Chapter 10
“The Spy”
The Moscow morning tasted of ash and iron, the air thick with industrial runoff from the few remaining factories. Evelyn adjusted her son's wire frames on her nose—the lenses long since removed, leaving just the delicate metal structure that had once helped him see the world. Through these empty frames, she watched the sun struggle to pierce the perpetual haze that had become Moscow's shroud. Before her, the city's towers rose as broken teeth against the poisoned sky, their once-proud silhouettes now crumbling under the weight of decay and neglect.
Three years, four months, and twelve days since she'd received the video. The timestamp still burned in her mind: 15:47, December 3rd. The footage had started abruptly—no preamble, no demands. Just Marina being dragged into frame, her clothes already torn, face bloody from what must have happened before the camera started rolling. Their son, Mikhail, was already there, bound to a chair, forced to watch.
"Look at your mother," one of them had said, his accent marking him as former FSB. The camera quality had been poor, but clear enough to see them strip Marina, to watch as they methodically broke her fingers one by one while Mikhail screamed. They took their time with her, demonstrating just how much punishment the human body could endure before shock set in. When they finally granted her the mercy of death, they did it slowly—a serrated blade across her throat, angled to ensure she stayed conscious as long as possible while she drowned in her own blood.
Throughout it all, they kept telling Mikhail to watch, to remember this was what happened to families of traitors. When Marina's struggles finally ceased, they turned their attention to him. Her ten-year-old son, who loved physics and could recite Pi to fifty digits, who had never understood why people chose cruelty over kindness.
His glasses—the same frames she now wore—had been knocked askew during his struggles. Even through the grainy footage, she could see the moment his eyes changed, when the innocence in them died. His final words, spoken directly to the camera with a steadiness that still haunted her: "I love you, Mama."
They'd made his death last nearly as long as Marina's.
The message that followed the video had been simple: "Even retired KGB have to pay their debts."
A scream from below pulled her attention back to the present. Through the empty frames, Evelyn watched as three men cornered a woman in the alley. One of them had military training—it showed in how he moved, how he positioned himself. Her mind automatically cataloged details out of habit, meaningless observations from her KGB years that refused to die even though the world that had required them was long gone.
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"Please," the woman begged, her voice carrying up through the haze. "I have children—"
The man with military training laughed, the sound echoing off the narrow walls. "Should've thought of that before coming out alone, da?" His hand tangled in her hair, yanking her head back to expose her throat.
Evelyn's fingers traced the empty frames as she watched. The woman's screams joined Moscow's usual chorus of suffering. Below, the ration line shuffled forward, faces turned away from the familiar sounds. Even the rats seemed indifferent, scurrying past in search of their own survival.
Evelyn felt a flicker of something—a long-buried instinct urging her to move, to do something. The weight of the wire frames against her nose kept her rooted in place. The memories of Mikhail's final moments, of Marina's pain, held her still. What good would it do? She was one woman, long past her prime, with nothing left but revenge as a reason to keep breathing. The city had died long before that woman screamed, and so had she.
The Ultimate Dive announcement drowned out the woman's final screams, the massive screens flooding the alley with electric blue light. Less than one percent chance of survival, they admitted openly. A game designed to thin the population under the guise of hope. In that fraction of a chance she survived, she could hunt down every person involved in her family's murder. Make them suffer as Marina and Mikhail had suffered. But more likely, she would simply die in a pod, her consciousness lost to whatever digital hell they'd created.
She remembered their faces from the video, burned into her memory with perfect clarity. Former FSB, state security, maybe even some of her old KGB colleagues. In the chaos of societal collapse, they'd hidden themselves well. The Ultimate Dive offered almost certain death—but at least it was death with purpose, with the smallest chance of vengeance.
The registration center had been set up in the former Bolshoi Theatre. Evelyn waited until the afternoon shift change before approaching, her movements calculated to draw no attention. Just another desperate soul seeking a quicker death than starvation. The guard barely glanced at her papers before waving her through.
Inside, the theatre's former glory lay in ruins. Row after row of processing stations had been set up where audiences had once sat, each staffed by technicians in white coats who avoided eye contact as they processed the endless stream of volunteers.
"Name?" The technician didn't look up from her tablet.
"Evelyn Sokolov." The false name she'd used since retirement rolled off her tongue easily.
"Age?"
"Forty-two."
That got a brief glance. Most volunteers were younger, still clinging to that fraction of hope.
"You understand what this is?" The technician's fingers hovered over her tablet.
Through the empty frames, Evelyn studied the woman's face. No trace of the practiced deception she'd been trained to detect. Just tired resignation to humanity's mass suicide dressed in digital dreams.
"Perfectly."
The gamepass felt heavy in her hand, its holographic surface catching the light, glinting with a dark and sharp intensity. Thirty days. In thirty days, she would enter the pods carrying her son's frames and the knowledge that she'd chosen her end. Whether she joined the millions dying in digital dreams or survived long enough to extract her revenge didn't matter anymore. Either way, she would face it wearing the frames that had witnessed her son's last moments, carrying the memory of his final words.
The Moscow evening painted the city in shades of toxic orange as she walked home. The empty frames sharpened every detail of the dying city—the crumbling buildings, the endless ration lines, the desperate faces of those choosing between slow starvation or quick death in the pods. Above it all, the Ultimate Dive recruitment screens pulsed their electric blue messages. "Trade your death for humanity's future." Simple math: fourteen billion must die for the remaining six billion to have any chance.
*I love you, Mama.*
Her son's final words echoed in her mind as she traced the wire frames. In thirty days, she would join millions, maybe billions, of others trading one form of death for another. And if she somehow survived... well, there would be time for vengeance then.
She was ready.