them next time.”

Olga laughed.

“Better to ignore them and let them assume they think you can’t see them in my experience. Reports go better that way.”

Hazel nodded. Olga started sprinting. Hazel chased after her. The pair ran flat out for half a kilometer. Olga was leaning over panting by the end. Hazel was feeling it but she was used to doing it for longer as a wolf. She walked slowly. And looked at Olga.

“Are you okay?”

Olga waved her arm and continued to lean forward panting when she caught her breath enough to talk she spoke through short rapid breaths.

“Yesh, that was…”

“Half a kilometer.”

“How are you still standing up straight? I’m dying here.”

“Just training. You could get here. Takes me about a kilometer before I’m done and need to catch my breath.”

Hazel noticed the brown car again, she paid it little mind.

“I think they lost us when we sprinted. We messed up their schedule.”

Olga struggled not to laugh while she was still trying to get her breathing under control.

“Let’s walk it off.”

Hazel motioned towards the sidewalk ahead of them. The pair started to walk to Olga’s apartment.

*****

“Oh, I love the dress. Perfect. Better then what the government provided. I’d bring both though, just in case.”

Hazel nodded she got changed into her more causal clothes and brought both dress bags as they went down to the car waiting for them. Olga was wearing her KGB cadet uniform. The pair had become fast friends even with the apparent four-year age gap in the intervening eight weeks. Hazel was privately annoyed about the fact it was eight weeks and she was still in Moscow and almost ten thousand kilometers from her mother. She put her dresses in the trunk and sat in the back seat. She’d spent the last two weeks doing photo shoots while being taken a tour of Moscow. Being spoiled at the various plays and entertainment venues, also being photographed. She felt like a peacock. She blinked slowly as the now familiar buildings of Moscow passed. She had not been to the Kremlin yet, and that was where they were heading today. She had played along with everything asked of her, when she wasn’t with the propaganda folks, she behaved like she had nothing to hide. No skulking around, no use of her mother’s holo-phone. No strange expenditures. For all intents and purposes, she pretended to be an orphaned teenager. Just like her mother had told her. Go with the flow, don’t fight against it. Olga looked over to Hazel.

“You don’t seem excited.”

Hazel looked at her and realized her thoughts had been showing on her face. She smiled.

“Just missing your parents. I was hoping to be back home by now.”

Olga’s face fell and nodded.

“If I’m being honest, I think this is home for you now. You’re not an adult yet, if the government decides to take over your care, my parents can do little.”

“I guess that is just the way of things.”

Olga nodded. The car pulled through a secure gate and Hazel and Olga were let out and led to a room in the large building. Hazel found herself at the center of a whirlwind of activity trying to get her looking just right. When it came time to pick the dress the woman in charge of everything who unlike everyone else was dressed with flair and style. She looked over both dresses and picked up the one Hazel had brought with her.

“This is perfect! Far better than this.”

She motioned to the other dress. Hazel nodded and didn’t say anything and stepped into the dress and Olga buttoned up the back for her. Hazel felt odd being paraded in front of a bunch of old Russian men. She had never met the standards of beauty of any time period she’d lived in and with her mother, who beyond a stint in the fourteenth century didn’t have a lady like bone in her as her female role model for the majority of her life, she wasn’t exactly a magnet for male attention. So, in this case she was so far outside her element she actually felt uncomfortable. There were speeches, a lot of pomp and ceremony, finally she had two medals pinned on her chest and the ordeal was over with. Strangely the individual who made her feel the least careful was an older dark greying haired woman with thick rimmed glasses. She had been looking at Hazel with far too much attention. She’d paid too much attention to Olga as well. The pair arrived back at their apartment and Hazel went into the washroom to remove the make up from her face and called to Olga who came in. Hazel had the water running and spoke to her.

“Who was the old woman with the glasses at the ceremony? She creeped me out.”

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“Alina Bazin, she’s been coming to the academy often. She is the chief of some intelligence branch. Rumor has it she’s recruiting for something.”

“Why are we talking in here, with the water running?”

“To make it too hard for them to hear us on the bugs they have in the apartment?”

“What?”

“There’s like six, one in your room, one in my room, one in the kitchen, one on the balcony, one in the living area, one on the phone.”

“Are you serious?”

“I thought it was just normal.”

Olga frowned.

“I’m supposed to be trained to notice these things. And here is you no experience finding them. I was stuck here for six weeks bored out of my mind. It makes it easy to notice things.”

“Also, our neighbors are KGB, and not a young married couple.”

“Are you sure you have not been taking counter-surveillance lessons?”

“I have just been really bored. Really, really bored.”

Olga sigh and shrugged.

“Being under surveillance is just the way of things for KGB I guess.”

“I think it is more for me. Anyway, I’m going to have a shower.”

Olga nodded and left. She closed the door behind her.

*****

It was a bright spring morning when Hazel felt her wrist vibrating. She went to the washroom and closed the door. She turned on the vent fan and settled down to look at her mother’s holo-phone. It started showing strings of code Hazel did not recognize. The window that had popped up was satellite uplink. Apparently, her mother’s holo-phone was initiating a communications uplink on its own. It took about ten minutes, but it finally said link established. Hazel blinked at it. She had no idea they had space travel in the 1960’s. She had no concept of the space race. She knew enough to know that any computer from this day and age would stand no chance against a military grade quantum processor and the phone’s auto-hacking tools. She quickly dialed Eyre’s number in without even bothering to check the time, she wasn’t sure how long the connection would hold. The phone picked up and she heard her sister’s voice.

“If you’re calling at 2 am this had better be important.”

“Eyre?”

“Who is this? How did you get this number?”

“My mother gave it to me.”

“That is very cryptic, I don’t have time for games.”

“Please don’t hang up Eyre. Please.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Hazel’s desperation must have been clear in her voice even through this rather strange and delicate connection.

“Fine, but I need to know who you are.”

“My name is Hazel Aurelius. I am…related to you.”

“Who is your mother?”

“Her name is Sarah, she…we need help. We’re stuck in the Soviet Union and my mother’s in Siberia in some KGB prison. We would have left already but we need…we need grandfather’s blood.”

“Sarah, as in Seraph?”

“Yes! Yes.”

“I recognize your voice, from Italy you’re a wolf-born but how can that be it’s been…five hundred years.”

“I can’t explain, that is to say I am not allowed but we really need help. Mom is stuck, and she can’t use her powers to escape, we need…we need a rescue team.”

“How does she have this number?”

“She… she has her ways.”

“I guess she would. Are you on a secure line? Soviet Union is very… their phone lines are monitored.”

“Umm I stole a communications satellite Intelsat 1, I think it said.”

“You what?”

“It’s not important, I don’t think anyone can hear my side, but they might hear your side.”

“We just really need help. I don’t know who else to call. I’d call grandfather if I could. If you can reach him, if you tell him Hazel, his granddaughter is in trouble he’ll tell you I’m telling the truth. And that his daughter is in trouble, he’ll know. I am not sure how long this connection will last but my picture is all over the Soviet news, you should be able to track me down, or something…”

“I’ll call you back if I can but its hard, I’m under surveillance.”

“I’ll see what I can do, my grandfather isn’t exactly easy to reach.”

“Thank you so much Eyre, I just want to give you the biggest hug.”

Hazel heard knocking on the bathroom door. Hazel lowered her voice.

“I need to go, I’ll…make contact when I can. I love you.”

She disconnected the call and tapped the holo-phone to turn off the display and it went back to looking like an inert black band. She flushed the toilet then washed her hands. And opened the door.

“Sorry.”

Olga was just getting back from her run so was in her sweats.

“I just need to get a shower before I go to classes.”

Hazel nodded and got out for her. Olga closed the door and Hazel went to her room with a bounce in her step she wasn’t alone!

*****

Eyre (1965)

Eyre put down the phone when the line went dead and looked at the phone with an arched eyebrow. It was the strangest feeling, she felt a kinship to the girl on the other end of the line and that I love you threw her for a loop. She pondered it and shrugged. She looked at her grandfather.

“Sorry.”

“Who was it, sounded like a strange call.”

“You heard every word of it, and don’t pretend you didn’t grandpa.”

Sextus stroked his beard, he hadn’t seen Hazel in centuries. It was taking quite a bit of his willpower to resist flying right to Moscow to see her, but there were other more pressing issues at the moment. He knew that Enid could take care of herself and it didn’t sound like Hazel was in any immediate danger. He had time.

“Is she really your granddaughter?”

Sextus nodded.

“She sounded like she was in trouble, should we help her and her mother?”

“One crisis at a time, child, one crisis at a time.”

He stood and walked to his granddaughter and put his hand on her cheek she looked up at him.

“You’re going to make me forget her, aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry Eyre.”

“Could you at least explain it to me first?”

Sextus patted her cheek and sat down.

“Yes, good point, your mind will be less likely to reject forgetting if its no longer a mystery.”

Eyre nodded.

“Your mother, your future mother that is, is trapped in the past and is trying to get home to you, they need my blood to perform the ritual…”

*****

Enid

Enid was pacing outside Alina’s offices in the KGB headquarters. It was in a dingy basement, out of the way. Likely on purpose because Alina’s task needed secrecy even from other arms of the KGB. The division itself was officially called the Office of Retirement, though it should have been called the office of plausible deniability. Alina was in charge of black ops. Things the KGB did not want traced back to the Soviet Union, or extreme deep cover operations. The secretary for Alina finally waved Enid inside. Enid did not waste any time.

“I dealt with your problem. Our business should be concluded, yet I haven’t been allowed to leave.”

Alina lit a cigarette and poured out two glasses of Vodka.

“Sit, let’s talk. Yes?”

Enid frowned and sat down. She took a drink of the vodka and shuddered slightly it was a very strong batch. Alina downed her glass and took a long drag from her cigarette and patted the ashes out.

“I have a proposition for you.”

“Let me guess you’re altering our deal? Pray you don’t alter it further?”

Alina shook her head.

“No nothing like that. I would like to hire you to train some… select future KGB assets.”

“I can’t imagine that is going to go over well with your bosses.”

She shook her head.

“They don’t want to know what we do down here. I will pay you a very nice fee, one-year intensive training, hand to hand combat. It will be at an old mansion, it will be all young women, eighteen too twenty-two. You will have one hundred percent control over their combat training. I want you to teach them to be like you.”

“And I if I say no?”

“The execution order will find its way back into circulation.”

Enid kept her face a mask of calm, but inside she was wishing she had her powers back so she could paint the walls red with Alina’s blood. She still could but getting out of the building alive would be a challenge.

“And the payment?”

“Fifty thousand.”

“If you bring that Greta girl on board I’ll even smile while I’m doing it.”

Alina narrowed her eyes.

“Why her?”

“She has raw talent; I would like to see what I can do with it.”

“That will be difficult, she has responsibilities.”

“A teenage girl?”

“She is…useful to the party doing other things.”

“What if she was useful to the party by being a trained assassin? I’m sure you have your eyes on her for the KGB.”

“Yes, there have been recommendations, no family to speak of no blood ties. She’s still young enough we can mold her. She can speak multiple languages already.”

“She’s a teenage girl. Beneath suspicion. Probably has a much better chance of getting close to targets…”

“She is rather… large.”

“So?”

“She stands out.”

“Well, if she wraps her chest, puts her hair under a hat all of a sudden you have a muscular man.”

“Good point. I’ll consider it and speak to some people.”

*****

Hazel

Hazel had a rare day with no propaganda work, or Russian language lessons so she spent it making sauerkraut perogies. She’d been in Moscow for almost three months at this point. Olga loved them and they hadn’t had them since they had devoured the ones sent west with Hazel when she first arrived. She was singing along to a Russian song, she had to admit the music was alright once she had gotten used to it. She was doing it partially to make the monotonous task of folding perogies go faster and to torture the people spying on her. She was tone deaf at the best of times. Miles would beg her to stop, she smiled as she remembered the laughter that would erupt from the pair.

She had made enough perogies for four meals. The jar of sauerkraut had been large. She hadn’t even managed to use all of it, but perogies were only so big before they were gross. She was frying up the two meals worth for supper along with some onions and bacon. It had been so long and the pair loved them so much, they would get eaten. Olga came in and Hazel heard her inhale deeply.

“Oh my god, you made perogies!”

“Just like your mom taught me.”

Olga rushed off to get out of her cadet uniform and into her PJs. She plopped down at the kitchen table and Hazel put some perogies on her plate. Leaving some in the pot in reserve. Hazel put her own plate down and had her fork poised to start hacking one in half when someone knocked on the door. Olga was already munching on one so Hazel went to answer it. Outside was Alina, the KGB chief from the awards ceremony.

“I’m sorry I seem to have interrupted your supper.”

“Are you hungry? I made two batches.”

Alina looked up at Hazel and adjusted her glasses.

“Thank you, I will have some.”

Hazel motioned for her to enter. Alina took off her shoes and her spring jacket and placed it on the coat rack. Hazel put a serving on a plate for Alina and then sat back down at her spot. Alina took a bite and glanced at Hazel.

“You made these?”

“Yes.”

“They are excellent. Just like my mother used to make them.”

Hazel smiled. The three sat silently and ate. Olga and Hazel were both a bit nervous to have a high ranking KGB officer sitting at the table with them. Hazel took another helping. Olga and Alina held up their hands claiming to be full. Alina sipped a cup of tea that Olga had made her and looked between the pair of girls. Hazel finished her plate and put her cutlery down on it. Alina took this as her queue to begin speaking.

“You are both probably wondering why I’m here.”

Hazel nodded.

“I am just checking up on you, making sure you’re taking care of yourselves.”

Hazel didn’t believe a word of it but nodded.

“It seems like you are, home made perogies. A lot of work. Your apartment is also very neat and tidy.”

Alina stood up and casually disconnected the bug in the kitchen and the living area. Then the one from the phone. She smiled at the girls when neither looked surprised.

“It is good to see the KGB academy isn’t lax in their counter-surveillance education.”

Hazel blinked at her.

“Won’t we get in trouble?”

“No, I think we’re the past the need for surveillance on this apartment. And what I’m about to say isn’t for their ears.”

Hazel and Olga both looked at her with wide eyes.

“I am building a special team… Olga is probably already aware of it from the rumors going around. I’d like you both to be on it.”

Hazel blinked.

“I haven’t even had my first class at the academy yet.”

“We will be giving you an accelerated course. You seem smart enough to handle it. You will both be trained in new combat techniques. You’ll be trained to be a native speaker of another language. Then you’ll be assigned to foreign countries. You’ll pretend to attend university. Deep cover until you’re needed. Possibly gain a high-ranking position in companies or government.”

Olga seemed very excited by the prospect. Hazel was dubious, but it would get her out of the Soviet Union and closer to Eyre to mount a rescue.

“So, pack your things, you’ll be leaving in tomorrow for your new home.”