Lavrentina Chazia sat alone in the projection room in the deserted offices of Project Winter Skies, running the film of the test explosion at Novaya Zima over and over again. The evacuation of Mirgorod was under way. Her instructions were being carried out. Her train was ready: the Pollandore installed, her angel skin crated and stored, the Shaumian girl under lock and key in a barred freight car. There was nothing that required her attention until the train left at noon. She ran the film again. And again. She must have watched it twenty, fifty times. She could close her eyes and watch it all unfolding inside her head: the technicians busying themselves with the final preparations; their stupid, excited grins; the caption, UNCLE VANYA; the wind across silent level tundra, dwarfing the gantry; and then the cataclysm. The blinding gush of absolute, total, irresistible destructive power. As soon as the film had finished she went back to the projector, rewound it and played it again.
It was almost impressive that Dukhonin had achieved so much alone. She had underestimated him. But whatever he had done, it was hers now. In Mirgorod, Dukhonin had kept the circle tight and she had killed them all. Their families would be rounded up and shipped off east. That they would end up as conscript labour in Novaya Zima itself was an elegance that pleased her.
The Vlast had made a terrible mistake. She realised that now. All of them, and she along with them, had made a terrible mistake. They had been so focused on the fallen angels and what they meant, and what could be done with the flesh of their carcases, they had all failed to realise what human ingenuity could do by itself. They had taken their eye off those obscure laboratories.
But Kantor had not. Kantor had found them. And Kantor had found Dukhonin and made him his puppet. When he needed to tap into the resources of the Vlast he had chosen Dukhonin as his point of entry. Vain, industrious, narrow-minded Dukhonin. It had been a good choice.
Kantor’s continuing existence pained her. Him she could not touch, not yet, but his time would come, and soon. He thought he pulled her strings. He thought he could keep things from her. But she would tip him over. She would see him swing from his own lungs. When the time came. Not yet but soon.
On the screen Uncle Vanya erupted once more. Chazia shifted in her chair and grunted at the punch of excitement in her belly and groin.
It was all coming together for her now. Power. Power. Power. The living angel. The Pollandore. And this: Novaya Zima. This was a strength that would wipe the Archipelago from the face of the planet and build her Vlast for a thousand, a hundred thousand years! The Founder himself would be nothing more than a footnote in the story of the rise of Lavrentina Chazia and the Vlast she would build. With this, the living angel would listen to her. With this, could she not erase the angel itself from the face of the planet? Yes, and burn the forest too. All of it. The whole of the planet would be hers.