Vasilisa the Brave - Chapter Fourteen - Nearing the End

  She was home, in a sense.

  They were in the streets of Pripyat, the city she'd grown up in, or so her memories said, sometimes. It was a familiar place, a city she knew, only as she looked around now, this place here felt more familiar, more like home.

  Did that make any sense? She was quite sure it didn't.

  There was no ash in Pripyat, and yet what she saw now felt right. As if the city she'd started her quest in was the funhouse mirror reflection of this truth she saw now.

  Vasilisa closed her eyes and tried to stop her head from swimming so much. She was thirsty. Her mouth tasted like bile.

  She was quite certain that she was dying. The girls didn't say so outright, but she wasn't stupid, she could put two and two together.

  High levels of radiation, the sudden sweats, vomiting, and the shakes she had. She was poisoned. Her Geiger counter couldn't even read the level of radiation. It clicked up to its maximum then fidgeted there. She was pretty sure that it was radioactively hotter than what her machine had as an upper limit.

  She'd turned it off after a while. What was the point of knowing that it was dangerously radioactive?

  Vasilisa opened her eyes, then squinted them shut. It was so bright here. The sun reflecting off of the white ash. It burned to look at directly.

  "I think we're getting somewhere," Crystal said. She shifted her back a little, and Vasilisa swallowed thickly as she tried not to lose her lunch at the sudden lurch.

  "W-why do you say that?" Vasilisa asked.

  "The magic in the air is thicker," Crystal said.

  "Oh," Vasilisa said. She couldn't feel anything of the sort, but she supposed that Crystal and Alice might. Alice was doing something with the shadows. She said it was stopping the radiation from reaching them, and Vasilisa supposed that she wasn't feeling too much worse. "I think... I think I can walk now," she said.

  "Let's keep you up there, yeah?" Crystal asked. She turned her head a little and smiled up at Vasilisa. "I can barely feel your weight, so no worries, okay?"

  Vasilisa nodded slowly. There was no point in arguing. She was... tired. What time even was it? It felt like it had been noon all day. She wasn't sure if that was just her perception of time being off, or if things really were... off.

  "Oh," Alice said.

  It was strange, hearing her gasp that way. The dark-skinned girl was usually so stoic and calm that it took Vasilisa off-guard to hear her exclaim anything.

  She blinked and looked up only to find a corpse.

  It was laying on the ground, one hand stretched out as if it had been trying to pull itself forwards.

  It was a girl, dressed in roughed-up Stalker gear. A rusty kalishnikov rested next to her, there was a ripped open backpack as well.

  Her face was desiccated, pale, but her eyes were locked ahead.

  Crystal gestured, and Vasilisa turned her face away as the world brightened. When she looked again, there was nothing but a blackened scar where the body had been.

  It wasn't the only one.

  A block later they came upon a second. Another girl, this one curled up in a ball in the eve of a shop.

  Then, further in, a third. Again, a girl... probably. She was bundled up in scarves and a thick coat, oversized mittens and big boots.

  It hadn't saved her. She was on the ground all the same.

  Alice gestured, and that corpse sank into its own shadows. "Radiation poisoning," Alice said simply. "She wasn't protected enough to resist it."

  They continued to walk. On rare occasions they'd find another body alongside the interminable road. At one point they walked around a bus, and the three of them froze. There were four bodies, sitting in a space that was mostly cleared of ash. It was partially hidden by a few cars that had crashed into each other and others that were pushed closer.

  With the larger bus for cover, it made for a small nook that was protected from the ash.

  Within was a half-barrel, cut down the middle and filled with scraps of wood and ash of the non-radioactive sort.

  Four bodies lay around the fire. All of them girls. They were wearing PPE. Bright yellow suits, rebreathers, full-faced masks. The kind of equipment that Vasilisa immediately imagined people dealing with radiation wearing.

  "They're from different times," Crystal said in a low whisper.

  Vasilisa squinted. One suit had a skeleton within. The one next to it was far... fresher. The girl next to her was... mummified. The last was the newest. She had a rip on the side of her suit's hood, a handgun still clutched in her hand. It looked like she'd knelt there, next to the fire, and just...

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  "Can we move on," Vasilisa said.

  "Yeah," Crystal said.

  "What that fool said, about there always being a girl," Alice said. "They spoke as if they always managed to capture her, to kill her before she made it into the Zone."

  "I guess they didn't always manage it," Crystal said.

  Vasilisa wasn't sure if she understood. Or maybe it was more that she didn't want to.

  Alice sighed, and more shadows swallowed the bodies. "Let's put an end to this, Crystal. I don't like what I'm seeing here, or its implications."

  "Do you think Meagan is doing this on purpose?" Crystal asked.

  "On purpose? No, but it's happening anyway. Something is making her magic loop through what feels like a... self-healing process gone wrong? I have a few ideas, but I'm not sure."

  Crystal shifted Vasilisa high up onto her back. "So, she arrives in this world some time ago. Things go really wrong, but her magic is contained to a small area. This Zone. Which I guess is about as big of an area as you'd expect if one of us just... let loose."

  Vasilisa blinked. The Zone was larger than some countries. What did she mean by that, exactly? She knew that these two were powerful, magical maybe. But were they the equivalent of nuclear weapons just ambling around?

  "And her magic, or part of her sleeping consciousness, tries to reset itself. Meagan is very good at that kind of thing," Alice said.

  "Yeah, I remember her regrowing limbs," Crystal said.

  "Exactly. But this is more complex than that. When you found me, I was... out of tune with my own magic. I think, to fix that, you'd need to reset the soul, to some degree." Alice glanced back and looked to Vasilisa, but just for a moment before concentrating on the road once more. "For that, you'd need a template."

  "Is that what I am?" she asked.

  Both girls froze up, but it was Crystal who looked guilty. "Uh, well, that's kind of reductivist, isn't it? Calling someone a template feels kind of rude. But... yeah, honestly, your soul is all sorts of strange. The more time I spend around you, the more I'm sure that you're something Meagan created."

  The words didn't comfort her. She thought of the girls they had passed—their bodies, each a testament to a struggle they hadn't won. She was walking the same path, wasn't she? Would they find her in the ash someday, just another failed attempt at fixing a broken world?

  "Don't," Crystal said suddenly, breaking into her thoughts. "Don't start thinking like that."

  "Thinking like what?" Vasilisa asked, though she already knew.

  "Like you're doomed," Crystal said, her voice lighter now, almost teasing. "You've got us, remember? We're not going to let you end up like them."

  Alice didn't say anything, but the slight dip of her head felt like agreement.

  They kept walking. The air grew thicker, denser with magic—or radiation; Vasilisa couldn't tell which anymore. The shadows Alice moved around them grew thicker, turning into something almost like a fog.

  They passed more bodies. A girl slumped in the shadow of a car. Another curled beneath a shattered streetlamp.

  "They were all like me," Vasilisa murmured.

  "Not exactly like you," Crystal said. "They didn't have me for a piggyback ride, for one."

  The road ended.

  Vasilisa almost started. She hadn't been looking ahead much anymore, her focus mostly on the ground a few steps before Crystal. So when the road stopped and turned to gravel and grass, it was sudden, wrong.

  She looked up, and... there was a power plant. The one not too far from her home.

  It was the Chernobyl power plant, but not as she remembered it from the old photos and videos that lingered in her mind. The massive cooling towers were warped, their concrete shells twisted into spirals that reached hungrily toward the sky. The reactor building itself was encased in a jagged cocoon of obsidian-like material that pulsed faintly, as if alive. Thin tendrils of light arced from its surface, lashing out at the air like lightning searching for ground.

  It was on fire, and a constant plume of blindingly white ash poured out of one of the boxy buildings and up into the sky where storm clouds were gathering.

  "Looks like that's the true middle," Alice said. "Come on."

  ***