Felix
He had done this. The thought stayed with him no matter how far he walked, no matter how fiercely he prayed for the death he deserved to find him. It dogged Felix through the night, chased him along the river, and finally shoved him into the filthy traktir on Sredny Prospekt, where the proprietor pushed a bottle of liquor in front of him and let him seal his own fate with it. He poured two fingers of vodka and shot them back before filling his glass again, this time high. There wasn’t a drink in the world that would bring him oblivion as fast as he needed it, but he intended to do the best he could with what he had. Chasing emptiness, until that cruel thought stopped whispering its accusation—its truth—in his ear.
Felix had told Sasha where Isaak could be found, and now Isaak was dead.
He pressed his eyes closed and slumped forward, fingers nested in his hair, shoving back tears. He hadn’t earned the right to cry. The Koalitsiya had trusted him. Isaak had trusted him. And he’d led the wolf straight to their door, on the foolish hope that Sasha might have a scrap of decency under that hard heart of his. His fists tightened in his hair until his scalp ached. He’d given Sasha the chance to prove himself, to build a new future, and Sasha had proven himself to be exactly the monster the Koalitsiya thought he was. So be it. Sasha had chosen the empire, and Felix had chosen the people. He would give everything he had to this movement, because this wasn’t talk anymore. This wasn’t childish idealism. No, Felix was angry now. Angrier than he had ever been. And this was the kind of anger that demanded action.
The drink poured fast and steady, until he wasn’t sure whether the glass of vodka in his hand was his fourth or his fifth. It hardly mattered—the sooner he could escape who he was, the better. Felix had little practice caring for people outside palace walls, but Isaak had managed to see potential in Felix that even he hadn’t realized was there. Something more than the small-minded dilettante his father had always dismissed. More than what Sasha had always seen, wasted potential needing a firm hand and careful guidance. Isaak saw a different future for him: a man worth listening to, who could be believed in. Two things Felix had never been before.
Two things he would be, come death or pain or the end of the world, for Isaak’s sake.
He raised the glass to his lips again, thudding it empty against the table a moment later. Tonight, he would drink and hate himself and hope to forget. Tomorrow, the real work would begin.
Felix woke with his cheek stuck to the dirty table, a half-finished glass near his forehead. The bottle was empty, but even so, his head felt clear, as if his new certainty of purpose had shielded him from the worst effects of drink. After a few mouthfuls of blisteringly cold water and a quiet apology to the owner of the traktir, who had let Felix sleep through the night in an undeserved show of kindness, he’d mastered himself enough to return to the apartment on Preobrazhenskaya Square. Sleep had honed the anger in his breast to the tip of a spear, and the winter air acted like a whetstone against it.
The mood of the apartment now could not have been more different from when he’d left it. The time for stricken mourning had passed, and he could hear raised voices even from the landing, brazen and reckless. The snatches of conversation audible from the stairs were enough to condemn every man and woman in their number if the Imperial Guard happened to catch wind of them. Perhaps that was the point. Every member of the Koalitsiya would have dared the tsar’s soldiers to descend upon them just then, would have welcomed the opportunity to fight. Every face in the tight-packed room was alive with grief, with hate. With the desire to do something.
“We have no secrets anymore,” Ilya was saying, standing atop a chair at the head of the crowd. Felix had expected Irina to emerge as a leader in Isaak’s absence, but he should have known better—should have known Ilya would see an opportunity to fill a void. “If they knew how to find Isaak, who’s to say they can’t track all of us? There’s no telling what he might have told them before he died.”
“Isaak would never,” Irina said from the corner. She stood holding Marya’s hand, a black shawl around her shoulders and death in her eyes. “Go to hell, for thinking he might.”
“Don’t be naïve,” Ilya snarled—Felix marveled at the nerve, when he himself could barely look Irina in the eye without wanting to crumble from shame. “No one keeps silent under the tsar’s interrogation, no matter how much they want to. Even a saint would tell his secrets. We have to be prepared for what the Komarovs will do with that information.”
Felix clenched his teeth. He couldn’t let himself be sick, and he wouldn’t be, but it was desperately close. The phrase the Komarovs had stuck in his ears, and it had become difficult to breathe. If they’d known that it wasn’t just his family that had led to Isaak’s death, if they’d known it was him…
“Which means,” Ilya continued, “we don’t have time to wait for the perfect moment. We have to act now, if we ever mean to.”
A rough murmur of agreement coursed through the room. Before he realized he was doing it, Felix took a step forward, into the heart of the crowd.
“Ilya’s right,” he said.
Dozens of surprised eyes turned in his direction, but he barely felt them through the blood churning in his ears. Instead of fading, the rage that had surged in him last night was even stronger now, a baying, clawing presence he couldn’t deny.
“We have to show them,” Felix said. “That when they hurt us, we hurt them back.”
Ilya’s surprise faded rapidly into fierce satisfaction. Marya stared as though she’d never seen him before. He liked it more than he’d been prepared to, making Marya Ivanovna proud. Irina’s face was utterly blank. She barely seemed to register that Felix was in the room.
“Yes,” Marya said. She stepped forward, away from Irina, and it was like a planet edging out of orbit, pulling the group into her gravity. “It’s time. Now we show them we mean what we say. If we sit back and accept it peacefully, that gives them permission. It says they can do what they like and we’ll do nothing to stop them. But we can’t let the anger decide for us. Isaak wouldn’t want to be the reason blood is spilled in the streets.”
Ilya started to protest, but Felix didn’t let him finish. This was their chance, Marya with her authority and Felix with his political weight, this was their opportunity to chart the right course.
“We can do both,” he said. “Give them a message they won’t soon forget, without taking a life. But it has to be tonight. It has to be loud, and decisive, and it has to be now.”
This was the moment to disagree if anyone had the will to. The last chance to turn it all back. But if anyone could argue with the steel in Marya’s stance, they were not in the apartment at that moment.
“Damn me, but the princeling’s right,” Ilya said grimly. “Tonight, then. Where, the Bastion? Remind them they’re not the only ones with teeth.”
Marya shook her head. “The most heavily guarded spot in the city? There aren’t enough of us to challenge their soldiers. They hit us where we were unarmed. Now’s our chance to do the same.”
By silent agreement, the Koalitsiya turned toward Felix.
“I have an idea,” he said.
Compared to the squalor of Preobrazhenskaya Square, the Admiralteysky District looked like a fantasy spun up by a romantic painter. Velvet curtains glowed around the edges from the warm fires burning behind them, and the streetlights glittered like anchored stars atop their poles. Even the streets had been cleared of snow and slush, leaving the dozen-odd members of the Koalitsiya room to walk three abreast through the empty thoroughfare. Though they could see the silhouettes of Petersburg’s finest citizens moving behind their curtained windows, the streets themselves, that night, belonged to the people.
Felix walked near the head of the pack, in step with Marya and Ilya. In his right hand, he held aloft a torch. The flame licked the air behind him as they moved, leaving a smeared trail of light across their faces.
Felix’s father had tried to inure him to violence as a child, dragging him along on endless hunting trips that invariably ended with Felix flinching away from the death stroke. He never understood the thrill of stalking something unprepared and underdefended, holding its death in your hands. Preordained slaughter was execution, not sport. But as the night air filled his lungs, he began to wonder whether what had disgusted him hadn’t been the violence so much as the senselessness. All that blood, staining the snow crimson, and for what? What had anyone gained from it except a worthless trophy?
This, now, was for a purpose. If the hunt had felt like this, Felix would have understood what his father found to love in it.
It was madness, planning an attack on an undefended house in the Admiralteysky, but the energy coursing through Felix hardly allowed him to question the wildness of the act. It was as if someone had drained his body of blood and replaced it with quicksilver. His vision seemed heightened to an impossible degree, every flake of snow drifting to the ground perfectly defined. The night itself smelled like gunpowder.
All men had a limit to how much pain they could bear, and Felix and the Koalitsiya had found theirs. Let the tsar and his ministers know what it felt like to live in fear.
He hadn’t visited this house in years, not since the tenure of the previous chairman, but his feet would have remembered the way even if the group hadn’t been bearing him along in its current. His father always reserved the grandest houses in the finest district for his ministers, and by long-standing tradition, the chairman of the state council lived in this well-appointed three-story home. Bezkryostnov would have decorated it splendidly, this baroque oasis, tucked away on a quiet street where danger seldom dared to tread.
Desperate times, though, gave danger permission to roam.
He tilted his head back, tracing the length of the faux-Grecian columns along the façade of the house. It was the ideal target for an attack of this kind, a direct assault on the minister responsible for law enforcement, and practically unguarded compared to the state buildings that crowded Palace Square. Through the curtained windows, soft light revealed moving shadows, passing back and forth on the second story. Too many to be simply the chairman and his wife, the silhouettes too elegant to be the staff. Perhaps Bezkryostnov hosted a soirée that evening. Felix could picture it without effort, having attended dozens of similar events himself. A hired string quartet in the corner of a private ballroom, endless bottles of the finest vintages, and for entertainment dusty old men recounting embellished tales of their long-ago military exploits against the Turks or the Swedes for the umpteenth time.
The first makeshift missile flew past Felix like a shooting star. Rocks and bits of brick at first, enough to shatter the windows, but makeshift torches almost as soon as the broken glass began falling like rain. He’d known it was only a matter of time until they’d gone too far to turn back, but knowing it was nothing compared to watching the surge of light as the flames found fuel to feed on. Damask curtains, carpets imported from Persia and Constantinople, vapid French landscapes painted in oil and displayed in gilt frames. First the fire, then, moments later, the screams. Not pain but panic, a shrill cry as the guests’ peace shattered like so much window glass. Felix felt the fire cast a glow against the planes of his upturned face. He could only imagine what he looked like to the rest of the Koalitsiya: the tsar’s eyes, the tsar’s nose, the tsar’s cheekbones, painted in flames. At least now the empire would think twice before crushing another member of the Koalitsiya beneath the heel of the state. This animal bit back.
Another crash, a furious swell as the fire took proper hold of the second story, and then it was as if the spell suspending the Koalitsiya had broken. The noise of the outside world surged back, startling Felix out of himself. Pounding footsteps, shouts from elsewhere in the dark, and there, cutting through it all, the unmistakable cracks of rifle fire. Far off, but not far enough.
“Soldiers!” Marya roared.
Felix hurled his torch—it spun wildly before skittering to rest against the front door, flames eagerly climbing the varnished wood. Without waiting to see if the others followed, he bolted into the night, away from the sound of gunfire. He wasn’t slow, but Marya tore past him like a deer on the move, darting forward and between buildings, into the shadows. He followed her as best he could, despite the rising stitch in his side. Behind them, the crackle of flames remained constant as a snare across a battlefield.
They wouldn’t be caught. The Koalitsiya was the people, was the city itself. How could his father’s soldiers hope to stop an entire city now that it had come alive?
Minutes later, the streets opened before him, and he found himself near the north bank of the Moika, which wandered through the Admiralteysky in lazy ribbons. He skidded beside Marya, who had stopped to catch her breath. Her eyes caught the reflected lamplight the way the icy river did, throwing back sparks. Behind them, back toward the smoldering wreckage of the chairman’s house, Felix heard shouts, and the report of pistols. He shared a look with Marya, whose black eyes fixed grimly on his.
“This is what you asked for, isn’t it?” she said. “Isn’t this what we wanted?”
Was it? A scream, high and piercing in the night.
“It won’t bring him back,” Felix said softly. “But they won’t forget this.”
Marya looked back, and for a moment it was as if she’d forgotten Felix stood beside her at all. Her hand clenched around nothing, and Felix wondered briefly what, or whom, she was thinking of, as the gunshots rang louder.
“It won’t be enough,” she said. “Not on its own.”
He could still smell the smoke on the night air. Felix let out a long breath, and the warmth against his lips reminded him of ash. The city trembled around him, tinder waiting for a spark.
“But I don’t want to find out what else in this city can burn,” Marya murmured.
A final gunshot, and then silence.