Apostolic Journey

[Seraphis]

For several confused seconds she had no idea where she was. Her head had fallen sideways against the wall, one leg was numb beneath her, and something warm and heavy rested across her thighs. Then Theron shifted in his sleep and the Kremlin staging room assembled itself around her again: blankets, equipment, dimmed displays, exhausted bodies scattered across chairs and floor. Memory returned with considerably less mercy.

Seraphis blinked sleep from her eyes and looked across the room. The place where Ascendancy had been sleeping was empty, and her gaze lingered on the folded coat no longer there before she caught herself doing it. Of course he was gone. He had tried to negotiate three hours of rest down to two before he'd even closed his eyes. She checked the time and frowned. He had left considerably before everyone else.

Theron stirred again, drawing her attention back where it belonged. His head was still in her lap, his hair disordered beneath her hand. She flexed her fingers and discovered they had stiffened sometime during the night from remaining half-curled against his scalp.

“Oof, you're heavy.”

One eye opened. “Good morning to you too.”

“I think you've crushed my leg.”

“Ah, what a tragic loss.”

His voice was rough with lingering sleep, but stronger than it had been when he returned. Seraphis felt the relief before she could stop it. Theron pushed himself upright slowly, wincing as muscles apparently objected to being used again. She watched him stretch and disguise the effort halfway through, and said nothing until he reached for his gear.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready to go back out with the others.”

Seraphis blinked at him. “No, you're not.”

Theron looked over his shoulder. “I'm fairly certain you don't command the Dominions.”

“Neither do you, Luminar.”

They climbed to their feet, but Karim appeared before the argument could become interesting. He looked considerably better after sleep, though not exactly rested. Seraphis doubted anyone in the room would look rested again until the snow stopped. He took one look at Theron fastening his outer layers and shook his head.

“No.”

Theron stopped. “I'm recovered.”

“You aren't.”

Seraphis felt herself bristle. Karim's tone was not cruel. There was no challenge in it and no invitation for Theron to prove himself. He simply stated the conclusion as though the matter had already been decided.

“I know what I can sustain.”

“Yesterday suggests otherwise.”

Seraphis's irritation sharpened immediately. Theron had stayed with them all day. He had gone into the storm when nearly everyone else in Moscow had been trying to get away from it. He had done everything they asked of him, and if he had finished the night exhausted, that seemed less like failure than proof that he had given them everything he had.

She opened her mouth, but the doors opened before she could say anything. Cool air entered first, then Nikolai. Seraphis forgot whatever defense of Theron she had been preparing. It was immediately obvious that Ascendancy had already been back outside for hours. Fresh snow clung to his shoulders and the seams of his coat. Damp darkened his hair near the temples again, and the wind had renewed the raw color across his face.

He looked no more rested than he had before sleeping, only reset somehow, as though those two hours had given his body enough permission to continue and nothing more. Something in Seraphis's chest tightened. He had left while they slept. Not gone to another command room, not spent the morning behind a desk somewhere issuing orders. He had gone back outside.

Nikolai crossed the room while listening to someone at his side, dismissed them with a few quiet words, then looked between Karim and Theron. His subsequent denial of Theron’s request felt like an insult even though it had not been directed at her. Theron's face hardened.

Seraphis wanted to object. She wanted Nikolai to acknowledge what Theron had done the day before, to recognize that he had chosen to go with them when he could have remained safely inside. Then Ascendancy stepped closer to Theron and lowered his voice. Seraphis could still hear him, but the change in tone made the exchange feel more private.

Theron still looked as though he would rather have been marching back into the tunnels with the Dominions, but the humiliation Seraphis had feared never arrived. Nikolai had not told him he was weak. He had given him a different kind of responsibility. Seraphis found herself unexpectedly grateful for that. She was even more grateful when the Dominions left without him. That feeling made her guilty, but it remained true anyway.

The rest of the day blurred around her. Seraphis discovered that disaster contained astonishing amounts of waiting interrupted by sudden demands that could not wait at all. One moment there was nothing useful for her to do. The next someone needed blankets moved, a frightened child distracted, a volunteer shown where to report, or a family directed toward the person managing displaced residents. She began helping because sitting still became unbearable.

It turned out she was reasonably good with frightened people, children especially. Adults tended to ask questions Seraphis could not answer. When would the snow stop? Was their apartment still standing? Had anyone found their husband, sister, mother? Children mostly wanted to know where their cat was or whether they would have to sleep on the floor again. Those questions were easier.

Sometimes she lied a little. Not about anything important, mostly about how terrible Kremlin tea tasted or whether the guards secretly slept standing up. Once she convinced a little girl that one of the Barrier Praetor was almost certainly a robot because she had never seen him blink. The man heard her, blinked deliberately, and made the girl laugh for the first time in nearly an hour. Seraphis decided she liked him. By midday her body reminded her that she had slept only a few miserable hours sitting against a wall. She found an empty chair near the edge of the staging room, propped between her head and the wall and intended to close her eyes for five minutes. She woke nearly forty-five minutes later with someone's blanket draped over her. No one admitted doing it.

The room had changed while she slept. More supplies had appeared. So had more people. The broadcasts showed Moscow organizing itself beneath the snow. Restaurants were cooking through food that might otherwise spoil. Residents were carrying blankets and bottled water into tunnel junctions. Businesses with generators had opened their doors as warming centers. People sent lists of elderly neighbors who lived alone. Somewhere in the city, someone had established a station entirely devoted to pets separated from their owners.

Seraphis heard Ascendancy's name constantly, not from the broadcasters but from people. A woman whose building had been evacuated told anyone willing to listen that she had seen him rebuild part of the structure himself while rescue workers were still inside. An older man complained loudly that Ascendancy had refused to sit down after telling everyone else to do exactly that. Someone else said Nikolai had accepted tea from a woman underground only because she had apparently refused to let him pass without taking it.

Every story made Seraphis look toward the doors. She did not notice she was doing it at first. Theron was safe. He had spent the day growing increasingly animated as the volunteer network took shape beneath his direction, his energy returning now that the work required his mind and voice rather than hours of sustained veilwalking. Seraphis no longer needed to worry about whether he was freezing somewhere to death. Yet every time the doors opened, her attention moved. Sometimes it was a Dominion, sometimes a Kremlin official, sometimes evacuees. Never Ascendancy. She told herself she was only curious because he had left so early.

Her second nap happened sometime in the afternoon with her head folded onto her arms across a table. She woke because someone nearby had begun vomiting. At first Seraphis barely reacted beyond a wince for the horrible sound. People had been nauseated all day from exhaustion, fear, medications, bad food, too little food and everything else the storm had done to them. Then another person complained about a headache and more vomiting. Seraphis sat up. The woman was from the same temporary shelter as the man who had been sick. That might still have meant nothing. A third person arrived twenty minutes later confused enough that he could not remember what day it was. Same shelter. Seraphis found someone in emergency coordination.

“I think there's something wrong with Shelter Seventeen.”

The woman barely looked up from her display. “They're overloaded. We know.”

“I don’t mean overloaded. I think the people there are sick.” Seraphis explained what she had seen: the headaches, nausea, confusion, several people from the same place.

“It could be stress.”

She folded her arms. “Then everyone in this building should be vomiting.” The woman looked at her. Seraphis held the gaze.

“Please check it.” They did. The answer came back less than an hour later: carbon monoxide. Something associated with emergency heating and inadequate ventilation had allowed it to accumulate inside the shelter, and the building was evacuated before the concentrations became worse.

Seraphis spent several minutes afterward feeling pleased with herself. Then she remembered that she had almost gone back to sleep, and that feeling disappeared. By evening, exhaustion had settled over the Kremlin again. Theron had spoken publicly sometime around midday, and clips of his message had traveled through the networks afterward. The Brotherhood volunteers had grown into something Seraphis barely recognized from the loose collection of believers she knew before the storm. They were carrying food, sorting donations, working registration desks and helping people find relatives. There weren’t many of them, but they were enough to make a small difference. At least in their corner of the city.

She was proud of him. That feeling remained simple. What she felt every time someone mentioned Ascendancy was becoming more complicated. The doors opened again after dark, and Seraphis looked up automatically. Finally. This time it was him.

The Ascendancy entered surrounded by Barrier Praetor and Kremlin personnel, though the people around him seemed less like an entourage than objects caught in the wake of someone who refused to stop moving. Fresh snow had melted across his outer layers again. His hair was damp, his face drawn more tightly than it had been that morning, and fatigue had settled visibly into the lines around his eyes. He was still upright, still listening to reports, still leading.

Seraphis watched him from across the room, and there was something frightening about that. She had always imagined strength as something reassuring. Theron spoke of Ascendancy's strength with reverence. The Codex treated it almost as proof of what he was. This did not feel reassuring. He looked like a man who could keep going simply because he had decided stopping was unacceptable. Seraphis wondered suddenly how far that could carry him, and the answer frightened her.

A woman intercepted his path before he crossed the room. Seraphis had never seen her before. She looked to be somewhere in her thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair and a stern jaw that seemed particularly well suited to disapproving of powerful men. She wore a white doctor’s coat and carried some equipment.  She stepped directly into the Ascendancy’s path. To Seraphis’ shock, he stopped.

The woman said something Seraphis could not hear. Nikolai answered, and whatever he said did not impress her. She took his wrist. Seraphis sat a little straighter. Nobody touched Ascendancy like that, at least she assumed, not casually and not without hesitation. The woman pressed two fingers against the inside of his wrist and watched the time. Nikolai looked down at her hand, then at her face. Even from across the room, Seraphis could see the displeasure in the set of his mouth. The woman appeared entirely unmoved.

Seraphis liked her immediately.

An arm cuff appeared next. Nikolai said something, but the woman's expression hardened.  Seraphis covered her mouth with one hand. She could not hear the conversation, but she understood enough of it. The woman asked another question. This time Nikolai did not answer immediately.

The doctor, because Seraphis assumed that was what she had to be, said something else. Nikolai's jaw tightened. They exchanged several short remarks that looked suspiciously like bargaining, and then Nikolai glanced toward the doors. For one moment Seraphis thought he might simply leave. He had that look. Not indecision. Resistance. Theron had it sometimes.

The same stubborn force she had watched hold him upright since he came through the door seemed to gather in him again, and Seraphis understood with startling clarity that if he chose to turn around and walk back into the storm, he probably could.

That frightened her. Not that he might collapse, but that he might not. There was something terrible in a man strong enough to spend himself completely if he decided everyone else needed what remained of him more than he did.

The doctor's expression did not soften. Eventually Nikolai looked away from the doors, and whatever argument had passed between them was over. He followed her toward one of the leading corridors.