Veronica stepped into the marbled lobby of one of the finest hotels in St Petersburg. She was just outside the industrial area of the city. There was a lot of military activity in the area and she had seen many uniformed officers coming and going. She waved away a concierge and headed toward the lounge.

There she spotted three girls who gave off the feel of mech riders, between late teens and early thirties with practical haircuts and a military bearing. Two of them sat together talking over drinks, and another sat by herself. This one was toying with a glass of something clear that did not look like water. She had a brooding expression.

Target acquired.

She stepped up to the table and pulled back a chair. The woman looked to be in her late twenties and had the eyes of someone who had seen combat.

Veronica made a “may I” gesture.

"I suppose," the other woman said, sounding reluctant. “I’m not sure I’m going to be here much longer anyway.”

Veronica folded her hands and gave her an intent look. "Why? Aren't you interested in the latest hardware?"

The other woman shrugged. "I'd rather have my old machine back."

Veronica adopted a knowing look and nodded. "You were at the front then.”

The woman seated across from Veronica was on the older side for being a mech rider, probably nearing thirty, with harsh lines around her mouth and eyes. She tipped back another sip of her drink as though used to drinking something much harder.

"Yes, I've seen the front," she said, looking Veronica up and down. "What of you? You’re old enough to have seen action. Where did you serve?"

"Poland," Veronica lied.

"I hear there was real fighting there. Not like the Hungarians we fought. Their mechs are pathetic. It's only their infantry holding us back, and we know how to win at that game, don’t we? More rifles, more bodies. I don't know why they pulled us back from the front. We could have punched through."

"Then you were fighting at Hatseg?" Veronica asked. She relaxed just a little bit. Not Budapest. This woman hadn't been at Budapest, hadn't killed Veronica's squad mates and made a mockery of her father and their city.

"Yes. We punched right through Szurduk Pass then got tied up around Hatseg. Another week and we would’ve rolled up the whole end of their line. Then the golems went crazy and we barely made it out with our prisoners."

"Prisoners?" Veronica blinked, trying not to show her astonishment. "What prisoners?"

The other woman waved a hand. "You'll see them later. Cannon fodder, them and their mechs. I thought the Hungarians had better, but they sent barely trained girls and mechs in bad need of repair. It was a slaughter. I'm surprised as many survived to surrender as did."

"Where?" Veronica asked. "Where are the prisoners?"

"I suppose they're being held here somewhere. Probably in the factory over there near the captured mechs. They'll want to move the girls and their mechs to the demonstration area with as little trouble as possible."

Veronica felt ill as she began to understand the Russian woman's meaning. The Hungarian prisoners and their mechs were to be used as targets to show how powerful these new German mechs were. Was this what Natasha had hinted at? Why hadn't the woman just come out and said it?

As the Russian rider continued to sip her tea calmly, Veronica's fury rose. She itched to get her hands around the woman's neck and squeeze.

"Excuse me," Veronica said abruptly, rising and walking away. She needed to make herself look less conspicuous. There were plenty of other girls here, many of them in civilian clothes. Veronica followed a few of them deeper into the hotel until she found one, alone, entering a room. Veronica slipped in behind her before she could close the door.

The tired and tipsy girl was taken completely by surprised. She barely had time for a word of protest before Veronica had knocked her cold.

Veronica stripped her uniform and swapped into it. She bundled up her own clothes and dumped them in a maid’s cart before leaving the hotel.

A steady stream of foreign engineers and technicians was coming into the hotel in small groups. Veronica headed the other way, following them upstream until she located the factory complex several blocks away where all the activity was focused.

Entering the main building, nobody challenged her. She had the air of a mech pilot who knew what she was doing, after all. She wandered the halls, passing machine shops and dingy drafting rooms. Most of the rooms were dark and empty but the factory floor, when she found it by following the noise, was a hive of activity. Mechs covered in tarps were being overhauled by handfuls of techs. They were still hard at work, late into the evening, though here and there groups were wrapping up and leaving.

Farther in, beside a group of armored cars lined up in neat rows, a handful of Italians were standing nearby talking. From the quantity of tools and equipment many more had been working there that day.

Deeper in, the soldiers were thicker. Racks of weapons were surrounded by squads of Russian soldiers. Piles of ammunition were guarded by troops with casting suspicions looks.

Finally she reached a darker area of the building, occupied only by soldiers. She found a chamber filled with damaged mechs, all Hungarian, all showing bullet holes and burn scars. Some were missing limbs. They had a motley assortment of weapons, nothing as good as what Veronica's mech had carried. One in the corner had a sword with a chip out of it strapped to its back.

In the back of the room was a heavy metal door secured by a padlock. Two soldiers stood guard outside.

The guards saluted but politely refused to allow her past, not without orders from the general. Veronica hesitated. If she was wrong, this would start a chain of events she might not be able to stop. But she wasn't wrong. She could feel it.

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Veronica reached out to feel for the river. It was there, as always, lapping up against her, calling to her. She let herself drop into it, become part of it, felt it flow in and through her. Then she lashed out.

A wave of force struck both guards, knocking them back and down the stairs. One shouted as he fell, but when they reached the bottom, they lay in a silent heap. Veronica rifled through the guards' pockets for a key. There would be trouble when they were found dead, she was sure of it. She needed to do what she had to do before then.

Most of the mechs were not bound to a pilot, but a few still were. Veronica could sense the bonds stretching out of the room beyond to the wrecked and damaged mechs.

She unlocked the door and found herself facing eight of her countrywomen. They were young. They were terribly young, barely out of childhood, in some cases. As she entered, they turned to look at her, their faces full of fear. Most of them had tear stains running down their cheeks.

Two girls had their arms in slings. One had a bandage wrapped around her head. Another had a crutch at her side. Their body language spoke of defeat and despair. These were not the daughters of nobility that Veronica had trained with in Budapest, the elegant cultured girls who had spent their mornings studying languages and politics and debate and their afternoons drilling with their mechs. These, by their looks, were peasant girls.

Yes, they wore uniforms and some of them had rank marks on their collars and sleeves, but she saw in their broad sunburned features and their calloused hands signs of women who had worked their whole lives.

So this was what happened to Hungarian peasant girls who were found to be capable of bonding mechs. They were given out-of-date models and thrown at the front to delay the Russians as long as they could. Veronica felt sick to her stomach as she took it in.

The girl with a crutch struggled to her feet, began to limp forward. In awkward Russian, she said, "We need more food and..."

Veronica held up her hand. She spoke in Hungarian to them and the girls' faces changed. "I'm not with them."

Astonished, the girls began to babble back at her. She held up her hands. "Wait, wait.”

“Are you here to help us escape? Have you come to negotiate our parole?"

Veronica shook her head. These girls didn't understand. There would be no parole, not for them. They had been brought here by the Russians to be used as experiments. No one would know they were here. Even if they did, she doubted anyone cared.

Her heart ached at the waste. “No. I’m sorry. There's an entire fortress full of Russians above me with mechs. We can’t break out."

"We know," the girl on the crutch said. She had a lieutenant's marks and seemed to be the one who had taken charge here. "They have told us we will be taken up and allowed to fight against some new mechs. They say if we survive, we will be sent home."

"Do you believe them?" Veronica asked.

"Of course not," she snorted. "But they have said anyone who does not bond a mech and go with them will be shot here like a dog. It is better to face death on our feet, yes?"

She looked around the room. The other girls didn't reply. Some of them were staring at their own feet.

Veronica's heart swelled with anger for these girls who had been abandoned by their own people, condemned to this death. Here she had been angry and bitter just because she had lost her mech and didn't know what she wanted to do with her life. She still didn't know. But she could say one thing. She did not want the Russians to win this.

"Can you at least get word back to the lines? Tell them we are here, we are alive?" the girl asked.

Veronica met her eyes. "I am here with a message from our fatherland," she said simply. And now, she wasn't speaking as herself, but as the daughter of Hungary's prince, who knew that sacrifices had to be made, but that death, that defeat, could be a victory as well. "When they come for you, you will bond the mechs, you will fight with every breath in your body, and you will die. But don't be afraid," she told them, "because you are already dead."

The girls looked at her and gasped. They were staring at her through those big, sad eyes, begging her to keep talking, to tell them their deaths would have meaning at least.

"Your families have received the notification and the death compensation from the crown. They have wept and mourned for you, but in truth, they wept and mourned for you when you were taken from them," Veronica said. From the way the girls fastened their eyes on her, she knew she spoke truth. None of these girls would ever have gone home. If they had been victorious, they might have gone to a regiment in the capital and been rewarded with position and rank. But the likelihood of them surviving their first battle had never been high.

It was a waste, such a waste to throw away young lives against an implacable foe. But what else could you do? Step aside and allow Russia to overrun your country, take your people for themselves? Perhaps there was a better way, but Veronica didn't know it. “So fight, until your last dying breath, and you will show them what Hungarians are made of!”

One or two gave a ragged cheer, but others still sniffled. Veronica sighed. What else could she do?

"They aren't even going to give us enough desh to do more than stand there and be slaughters," the lieutenant said, her voice bitter. “What will that prove? That Hungarians are made of blood and meat?”

"You will have the desh you need," Veronica swore. "And you will go to death beside the daughter of your prince."

She stepped into the room, pocketing the key, then removed the jacket of her Russian uniform. Without it on, she could pass for one of the prisoners, especially once she mussed up her outfit a bit and smeared some dirt on herself. She very much doubted they would be counting to see how many girls there were. The others stared at her as Veronica mussed her hair and dirtied her face.

There was a rush of footsteps in the hall outside. Veronica motioned the girls to step back against the wall. Shouts in Russian, "The guards, the guards are dead. Check the prisoners."

A moment later, the door of their cell was flung open. A pair of Russians stood there.

"Girls, on your feet," they ordered.

The girls stood. Veronica shuffled into the back, keeping her face down. The guards counted.

"Nine. I thought there were eight prisoners.”

“Well, at least there's not too few," the other guard snapped before slamming the door and locking it behind him. "Sound the alarm. There’s a saboteur about!"

The other girls turned on Veronica. "You are trapped in here too now."

"No," Veronica said. "I am finally free." She felt lighter now, at peace for the first time since that night in Budapest. Frank, I’m sorry I left on cross terms. But this is what I need to do.

"But what are we going to do?"

"We are going into that arena and we are going to die," Veronica said quietly. "But we are going to show them what Hungarians can do, even with scraps, even wounded."

She reached for the river again, felt it, followed it, closing her eyes, reaching out into the next room where she felt the mechs. They had perhaps a 15 percent desh charge, as the others said, enough to walk into the arena and die.

Slowly, opening herself to power that her teachers had told her either didn't exist or if they did would tear her apart, Veronica began to channel desh from the river through herself into each of the mechs.

When she came to the one with the broken sword, she filled it and then reached out to bond with it. Its left knee servos were damaged. It would walk with a limp. Would its arms work? It would be able to swing the sword.

Good enough. "You will have desh in your mechs.”

“But we will have no bullets for our guns."

"Then they will be clubs in your hand," Veronica said. "Have they not taught you anything? Can any of you shield?"

One of the girls tentatively raised her hand. "My old lieutenant was trying to teach me how."

"If you can shield, you can fight," Veronica said. "Come, listen to me. I will teach you."

The girls sat around her, their faces eager, as she began to teach them how to shape istota to form a shield, how to use that shield as a weapon. All the things they should have been taught before they ever faced a battle, and she cursed the idiocy of everyone who had put them in this position, throwing their lives away for nothing.

As she settled in and listened, learning their names, hearing their stories and their fears, Veronica felt for the first time ever that she belonged. This was no unit of coddled princesses showing off. These girls were as desperate and as hungry as she had been. And if she died in their presence, she would die content.