ONE
The next day, Pavlina Ivanova convinced those attending her that she felt well enough to leave.
Lina smiled at the people she passed on her way out of the hospital, which was sparsely occupied and seemed outmoded to her. Her recovery room had no phone, no videoscreen, no radio, no newspapers, magazines, or any methods of obtaining current information of any kind. Her bathroom didn’t even have a mirror—just a blank space where one should have hung. Had the gunshot disfigured her somehow? A quick examination of her body—she didn’t dare more, in case she was being watched—revealed nothing shocking, not even a bandage; apparently she’d completely recovered while unconscious. So why no mirror? Why the limited access to the outside world?
The other rooms she noted as she headed for the main exit looked strangely bare as well. In fact, the whole building seemed more like a huge isolation tank rather than the state-of-the-art facility she would have expected from a government security agency looking after one of its own. Despite her growing apprehension, as she walked, she made small talk with the hospital’s doctors and officials—all members of the Fifth Section—calling each by name:
“Good to see you again, Doctor Mariyana … I’m feeling much better, Sergeant Dimitriev … Thank you for your concern, Nurse Alexov.”
She kept nodding, kept smiling, as she walked quickly through the building’s narrow, green-walled corridors, all the while concealing her terrible secret:
She didn’t remember any of these people. She didn’t know this hospital or this place she’d woken up in at all.
Nothing here was as it seemed.
She wasn’t a Captain, though she had been before she’d risen substantially higher within the Russian Security forces. Previous to her interrogation yesterday, she’d never even heard of the Fifth Section. In fact, her name wasn’t even Pavlina Viktorovna Ivanova—it was Pavlina Alexeyevna Ivanova, Colonel of the Russian Special Services, Cryptobiological Procurement & Development Division.
But she couldn’t allow these people—whoever they were—to know any of that. At best, they would think her mad. At worst … a traitor. And Lina knew very well what happened to traitors in Russia, whatever version of Russia she’d awoken in.
How did she get here?
She remembered falling … and cold … deep, bone-chilling cold … and darkness. She’d been on assignment … somewhere, trying to procure new cryptobiological specimens. She’d had an … an accident? Yes. An accident.
Or something had gone terribly wrong … though she couldn’t remember what.
That lack of memory disturbed her more than anything else. If Lina Ivanova knew one thing well, it was her own mind.
Though not now, it seemed.
The missing memories nagged at her, even as she headed toward the facility’s main entrance. “I’m hoping a return visit will not be necessary anytime soon, Katya,” she told the receptionist.
The girl returned Lina’s warm smile and wished her a good day. She never suspected a thing.
Loss of memory: troublesome. Waking in this strange, archaic world? That Lina could cope with.
She’d heard of alternate worlds, of course. Science had speculated about them for more than a century. Their existence had never been proven, though.
Ironic that Lina had finally made a scientific discovery she didn’t intend to—one that she didn’t need to out-compete anyone to uncover, one that, at the moment, she could think of no easy way to profit from. Not without getting home.
That had to be her first order of business: returning home.
No. Strike that. Her second order of business. Her first had to be keeping these people from discovering the truth about her.
That shouldn’t prove hard.
Everyone she’d encountered so far had been easy to scan. Clearly, none were trained to resist mind reading.
The adventures of Lina Ivanova continue in the novella Heart of Steam & Rust, now available from better e-book sellers.
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