Mikhailovka wasn’t known as the Boneyard for nothing. The barbed wire fences rose higher than in a standard prison. If you made it through one, there were two more in front of you. And that was providing you made it over the inner perimeter wall.
And evaded the crosshairs of trained snipers.
And found your way out of the impenetrable design of the facility.
Then there was the walk to the nearest town. A hundred-mile hike through an unforgiving wilderness of bears, wolves and white-water rivers.
For several months of the year, the warden could have opened the gates and not seen a single inmate walk out. Such were the temperatures in a Siberian winter, no one would make it beyond five miles.
Inside the walls of the Boneyard, the old buildings were stained yellow. The ground was cracked and broken. The one route into the facility was more pothole than road. No one came and went except for staff, supplies and new inmates. The dead were cremated in the incinerator. Inmates were given numbers, their names burned along with their clothes. After all, the only guests of the Boneyard were inmates deemed unfit for the confines of Russia’s maximum security facilities. Those and people the state deemed it necessary to disappear.
One of those inmates hit the brutal concrete yard of Block D. Her name was Prisoner Ninety-Three, a number inherited from a woman stabbed to death with a canteen fork. She breathed heavy, feeling her ribs, her cheek burning hot from a stinging left.
All around her, she saw ragged, filthy white pumps with Velcro straps; shoelaces were too much of a temptation, and the warden didn’t want anyone having an easy exit. Ninety-Three rolled onto her front. She was about to get to her feet when she spotted a rusty nail, bent half over. She crawled forward and slumped on top of it. Pushed off the ground with the flats of her bandaged hands, the nail no longer there.
As she shook off the punch, the all-male crowd bayed for her blood. The chants of kill, kill, kill were among the nicer things aimed in her direction. Thick yellow phlegm was among the worst. It landed on her forehead as she straightened up, courtesy of a grinning, skeletal man, shirtless in the chill of spring. Ninety-Three wiped away the phlegm and flicked it to the ground. Without looking, she threw out a left and connected with the man’s jaw, knocking him senseless into the arms of the roaring crowd.
Ninety-Three squared up again to her opponents – a pair of men in white vests stained brown from old, washed-out sweat and blood. One stood well over six foot. He was broad, and blond as bleach. His friend was short and dark, but no less dangerous for it.
As money changed hands among the crowd, the prison guards watched from the walls of the exercise yard. Ninety-Three beckoned her opponents on. She’d gone at them too fast, trying to finish it early. Now she waited for their first move.
They took the bait. The smaller one first, throwing a left. Ninety-Three shimmied, caught his arm and slammed him to the ground. She held onto the arm and tried to break it, throwing a reverse kick at his onrushing friend. He took that kick in the guts. It didn’t stop him for long. He grabbed her legs and dragged her to the ground. She kicked the man in the groin and drove an elbow into the back of his knee. The bigger man collapsed in agony, yet the smaller one picked himself up and tackled Ninety-Three low to the ground. He got on top of her and tried to punch her face through the concrete. But she parried his blows with crossed forearms and countered with a couple of her own.
Ninety-Three hit faster, harder. Technique over strength. She rolled the man onto his back and drove a straight right into his jaw. It broke easy, but she slammed the back of his skull into the ground for good measure. She left the man alive but finished, finding his larger comrade crawling on all fours. He begged her for mercy. It came in the form of a knee to the temple.
‘Kill that motherfucker!’ an inmate yelled in Russian.
‘Split his fucking head, I wanna see if he’s got any brains,’ came a second cry.
The crowd roared with laughter. From among the six-deep ranks of the jostling inmates, a guard, Dimitri, fought his way to the front, knocking bodies aside with the butt of his rifle. The prisoners knew not to try and wrestle it from him. They’d be gunned down in an instant by the sharpshooters on the walls.
In fact, Ninety-Three had seen it happen only three weeks before. The prison snipers had killed the offending inmate and an innocent bystander, just to make sure everyone got the message. They did. And so Dimitri stood untouched, holding out a thin, razor-sharp shank in his open palm.
Ninety-Three looked over her beaten and bloodied opponents. The guards paid double for a kill. The crowd chanted for her to finish the job. This was her fourth fight in three months. She’d resisted involvement for much longer before signing up.
In her first match, Dimitri had paired her off against a woman from the smaller all-female wing that sat alongside the men’s as part of the same colony. She was a burly, paranoid schizophrenic called Vera. After that, Ninety-Three had fought two women from a neighbouring cell block, before Dimitri realised he needed to make the fights more interesting and lengthen the odds enough if he wanted to make any real money from his colleagues.
Dimitri grabbed Ninety-Three’s hand and opened the fingers of her palm. He pushed the blade into her hand. ‘Do it.’
Ninety-Three looked over her shoulder at the injured men. At the crowd, screaming with all the bloodlust of the Roman Colosseum. She looked up at the sniper rifles trained on her, then at Dimitri. Ninety-Three let the blade fall to the ground. ‘Do it yourself.’
She held out a hand. Dimitri looked up to the walls and nodded. A fellow guard threw an old, white four-litre milk container, half full with vodka. Ninety-Three caught the container. The other inmates yelled for her to share it. Dimitri pushed a handful of prisoners out of the way. ‘Clear a path,’ he said, shaking his head in frustration at Ninety-Three.
She trudged out of the yard, inmates screaming in her ear, trying to snatch the container from her hand. The voices echoed along the dark, dank hallways of Block D as Dimitri led Ninety-Three to her cell.
The heavy cell door slammed shut behind her. Ninety-Three plodded to her bed and flopped down on the end, wincing and feeling the bruising on her ribs. She unscrewed the cap off the container and took a long swig of the vodka. Cheap, local and strong enough to knock out an 800-pound bear.
She looked around her damp cell. Foul-smelling water leaked from a pipe and pooled in the far corner. Mould crept up the walls. And a black rat Ninety-Three had christened Squeak appeared in the thin shaft of light shining through a slit of a window.
Squeak stared at Ninety-Three, nose twitching.
‘What?’ Ninety-Three said in Russian, the language she assumed the rat understood. ‘It’s one drink,’ she continued, knocking back another slug of vodka.
Squeak kept staring, nose twitching.
‘Okay, one big drink,’ Ninety-Three added.
Squeak sniffed the air and scurried away into a hole in the base of the wall.
‘Fine, be that way,’ Ninety-Three said, swigging more and more. ‘See if I care.’
Over the course of an hour, Ninety-Three worked her way through the container. She forced herself to screw the cap back on and set it down by the bed. She was suitably drunk already. And she’d need the rest to get her through the night. Through the faces and memories that visited her after lights out. Like ghosts they came in the chilled midnight air. And tonight was no different. As the waking nightmares came, the cold invaded her bones under her tattered, stale blanket. Ninety-Three reached for the container and began her second round of drinking.
Her furry friend was done filling his belly on her ignored dinner of cold cabbage and potatoes. The guard had pushed it as usual through a hatch in the base of the door. Squeak had taken full advantage. He knocked over a plastic cup of water and darted across the floor, disappearing once again.
‘You only want me for my food,’ Ninety-Three slurred, slugging her way through the rest of the vodka. Feeling dizzy from the alcohol, she reached under her hard, bare mattress and pulled out the rusty nail stolen from the prison yard. She held it in the pale creep of moonlight. It was either the nail, a slow, painful failure of her liver – or worse, spend the rest of her life in the same rotten place. Not knowing when they were going to come for you. To march you along the corridors to the Administration Wing. To read out your charges. To put a gun to the back of your head. To drag your body away and throw it in the furnace while a cleaner mopped up the blood.
No one actually saw what went on in the Administration Wing, but it wasn’t known as the Mausoleum for nothing.
Ninety-Three stared at the nail. At least this way she got to call the shots, to end the nightmares. So she carried on drinking until she emptied the container. Feeling numb, her eyes were drawn into the darkness. Ninety-Three felt his presence. He’d come to watch her do it. Tonight was the night.
Ninety-Three let the container fall to the floor. She held the inside of her left wrist out in the light. Brought the rough, blunt end of the nail to her skin. She paused as she heard distant footsteps. The echo of guards’ jackboots over hard corridor floors.
Ninety-Three held the cool, grooved metal of the nail to her skin and took a deep breath, head spinning, eyes red with tears.
‘Do it,’ she said to herself. ‘Do it, you fucking pussy.’
She dug the point of the nail into her skin. It broke. A trickle of blood, as black as a Siberian night.
But the noise of the boots grew louder. Marching in unison, they had to be for her.
Ninety-Three’s cell was at the end of the corridor. The only one at this end of the block. It was now or never. She dug the nail deeper into her wrist. Bit down on her own pain. It was harder than she thought. The end of the nail too blunt to make it quick. She sawed into her skin, trying to puncture the artery. The boots reached the other side of the door. She sawed faster, harder, deeper.
There was a low, metallic thunk as a bolt unlocked. A yawning of the cell door.
Two guards, as broad as they were tall, appeared in the doorway shining flashlights on her face. She turned away from the blinding beams, continuing to carve.
‘Shit!’ one of the guards said.
The pair of them moved fast across the cell. Ninety-Three gouged in a frenzy, laughing and screaming as they wrestled with her for the nail. Too drunk to fight with any coordination, she bit one of the guards on the shoulder and headbutted another in the nose.
Still, the guards won the contest. A third joined in and they dragged her out of the cell and along the corridor, a trail of blood following in their wake.
In the midst of the scramble, Ninety-Three lost her grip on the nail. The third guard grabbed hold of her forearm. He held it up and squeezed it tight, trying to stem the flow of blood from the open vein.
Ninety-Three felt cold and weak as they broke out of the corridor and across the yard. They hurried through a light mist of rain, breath fogging the air. The Administration Wing was a low-lying brown building at the rear of the prison. It resembled a Seventies office block. She dipped in and out of consciousness as they dragged her along the corridors of the Mausoleum. She looked down and saw her feet moving, but with no feeling.
At this rate of bleeding, there would be no trial. How Warden Blokhin would hate that.
Ninety-Three came round on a gurney in a small, boxy medical bay – woozy at first, but her senses sharpening.
She checked her left wrist. A fresh white bandage. The bleeding had been stopped and her arm cleaned up. Ninety-Three went to move, felt the room spin and put a foot on the floor. The spinning stopped, yet weakness persisted. She noticed the two guards standing in front of the door. They’d patched her up just to read out her charges. Soon would come the bullet. An execution looked better on the books than a suicide.
After a few minutes, the door opened. The guards straightened up as a middle-aged man in a black suit and tie entered, a file in his hand. He was rotund, balding and tired-looking, like he’d been pulled from his bed.
The man looked at Ninety-Three and turned to the guards. ‘Bring her through.’
The guards took hold of Ninety-Three, who offered up no resistance. Her fight was over. They led her into an interrogation room with a clock on the back wall: 1:07 a.m. Was that all?
The guards sat Ninety-Three down at the table. The man in the suit took a seat across from her. He took a pen from the inside of his jacket and clicked out the nib. ‘My name’s Egor.’
‘So?’ Ninety-Three said, assuming he was there to sign off her execution. She looked at the clock over Egor’s shoulder, counting the last seconds of her life ticking by. She felt nothing in particular, other than an urge to get on with it.
Egor opened the file. Inside was her photo on a sheet of paper, alongside what appeared to be her service record. The sight of it made her stomach turn. Ninety-Three didn’t want to think of that woman. That was someone else.
Mercifully, Egor turned the page. He took out a document several pages long.
‘Are we gonna do this or what?’ Ninety-Three slurred.
‘In a moment,’ Egor replied.
‘Just read out the fucking charges.’
Ninety-Three tried to rest her weight on an elbow. Her arm missed the table edge and she fell forward. One of the guards moved to steady her. She shook him off. ‘I’m fine. Just read me my charges.’
Egor looked confused.
Ninety-Three turned to the guards. ‘And shoot me here,’ she said, pointing to the base of her skull. ‘Here, understand? So I won’t feel it.’
Egor leaned forward in his chair. ‘This isn’t a trial hearing.’
‘Then what is it, Egor?’
‘It’s…’ Egor toyed with the document in front of him. ‘I’m not actually sure. I’ve never done this before.’
‘Ugh, just fucking tell me already,’ Ninety-Three groaned. ‘I’m tired.’
‘Oh, you’re tired?’ Egor complained. He turned the document around to face Ninety-Three. He tapped the top sheet. ‘This is your pardon.’
‘Pardon?’ Ninety-Three said.
‘A pardon, yes.’
‘No, I mean, pardon? A what?’
‘All you have to do is sign,’ Egor continued.
Ninety-Three straightened up in her chair. She looked for a logo, a letterhead. The document looked official, but with no header. ‘Is this some kind of trick?’
‘No trick,’ Egor said. ‘Just sign.’
Ninety-Three pushed the document away. ‘I don’t want a pardon.’
Egor looked stunned. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Take me back to my cell now, please,’ Ninety-Three said to the guards.
‘You don’t seem to understand,’ Egor said. ‘The pardon is mandatory.’
‘Mandatory?’ Ninety-Three convulsed into laughter. This was Warden Blokhin all over. She dropped her forehead to the table and laughed until her ribs hurt, which wasn’t long considering it was only hours since the fight.
When she ran out of tears, Ninety-Three looked up from the table. ‘You’re serious?’
‘You have to sign,’ Egor said, pushing the papers back towards her.
Ninety-Three shook her head and picked up the pen. She turned the page. The document was in Cyrillic, the words blurred and swimming around the page. She tried to focus, but reading made her feel sick.
Ninety-Three hesitated. ‘There’s got to be a catch.’
‘There is a condition, yes,’ said Egor.
‘And you didn’t think to mention it?’
‘Look,’ Egor sighed, shoulders sagging. ‘It’s late. I’m tired. When you sign, I go home. And besides, you can read for yourself.’
‘Of course,’ Ninety-Three lied, straightening up. ‘But I want to hear it from you. What’s the sting in the tail?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Egor replied. ‘Some kind of project. A mission, I think.’
‘Mission?’
‘I don’t have that information.’
‘Bullshit.’
Egor shook his head and consulted his watch. ‘I was told to put the contract in front of you and get you to sign. That’s all.’
Ninety-Three forced herself to read the papers. The language was vague legal jargon.
Egor rested his arms on the desk. ‘Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than here.’
After further struggle, Ninety-Three managed to focus and decipher the bones of the contract. She leaned back in her chair, as if recoiling from an unpleasant meal. ‘No, uh-uh. I don’t do that any more.’
‘Don’t or won’t?’ Egor asked.
Ninety-Three felt her breath shorten, her chest tight as if being squeezed. The waking nightmare flashed in her head. The faces of the dead. ‘Can’t.’
‘Even for your freedom?’ Egor said.
‘Four walls don’t make a prison,’ Ninety-Three replied.
The point was lost on Egor. ‘Huh?’
‘It’s a no,’ Ninety-Three confirmed. ‘Final answer.’
Egor sighed and nodded at the guards.
Ninety-Three heard the man behind her unclip his sidearm holster. Feeling the cold, hard muzzle against her temple, she turned in her seat. ‘I told you,’ she said, grabbing the barrel of the gun and jamming it into the base of her skull. ‘Do it here.’
The guard appeared lost. The three men in the room exchanged shrugs. Egor closed his eyes and cursed. He motioned for the guard to lower his pistol, who withdrew the P-96 duty weapon and returned it to its holster.
Egor’s chair screeched back as he walked away from the table.
‘Come on, pull the trigger,’ Ninety-Three yelled. ‘You’ve got a home to go to.’
Egor took a phone from his jacket pocket and called a number. He paced left and right across the back of the room. ‘Sir, she won’t sign,’ Egor said in a hushed tone. He glanced over his shoulder to the table. ‘Yes, I told her… No, we tried that… It’s almost like she wanted us to do it… Look, sir, are you sure you want this one? She’s a wreck. She tried to—’ Egor paused and listened. He returned to the desk and grabbed the pen. ‘How do you spell that?’ Egor scribbled something on the top sheet of the document in blue ballpoint. He dropped the pen on the desk. ‘Are you sure this will work?’ he asked. ‘Okay, sir. Yes, yes. I will call you back as soon as—’ Egor looked at the phone as if he’d been hung up on. He returned to his seat, turned the document around and pushed it under Ninety-Three’s nose.
Ninety-Three leaned in close to read Egor’s messy handwriting. There were two words written down towards the top of the paper.
The first was Nurian. The second was Serik.
A raw electric current charged through her nervous system. Her breathing shallowed. Her heart pounded. Her fists clenched. She picked up the pen and turned to the back of the document.
She scrawled her signature, dropped the pen and looked up at Egor. ‘When do I start?’