“(Don’t Fear) the Reaper”, by Blue Oyster Cult, soothed her eyes open.

Claudia tried to cough, but something was wedged against her throat. It was just tight enough to squeeze her airway from all sides, claustrophobically, but not quite enough to close it entirely. She bucked her head against it, but the irritation wouldn’t go away. In fact, it seemed to tighten just that little bit more, which triggered a primal, animal fear in her.

But when she tried to use her hands to yank at whatever was around her neck, she found they wouldn’t move. They were bound behind her back, and struggling only caused the bindings to tense, cutting off the circulation to her recently manicured fingernails. The claustrophobia, like a worm of ice, burrowed through her mind, but even in raw panic her legs didn’t thrash out: they could feel her toes were balancing on a very unstable stool, providing just enough upward force to keep whatever was wrapped around her throat from closing in around her entirely.

“Welcome to the Silver Wheel.”

A voice. Chilling and evil but grounding. The sound seeped into her ear and allowed her to take a few necessary but shallow breaths. The rest of the room was finally visible now that her veiling panic had vanished: it was dimly lit. Smokey, almost choking with floral scents accented with cigar smoke and dried blood. The music was muffled and unobtrusive, yet omnipresently filling the silence that would have otherwise choked the room. The floor was a poker green, while the light illuminating her was a hideous piss yellow.

And the woman standing in front of her had the most pale, inhumanly flawless skin and impossibly blue eyes she had ever seen in her life.

“W-what…” Claudia tried to ask -- her brain and everything in it were muddy and fuzzy right now. Maybe… maybe when she fell asleep, she bumped into something funny? She was having a hard time thinking straight. She didn’t get the time to organize her thoughts.

“My name is Teresa, and you and I are going to play a game,” the woman bowed her head, “If you win, I will welcome you as a guest here. If you lose…”

“...you die.” She delivered those words with extra emphasis but no joy or revelry.

“W-wait, what…?” Claudia squeaked. Her head hadn’t straightened out enough to register exactly what was going on. But her discombobulation was quickly fixing itself: she found her body adjusting automatically, following all the steps one needs to take when they find themselves in a crisis situation. It was her training kicking in. She had been trained for this.

Her breathing steadied. Her pulse slowed. And with a little help from the shockingly mellow scent that soothed the fire in her instincts, she accepted the premise of her current situation: she was in a noose, arms bound behind her back, and a flimsy, four-legged stool was the only thing keeping her from choking to death right now. And the person responsible was most likely the woman in the professional suit in front of her, right at the edge of the piss-yellow halo that surrounded Claudia.

A woman named Teresa. A woman who, it seemed, was also standing next to a chalkboard with four dashes on it.

“Tonight’s game will be hangman.”

Hangman is a popular children’s game, especially useful as an educative tool to encourage creativity, logical thinking, and of course, spelling and vocabulary. The game’s history is less than clear, however: there are some that claim it has its roots back in the 17th and 18th century as a rite condemned criminals could demand as an opportunity to escape death. This rite, called the “Rite of Words and Life”, would give the criminal five chances to guess a word the executioner was thinking of. If they were right at any point, they walked away: proof, perhaps, of divine providence. Otherwise, they would be executed as planned.

An interesting tale to say the least, but with no historical or documented backing, the real history behind this gruesome game may forever remain a mystery.

“The rules are simple and largely unchanged from the version you likely know well,” Teresa looked at Claudia with half-lit eyes. “You have to guess the letters that make up the four-letter English word in my head. If you guess the letters and the word correctly, you win. If you guess wrong too many times, you will lose. I trust there are no questions.”

“Hey. I do have questions actually.” Claudia gasped -- she still wasn’t quite used to the noose, but she was composed now, at the very least. “You said this was the Silver Wheel, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Claudia said with grim resolve. “That’s… that’s good.”

~*~

“It won’t be too har- mom, listen to me, I said it won’t be that hard. All I hav- mom, could you- mom mom!”

Claudia’s mother wasn’t so much prone to hysterics as they were her natural state. Which wasn’t the only reason she left home as quickly as physically possible, but it was certainly a big reason. She had been this way her entire life, an overbearing force of caution and fear, but when she heard Claudia was working for the government -- in law enforcement, even -- she reached levels of anxiety that would destroy the hearts of less practiced worry-ers.

“It’s all- it’s all goin- ugh, mom it’s going to be fine I have it under control bye.”

One tap, and silence.

“Putin’s ghost,” she sighed her favorite little expletive, “it’s a miracle that woman can wake up in the morning.”

She muted her phone and her mother’s obligatory follow-up calls and focused on dressing herself. Her boss, Nikolay Kondrashin, was a stickler for professionalism, especially for the people under his direct command. But his dress code for the females in his employ was, while archaic, not impractical. Knee-length skirt in any drab, colorless shade. Stockings and flat black shoes. A button-up blouse. Hair short, or wrapped up in a bun. No jewelry other than wedding bands or a watch. Not even earrings were acceptable. Not anymore, anyway.

She inspected herself with a casual glance. She looked the same as she always did. Like the nameless character in some uninspired stock photos.

That was fine by her.

She had the radio playing as she put her supplies away. The news. They were reporting on her boss’s -- and by extension, her -- most recent success in curbing the homosexual disease that threatened the motherland. They had found something like thirty men in their most recent online sting. Thirty new bodies for the reeducation camps, where their ‘unnatural desires’ would be purged from their systems one way or another.

She listened to the end of the congratulatory report before clicking it off.

She realized, with the radio off, that her phone was still vibrating. But her mom usually only called twice after being hung up on, and this was solidly in third-ring territory. She glanced at the screen: it was a co-worker. Oliver.

That was odd. She picked up.

“Hello Oliver. I’m heading out the door now.”

“You’re not late. It’s fine. I just wanted to ask if you knew about Garik.” His voice was slow and careful. Drained of emotion. He was calling from work, so they both knew there were more than two pairs of ears in the conversation.

“I’m terrible with names, Oliver. I only remember yours because it’s my brothers, too.”

“He was that short guy with the stomach. You called him an avocado pit.”

“Oh. Yes, Garik. Did something happen?”

“I was going to ask you. I can’t get in touch with him for our follow-up interview.”

She had been part of the first interview, but only as a witness on behalf of her boss, Mr. Kondrashin. All she really did was take notes and bring both men some coffee on request. Although he did give her his number because, to quote, “she had a worldwide ass”.

“No, I’m sorry. He hasn’t been in touch with me.”

Thank God.

“I see. Thank you. See you at work.”

He hung up before she could exchange the same meaningless pleasantry. She thought for a moment about his disappearance, shrugged to herself, and grabbed a banana off her counter before heading out the door.

She was planning a big lunch today.

“It’s time to guess a letter, Claudia.”

The haunting yet gentle vocals and virtuoso guitar of the Blue Oyster Cult blossomed fully in the largely silent room, only underlined by the occasional squeak of the tense hemp rope as it strained against her reddening skin. It didn’t take long for the irritation to promote itself to being downright painful, but Claudia tried not to think about it.

“Are you sure I can’t ask more questions?”

“Yes.”

“Yes you’re sure or yes I can-”

“-No more questions,” Teresa irritably answered, “The Silver Wheel is a very busy establishment but we only have one parlor. I’d hate to leave our welcomed guests waiting any longer than absolutely necessary.”

It was very hard for Claudia to think clearly right now, but her brain practically latched on any dangling thread it could find that would either give her an opportunity to escape, or at the very least, stall. And her eyes flickered with the dull recognition of one such opportunity.

“What… if I refuse to play?”

Teresa looked entirely unphased by what Claudia hoped was a winning move. If anything, she looked tired of hearing that question.

“Then you lose, and you die.”

“O-okay I’ll play! I’ll play. But can we compromise? A question with every guess. Please.”

Teresa sighed.

“You may ask whatever questions you want, but I retain the right to not answer.”

Claudia figured that was the best answer she was going to get for the time being, and turned her attention to the board. Four blank spaces, and literally nothing to act as a hint. She would have been more comfortable with a longer word: longer words were always easier to guess, and since they had more letters, you were less likely to be wrong on any given guess. But a four letter word could only have between two and four letters in it, which means you could go through most of the English alphabet before you found a letter that was actually used.

But there was a clear enmity coming from Teresa. She wanted Claudia to lose. Which meant she probably picked a four-letter word with as few unique letters as possible in it. So something like fool. Moon. Tool. Soon. Took. Hoop. Coop. Zoom. Doom. Noon. Soot.

O was the most common letter in a four-letter word to repeat itself. And as a vowel, it would be a safe choice anyway.

So Claudia took a deep breath, and said: “Is there an O in there?”

“...no. There is not.”

Teresa went up to the board and drew an O in the corner, marking it as an unused letter. Claudia felt a pang of fear at the logical recognition that she was one step closer to death, but the unreality of her reality dulled the sensation somewhat. Or maybe the tainted floral scent in the air was to blame.

Teresa gently placed the stick of chalk back on the base of the blackboard, then turned to face Claudia. Claudia frowned.

“Uh… don’t you draw the hangman now?” She anxiously laughed, struggling again with the bindings on her wrist. She didn’t want to remind Teresa on the off-chance she forgot, but she figured getting more information was the more important objective at this exact moment.

“Typically, yes,” Teresa said, “But perhaps it was a misnomer to call this game ‘Hangman’. The more appropriate name would be ‘Reverse Hangman’.”

“W-what…?”

But there was no one to answer the question. Teresa had vanished. In the time it took for Claudia to blink, she had disappeared from beside the blackboard. She wasn’t ‘gone’, however… Claudia could still feel her in the room: like a ghost watching from the other side of the veil. But that wasn’t all... she was also hearing something mingling with the music streaming in from radio. A new sound, an awkward sound, directly behind her… the soft grinding noise of heavy steel being dragged against the thin yet coarse fabric of a carpet.

Her stomach jolted into her throat as the noise abruptly stopped. She tried to turn around, but the noose wouldn’t allow it.

“You can’t mean…”

She struggled. She strained her arms against their bindings, muscles turning blue and joints burning as she tried to use raw muscle and her own dense bones to snap the ropes around them. She thrashed her head side to side, like a suffocating fish struggling to throw itself into a long-distant ocean, but the noose -- and the unstable stool under her feet -- leashed her in.

A glint in the corner of her eye. Dull, piss-yellow light catching on polished, sharpened steel. She screamed well before the shimmering axe blade cut through her shoulder, severed her bone, and removed her left arm from her body, but when she felt the heated metal cleave through her in one sweeping yet gruesomely graceful motion, all the noise suddenly stopped. Everything was static. Everything was fuzz. And her world turned black and white as her wide eyes watched her arm, her own arm, drop onto the ground with a sickeningly light ‘thud’.

And in those precious few seconds where she could neither breathe nor feel the pain, while she was still trapped out of her own body, she felt Teresa brush some hair aside, put her lips up to her ear, and whisper:

“Three chances left.”

~*~

Nikolay Kondrashin was not a tall man. In fact, he was considerably shorter than his peers. But it was important that you pointed that out to him. He generally found it more offensive when you didn’t acknowledge his height in some form or another. By the same token, he was also a man who demanded respect and had very little tolerance for when he assumed he was being insulted. The line between recognition and mockery was razor-thin, and apparently he was the only one who could see it.

So offering him a taller chair at the head of the table? Good.

Offering to let him sit on your coat, or raise up a normal chair? That’s bad, as the man being dragged from the room was now discovering.

Claudia watched him go with a trace amount of satisfaction. It had been her idea, after all, to send him off.

“Is everyone important here?” He started, his still high-pitched voice barely reaching the end of the table. There was a general murmur of agreement. “Good. Good.”

Snow battered the window outside.

“I’ll make this fast since we’ve all got things we’d rather be doing. I got a text three hours ago that at least four of the people we’re looking for are hiding right here in Khabarovsk. That’d be Pushchin, Stepenov, Mikhailovich, and Zheng. Thanks to a webcam we know Stepenov is with an uncle who’s very bad with computers. And one of the local family businesses just ordered a printer and a noticeable amount of paper: bend some thumbs we’ll probably find Zheng with an employee. Mikhailovich only matters by association, we can let her scurry for now. It’s Pushchin we really want but we’ve got no leads and no reason to think the other three know where they are either.”

He took a long drink of water.

“In addition to drones, we’ll have to sweep the ground. I want three teams of undercover agents on the streets by tonight. Move slow. If anyone suspects we’re on to them they’ll tell the others and split. Just in case that happens, we’re putting face scanners at every bus stop, gas station, and the airport. Even if they do run, we’ll be right behind them.”

What followed was a vague battle plan for the capture of these four criminals, although Claudia’s role in that operation was limited at best. While her job on paper was a mere secretary, her real job in these meetings was to read the room. Like most paranoid men, Nikolay Kondrashin saw enemies everywhere he looked. And like most men whose power was only freshly minted, he wasn’t wrong: his ties to the Chubais family were thin and well-tested, and without their good graces he had to hold onto his position as the head of the RFSB with strategically employed brutality and obsequiousness.

She helped him direct the former.

She watched expressions and when people took drinks. She read lips if people whispered to one another. She noted where eyes wandered, and if anyone had the audacity to check their phones. She took notes, likely more notes than she’d ever need. And she stayed behind when everyone else was excused to detail her observations laboriously. Nikolay Kondrashin ate up every detail and word with a starved, obsessive gratification. When she was done, he sighed like he’d just gotten a good fucking and rested his head against the back of his chair.

“Well done as always.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled warmly and genuinely at the compliment. She liked feeling useful to him, in whatever capacity she could.

“There’s something else I wanted to talk with you about before you go,” He continued, “Natalie Mikhailovich. You have a history with her, right?”

One of the four people they had been hunting down. Members of the Open Russia group, a rebellious gang of anti-government terrorists who promoted unprotected speech, political instability, and disturbing the peace of the people with unsanctioned and dangerous art and print material. They were small, but they were persistent, and they had enough technical know-how to avoid much of the biometric technology the motherland used to keep her citizens safe.

“Yes, she and I went to school together twelve years ago, where she was my roommate for 10 months.” She answered as honestly and completely as she could. “She was also my friend on Facebook before I deleted my account. Why do you ask?”

“Hmm. Her parents offered a generous bribe so I’m not technically after her, but I’d like to keep tabs on her anyway just in case. Have you considered getting back into… you know… social media?”

“She’s deleted her account by now, too. I mean, she must have.”

Mister Kondrashin smiled, broadly and wickedly.

“Well, I think I know a way you can help track her down nonetheless.”

~*~

Claudia wasn’t crying. Somehow, she just couldn’t.

She was sniffling. Trapped between a dry sob and the light, inconsequential tears of a dateless girl on prom. She could feel the pain. The pain was maddening, causing saliva to drip freely from her slack mouth as she stared dumbly at the empty space where her shoulder had once been. But she couldn’t cry. Crying involved some greater involvement from the mind, a convincing realness that she simply couldn’t formulate now. In her mind, nothing was okay, but things were so immersively wrong it was having a hard time putting together any concrete threat to cry over. It was like drowning in the deepest part of the ocean and trying to blame a specific gallon of water.

But somehow, the pain wasn’t the worst part of the experience. She’d felt pain before. Lots of pain, even, thanks to her training. It was the imbalance. The lopsidedness. Feeling extra weight on her right side that her left side simply didn’t have. Squeezing the fingers on her right hand to feel their bindings, but squeezing her left hand and feeling… nothing. She had lived her whole life experiencing that balance and symmetry, being without it was so disquieting it verged on sickening.

“We cauterize the wound so you won’t bleed out,” Teresa informed with her horribly grounding voice, which pulled Claudia back to this reality long enough to at least snap her jaw shut, “It would be unfair otherwise.”

“This… this is a dream… this has to be a dream…” Claudia actually laughed, blinking a few more tears from her eyes, “There’s no way this is real… it can’t be…”

“I’m afraid it’s real,” Teresa once again informed her. “There have been many who wished this place a mere dream. But it is not.”

“...why…?” Claudia squeaked, her body trembling as Teresa’s words were forced to settle into her mind.

“I assume this counts as your question for this round,” Teresa took her place in front of the chalkboard again, this time accompanied by an ornate and terrifying silver axe, the blade molten gold yet devilishly sharp,“But unfortunately the ‘why’ is very simple: I need to send a message, and you must be my parchment.”

The words passed through Claudia like a cold, stiff breeze. She shivered. First in fear, then again when the last ethereal disbelief that still clung to her slowly ebbed away. She was back in the real world, as far as she could tell. Or maybe just a more alert state of shock. Or whatever foul smells were in the air acted as a sort of smelling salt that yanked her to a more conscious state of mind. In any case, her assessment of the situation was the same: she was still one misstep from hanging from her neck, three wrong answers from meeting a similar fate, and four blank spaces from making it out of here in as few pieces as possible.

Technically not a very different situation than before, but now, the place had a terrible sense of realness it hadn’t had when she first arrived.

“There’s gotta be something you want… something I can give you…”

“Yes. Your next letter.”

“I just want to go home. Please. I’ll never come back I promise.”

“That can be arranged. If you win.”

“How can you be so cruel?!”

Teresa had no answer for that -- at least, not this round. So the only response Claudia got was an impatient cough from her ‘host’, the creak of the rope around her neck, and the generic rock of Danzig’s “Mother”, which took over when the Blue Oyster Cult had finished. Her watery eyes wandered back to the chalkboard, and the four blank dashes that were the keys to her freedom.

Her heart seized shut between her ribs. How was she supposed to do this now? She was in no state for precision thinking. And there was no logic she could employ that would make it easier to guess a letter, knowing now what the consequences would be if she were wrong. She suddenly could see it in her mind's eye, clear as day, a blade cutting through her right arm: the heat, the pain, the shock… her right arm throbbed and stiffened at the mental image, one that she just couldn’t bring herself to shake. It always clung fast, and grew stronger, the more she tried to see something else. Anything else. She couldn’t even visualize picking the right letter…

“Are you giving up, Claudia?” Teresa asked.

“No.” She answered cooly despite the staccato of her thoughts.

“Then you need to make a guess.”

“Okay. I’m thinking.”

She had to come up with a different approach to clear her thoughts. She had been trained to endure torture, and the primary mechanism of those lessons was awareness that you were being fucked with: the physical pain was only an element in a recipe designed to break your mind and trick you into cooperating with your tormentors, one way or another. So she had to stop thinking of this as a game she could win or lose, living in fear of a wrong answer. She had to fully and completely accept this as an execution. And only when she came to understand that reality, was she able to actually shake that horrible vision from her frayed mind, and stare at the chalkboard with a renewed focus.

Her logic wasn’t wrong with her first guess: at least in assuming Teresa was hostile, and actively wanted her to lose as quickly as possible. With any game of hangman, vowels were the secret to getting on the board, as every word had them. If she kept guessing vowels, there would only be a one in five chance that she wouldn’t get at least one correct before she ran out of chances.

But there was a sixth, often unused vowel. Almost like a secret one, that would ensure she could guess every one of the five other vowels and still lose in four guesses. And if Teresa wanted Claudia to lose as quickly as possible, then…

“Y.”

“I already answered that.”

“...no, the letter. Y.”

“I see.”

Teresa picked up the chalk with one delicate hand… and drew a y in the second blank spot. _ y_ _. She had guessed right. She had saved her right arm. She was so excited that for a moment she forgot to consider this an execution and she felt her joy intermingle with the horror of the three remaining blank spaces. But she composed herself and toned down her reaction to an acknowledgement. She was still missing an arm and had a rope around her neck.

But in her restraint she still had to recognize this was more than just a small win: the number of four-letter words in the English language with a y in the second spot was a small, small list: hymn. Sync. Myth. Gyms. Byte. Eyes. Dyes. By picking a unique word, Teresa had made a terrible mistake -- while they were harder to guess from the onset, even getting one letter of the four right put you well on the path to victory.

She still had to figure out what letter to pick next. But first…

“Okay. Okay. You owe me a question.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“D-did you know a man named Garik? He looks like an Avocado pit...did he... come through here?”

Teresa’s eye twitched at the question, and her straight lips curled downward by a few scant degrees.

“Of course. He lost his game as well.”

Claudia’s eyes widened. She found herself leaning forward, tightening the noose by a small but noticeable amount.

“Why did you -”

“-Please make your next guess.”

Claudia bristled at being cut off, but had little choice but to turn her attention back to the three blank spaces yet to be filled. Logically, the next letter to use would be E: it was one of the most common letters and certainly paired up with Y quite a bit. But the idea that Teresa would avoid vowels still stuck in Claudia’s mind -- and in that case, the most likely consonant to pair with Y… tyke, tyne, lyte… seemed to be T.

She swallowed. Her throat was dry. Combined with the rope, it made even her shallow breaths scratchy and raw.

She visualized her arm being removed. She imagined the inevitability of it. And then she braced herself.

“...T.”

Teresa, who was still holding the chalk from the last answer, turned to face the board.

And slowly. Almost luxuriously. She drew a cross right next to the O in the corner.

And then she was gone.

“Wait! Wait, no, I meant- I meant to say M! I meant M! M!”

There was no response.

“Please don’t, no- don’t, no no no please no!”

She thrashed as before. Bucked harder and stronger. Her right arm ached, as if trying to leave her something to remember it by. Her breathing was hard and shallow and eventually turned into hiccups. But as before, it was futile. She was utterly and completely trapped. And visualizing it did not make this part any better.

“...what are you doing?” Teresa muttered.

“L-leave me alone!” Claudia cried back.

“Get out of my way.”

“No!” She screamed.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you. Wait in the bar with the others.”

“...w-wha-?”

The blade came down.

And her arm came off.

~*~

“You want a drink?”

One did not refuse a drink from Nikolay Kondashin. She nodded, and he handed her one of the two coffees he was holding. She took it gratefully.

“You… watch the news, right?”

“Of course, sir.”

“So you know Marie Walker. You’ve heard of her.”

Nikolay Kondrashin was guiding her through a wing of the RFSB building that she had never been to before. Not because it was strictly off-limits to her, mostly because she never had any reason to go there. Her prowling grounds around the office were limited to the bathroom, the break room, the cafeteria, and wherever her boss sent her, which was usually just to pick something up; either papers from a colleague, or the colleague themselves. But never to these halls, which, despite their mundaneness and near-identical appearance to all the other halls in the building, were just new and different enough to ignite her curiosity.

“I understand she’s the founder and CEO of Walker Horizons. She’s the one who works with interdimensional travel and research.”

“She’s also a friend of mine, if you’d believe it. Sometimes she needs people and sometimes I need to get rid of people, so we come to mutual terms. I went to her last birthday. Did you know she has a pink yacht?”

“No, sir.”

“Of course. Why would you? Anyway, she does more than just explore alternate dimensions. She also discovers new dimensions entirely. The ones from fantasy stories where magic is real and all of that. And recently, she sent me a lovely little gift that will let me send people to one such reality -- a place called ‘The Silver Wheel’.”

Claudia tried very hard to withhold a gasp.

“That sounds very exciting.”

“Yes, yes it is. And the Silver Wheel might be just the thing to help us track down your former roommate. If, of course, you’ll be willing to help.”

“Of course. I want to capture these degenerates as badly as you do. In fact, I would be insulted if you asked anyone else.” She allowed a villainous smile to crack over her face. Her boss noticed, nodded approvingly, then pushed open one of the many nondescript doors that flanked both sides of the hall that lead into one of the many nondescript offices, and the holographic interface that consumed most of it.

“Then here’s what you need to know. The Silver Wheel is a strange place where you can play games -- casino games I mean -- against other people, wagering things like… skills or memories or what have you. I can send you straight there easily enough, and once we capture one of those other dissidents, we can send them there too. Then you can gamble with them for everything they know, and when you win, report everything back to me.”

She whistled, then took another sip.

“Can that really work?”

“Marie Walker had one of her own people do something similar, before he got greedy. The question is how good you are at games of chance.”

She considered for a moment.

“...I suppose it doesn’t matter. We can just threaten her family if she plays to win. It seems far more useful as a way to siphon information from people utterly and completely than a mere place to make wagers. If I understand the mechanics, I mean.”

He smiled, gesturing and waving through a number of holographic projections.

“As always, your creative mind does me proud. Still, I want to make sure you take to the Silver Wheel. So I’m going to have you do a test run first. I’ll take care of everything, all you’ll need to do is see if you arrive and can think straight when you’re there. Then you can leave straight away.”

“No problem. Are we doing this now?”

“No. We can only do it tomorrow -- there are things I need to take care of first, and you need to be tired: I can only send you there in your sleep. Take the rest of the day off but come in extra-early tomorrow. Five, sharp.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Miss Strekalov: obviously, keep this a secret.”

“Of course, sir.”

~*~

“Ah… aha… aaaahh…”

In some fucked up way, she actually felt a little better.

She was at least balanced, now.

Claudia’s resolve had shattered and she burst into tears. The broken, sobless crying of someone who wasn’t really all there, her eyes unfocused on something about a thousand yards away. The pain had torn her from her body, and she was disassociating, knowingly and blissfully, for as long as she possibly could. She was in such a state of delirium, she managed to ask her next question in a stunningly relaxed tone of voice. As if everything was fine. As if everything was all right.

“Do you do this with everyone…”

Teresa was prepared to dismiss this question, since clearly Claudia was not in any state to comprehend an answer. But the words made her pause.

“...No. Only with invaders.”

“Why am I an invader…? I was just told we’d play games…”

Teresa’s expression hardened without so much as twitching.

“You are an invader because you were not invited. Your boss knew perfectly well what happens when he sends people here.”

“...he didn’t tell me…”

Teresa’s expression softened in the same manner. Like ice thawing into water.

“...did you not see the video?”

Claudia shook her head weakly.

“I see.”

Teresa looked past Claudia, to something that was behind her.

“Is this why you’ve been protesting so dramatically?” Teresa asked.

There was no response. Not one that Claudia could hear, in any case. She looked hazily on, occasionally glancing to the side to see if her arms had grown back. They had not.

“Well. It ultimately doesn’t matter. Curse your poor fortune in choosing to be that man’s lackey, but the game will not stop now. Whatever his machinations, the Silver Wheel will play no role. Unless, of course, you manage to win.”

Claudia found that choice of words funny. So much so she even laughed a little bit, tears falling into her teeth and tongue and smearing her lipstick.

“I need to pick a letter now…”

“Yes.”

“If I win… do I get my arms back?”

“No.”

“Are you… sure this isn’t a dream?”

“Please pick a letter.”

Claudia finally got some life in her eyes as she scanned the chalkboard again. She vaguely recalled she had a strategy. But now she was realizing, perhaps a bit too late, perhaps to no one’s benefit, how pointless that was. All it could do was improve her odds, which meant she was always just guessing. Which means she’d eventually be wrong.

She was going to die here. She was going to lose all her limbs and die. And it was going to be so painful.

“E.”

Teresa picked the chalk up, and drew an E next to the T. And what Claudia found most disappointing was that despite her acceptance of that inevitability… she was still finding herself seized with fear as the chalk was placed back onto the board. Acceptance did not numb her to her terrors, they only seemed to leave her dwelling in them longer. As before, Teresa vanished, but now Claudia found herself struggling again.It was a weak and tired effort, but it was more complete than her previous attempts to escape. Now she didn’t care how tightly the rope squeezed against her throat, or how much the stool under her bucked in protest. She just didn’t want to lose any more. She didn’t want to feel anymore pain.

“Get out of my way.”

Claudia didn’t know who her tormentor was talking to. But whoever it was, she invested the tattered remains of her hope into them. Please she thought, please stay in her way.

“These are the rules of the game.”

There was something in the corner of her eyes, something that stayed there no matter which way she turned or moved her head. It was a moon-shadow on a windy night, where nothing, even the stars, could be still. It was cloying and it was invasive but she didn’t find it unwelcome. It almost felt protective. Like the darkness around the light that surrounded her was trying to reach and shelter her.

“I will not repeat myself. The Silver Wheel, its guests, and it’s employees are my responsibility. Don’t make me exercise the authority that comes with it.”

A moment passed. Then another. Claudia’s ragged breathing softened. Her legs trembled and shook.

Then the darkness that stuck to the corner of her eyes withdrew.

“NO-”

Her left leg was lopped off.

~*~

She had three phones.

Her best phone was her work phone. State of the art. All the best bells and whistles and tracking devices the Russian government could afford. It was so sensitive it could tell when she left a room without it, and made a note of it whenever she did.

She had a personal phone too, which was a year old and only had a single cursory bug planted into it, at her own recommendation. Allowing your own phone to be wiretapped was technically optional but refusing put you in a bad light. And she was always looking for ways to claw her way deeper into her boss’s world. To be trustworthy to him. To be invaluable to him.

Her third phone was a twenty-year-old brick that had been stripped of anything except the ability to text.

Which was what she was doing now.

Is Garik dead?

She turned the page of the book she was reading, waiting for her phone to display a reply.

Yes.

She glanced at her work phone, on the counter next to her. Counting her breaths. Tracking her heartbeats. The book she was reading was a thriller, so she muttered “oooh” under her breath.

How?

Throat cut by thieves. accident. no link to RFSB

She huffed. It seemed a lot of people were dying by accident these days. Garik was the ninth. Before him, Ben’s roof collapsed on him in the middle of the night. Andrei was shot twice accidentally in his sleep. Lidia was dismembered in a crash when her driver got drunk.

No one could link their deaths to the RFSB. No one except her. She knew they were all personal enemies of Nikolay Kondrashin. Garik and Ben were journalists who were going to expose his web of intrigue and corruption. Andrei was an accountant who threatened to make shady deals public. Lidia was a surgeon who knew Nikolay’s greatest secret.

But even with the exhaustive powers at his command, he couldn’t orchestrate assassinations like that.

Details?

She turned the page of her book. She had classical music, Stabat Mater, playing softly in the background. Softly enough to cover the sound of her finger pressing against the flat screen of her phone. But not quite enough to block the sound of her flipping the page. This response would take a while, but she masked her anxiety with occasional gasps and hums. She was a very vocal reader.

~midnight. asleep with wife. started sleepwalking. thieves in home saw him and panicked. cut his throat.

She bit the inside of her lip.

Did he mention a silver wheel before he died?

The reply was almost instantaneous.

Yes. what do you know?

meet me in 20.

A picture was starting to form in her mind. A picture she didn’t like. It was always a risk to meet in-person, but to figure this out she really didn’t have any choice. So she stood up, walked to the bathroom, closed the door, put on the winter clothes she had hidden under the sink, and climbed out the window to the ground.

She was four stories up, sure, but this was Russia. That was nothing.

There was a small park not far from where they lived. The trees there were old, but not as old as the cameras, which meant many of the branches had grown out, creating blind spots. But they were only blind spots you would have known about if you had seen the footage the way Claudia had.

Waiting for her in one such sanctuary was Natalie Mikhailovich. They hugged.

“We need to make this fast, I usually don’t poop for longer than 30 minutes.”

“Okay,” Natalie nodded. “Garik was saying that he’d been given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to film in an alternate reality. He mentioned a Silver Wheel.”

“Who made the offer?”

“Marie Walker. She wanted to make a documentary or something.”

“Shit.”

“What’s going on?”

“Marie and Nikolay are friends.”

“So Marie Walker killed him? With thugs?”

“No.” Claudia glanced around.

“What are you talking about then?! Why am I here?”

“Nikolay invited me to the Silver Wheel too.”

Natalie frowned, but mostly at Claudia, not the invitation.

“...and?”

“I told you Lidia was going to a casino before her crash.”

“Yes…?”

“And they all died in their sleep.”

“Yes…”

“And he needs to put me to sleep to send me to the Silver Wheel.”

“So the Silver Wheel kills people?”

“I think so.”

“That means he’s found out about your leaks.”

“...I think so.”

Natalie sighed, then nodded with determination.

“...then we need to go. Now.”

~*~

Claudia’s face was an awful shade of purple.

She had one leg to prop herself up, but she was exhausted with pain and fear. She was leaning into the rope, using it almost like a crutch to keep her standing. It restricted her breathing and caused the sores and burns on her neck to grow further inflamed, but that didn’t feel so bad right about now. Not as bad as her three thrashing phantom limbs, which were still wracked in terrible pain despite no longer being attached to her body.

“It appears as if you only have one guess left.” Teresa reported stoically.

Claudia could only gurgle. Her eyes were bulging. She could feel her eyelids scrape across them every time she blinked.

“Do you have a question you’d like to ask first?” the hostess asked with some indeterminate mix of pity and sadism. Claudia, between her swollen tongue and her constricted throat, struggled to answer. But she danced her foot around on the stool and strained herself upwards enough to spit out a question.

“...whwat… did I dew wong…?”

Teresa did not reply to that.

“Please make your final guess, Claudia.”

The woman slowly, painfully blinked. Her last remaining limb was trembling.

“Ah… dupth wanna die…”

“Closer”, by Nine Inch Nails, was pounding on the radio.

“...then you shouldn’t have taken that pill.”

“..whwat…?”

But Teresa did not reply to that.

“Make your final guess, Claudia.”

Claudia could still see the chalkboard. Well, she could see where it was supposed to be. Everything was a little blurry now. The world was spinning. She had achieved levels of pain she never thought possible. As if she knew she was supposed to be unconscious by now, knocked out by the shock, but something wouldn’t let her slip away, so her brain did the next best thing and just turned itself mostly off. Disassociating.

She barely remembered thinking it could be M.

So...

“...em…”

Teresa picked up the chalk one last time, and walked up to the three remaining blank spaces. She placed the chalk at the very first blank line, and started to draw an arch. Claudia felt something stirring in her fear-bloated stomach, something resembling actual hope: if M was the first word… then it had to be myan… there were no other words that would work… her brain started to tickle and throb with a dull recognition: if that were the case… then she had just won.

She just won...

Except… when she narrowed her eyes. When she focused. She saw Teresa didn’t actually draw an M on the board. She drew a W. She was filling in the whole word.

Y.

N.

D.

Wynd.

And her world stopped spinning and simply went dark.

“I’m sorry, Claudia.” Teresa placed the chalk down, vanishing for the fourth and final time.

“...you lost.”

Her final limb was removed with a heavy, unbroken swing.

The rope snapped taut around her neck, completely closing around it.

Claudia didn’t even have time for a final gasp.

~*~

Claudia and Natalie drove for a long time, along P297, until they pulled into Bira, or at least, what was left of it. It was one of the many Urban Localities bought out and repurposed into a carbon reclamation plant at the tail end of the 2030’s -- both to combat the climate disaster and to relocate the remote population to easier-to-monitor urban centers. Now, it was off-limits to people, but not in any serious way: as long as they hid the car well and avoided the cameras, no one would be the wiser they were here. They could even ignore the proximity sensors: after all, as long as nothing showed up on camera, people would just assume it was another raccoon.

No one really wanted to drive three hours out of Khabarovsk to check.

They listened to Jazz for as long as they had radio. Then, it was awkward silence the rest of the way there.

“I feel like you’re mad at me.” Claudia finally spoke as she wrapped herself in her third jacket.

“I…” Natalie paused, before sighing in self-defeat, “...I guess I am. You were our In. And either because you were caught or you’re paranoid, we have to spend the night in fucking tents.”

Claudia bit her tongue. Natalie continued.

“You warned the others, right? About the drones and the agents and shit?”

“Yes…”

“There you go. That was officially the last time they’ll get a warning. From here on out we’re gonna bleed people until we’re all in gulags or reeducation centers, because of you.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“No one wants to fucking die, Claudia, your job was to keep that from happening. We’re not... fucking... Pussy Riot. We don’t get second chances anymore.”

Claudia stared intently at her feet, without saying a word. Natalie took another deep breath, resting her forehead against the roof of her car.

“...look, I’m just… I need to sleep on this, okay? It’s been a long night.”

Claudia still didn’t say anything, but she could feel the disappointment pounding in her chest like a second lead heart. They had put a lot of effort into making this happen. Years and years of fake loyalty and forged background to make her a trustworthy asset to the RFSB. All the way back into middle school when she first reported an anti-party article in the school newspaper. There were times when she had worried she had lost her way, or herself, in her quest to be the perfect spy. And she was giving all that up because she had a hunch -- a strong, perfectly reasonable hunch -- that the Silver Wheel would be the death of her?

Maybe she had lost herself. Her resolve. Her determination.

...but it was too late now. She left her work phone in her apartment. People were probably already there, digging through her home and deducing she had left through the bathroom window. Even if she could invent a story to explain it, she would still lose her privileged status at Nikolay’s side. He would never trust her again.

Oh, god, she should have stayed. She should have gone to the Silver Wheel. This last-ditch effort to free the minds of the Russian people was going to die because she was a coward.

Those dark thoughts boiled in her mind as she and her comrade snuck through the barriers to one of the more intact buildings at the edge of Bira, that would provide them extra protection from the wind and wild animals. Plus, they had some supplies stashed away here for this exact situation: mostly just food and batteries and USB drives with essential privacy software, but they would probably need all three really soon.

They set up camp. They started a small fire. And her tormented mind kept her awake for a tiny bit longer, but emotional and physical exhaustion were a potent force when working in tandem, and the two of them were able blunt force her to sleep.

~*~

And when she opened her eyes next, she had a rope around her neck.

Teresa looked away as Claudia was slowly strangled to death.

She did not watch as she wiggled helplessly in the air, the last of her strength bleeding out of her as she flailed her limbless torso against the increasingly tight rope. Instead, she erased the chalkboard.

She did not turn around as her silent gasps turned to whispered gurgles, that grew increasingly faint and desperate, until they were replaced by a haunting silence accentuated by the squeaking whine of the rope. Instead, she pushed the chalkboard into the darkness, and pried open the loose floorboard where she kept all her victims when she didn’t have a spare moment to throw them into the void. Three pale faces stared up at her.

But then she heard a gasp, followed by coughing.

And then she turned around to see Mr. Eight holding Claudia up. Keeping her alive.

Teresa’s icy visage started to shatter.

“What do you think you’re doing? Do you not think she has suffered enough?”

Mr. Eight, as was his usual way, offered no answers. Beneath the sheet of ice that covered Teresa’s face, raw emotions swam and morphed seamlessly between guilt and horror and desperation, before finally cementing on resolve as she grabbed her weapon of choice once again, dragging it over in a power-walk to finish the job one way or another.

Claudia managed to spit something out, however, that stopped her in her tracks.

“...it was in the coffee!”

“...what?”

“The pill. You… you were talking about a pill. I think he might have put it in my coffee. Without telling me.”

Teresa dropped her weapon. Claudia, despite still being blue in the face and clearly shaken, was shockingly calm. Maybe having faced death, having lived through the worst the Silver Wheel could offer, and inhaling a year’s worth of the perfumed air when rescued by Mr. Eight, afforded her an eerie lucidity.

Which was followed by a weak but terribly sour laugh.

“...lady… you think you’ve been killing Nikolay’s henchmen? You’ve been killing his enemies.”

Teresa took a step back.

“You’re his assassin.”

~*~

Teresa took another drink. And another. And another.

Ture watched her empty glass after glass, refilling it wordlessly. Mr. Eight had walked out of the parlor first, carrying an extremely confused and impossibly alive torso. Ture didn’t know what had happened, and frankly didn’t want to, but apparently Mr. Eight was taking her home. To “fix” her, as best as he could. Her days as a human were over, but at least in his care she wouldn’t fall into oblivion. Teresa had walked out soon afterwards, politely asked the guests that had been here to step out into the void (which they were happy to do considering they had just seen Mr. Eight holding a sobbing torso), then took a seat and asked for a glass of straight whisky. Followed by another. And another. And another.

She didn’t say anything until she finished her seventh drink.

“...isn’t alcohol supposed to numb you?”

“That’s the theory, yeah.”

She looked at the bottom of her empty glass. Not for answers, as so many who had preceded her often did. She was looking for anything. Anything at all.

“It is not working.”

“Yeah, Ratna has some theories about that.”

The edge of Teresa’s lips twitched, as if she was considering either a frown or a smile. There wasn’t any follow-through, however.

“Perhaps I am already numb.”

“...I guess I would have thought so too, until recently.”

“Yes. I suppose anyone would.”

He lifted the bottle up to refill her glass, but she rested a delicate pale finger on the lip, stopping him from tipping it over.

“...I do not think I want to be numb, Ture.”

He slowly put the bottle down.

“I…” she started, but stopped.

She looked at her glass again.

“...I did not feel much when Juan died.”

Ture leaned forward, so their foreheads were almost touching. He knew that bartenders were supposed to offer sympathetic ears, a task he’d thankfully been able to avoid during his tenure at the Silver Wheel so far. But there was a first time for everything, right?

“I realized what Charlie said to him during their game was true. I spent a considerable amount of time with him but I never noticed him in a meaningful way. He was the dealer and a candidate, and I was the waitress and judge, which was the extent of our relationship.”

She ran her finger along the lip of the glass, which hummed in response.

“I liked him as a candidate. He had improved greatly from when he first arrived. But when Charlie killed him, my vindictiveness did not come from any personal feelings. It was professional.”

Ture frowned at this revelation, but didn’t say anything.

“I am starting to understand, however, that I am a terrible judge. The more time passes since his murder, the more I realize how much I never noticed about him. I never noticed the light in his eyes. Or his optimism. Or his eagerness to see everyone leave with a smile. Or his genuine desire to make friends… even with me. He shared these freely but only now in his absence do I realize they were there. Perhaps my numbness is to blame for this.”

She pushed the glass away, and looked Ture directly in the eyes.

“If I realized sooner how much I admired those qualities, perhaps I would have been quicker to emulate them. In which case, it is not unlikely I would not have killed nine innocent people. Or maybe, the anger and hate I would have felt for losing someone I loved would have driven me to kill more. I do not know. And I cannot know what I need to fix until I can feel the pain of my damage. Which is why I must not be numb.”

She leaned forward. He backed away, uncomfortable. She was forgetting to blink again, which made her unearthly mystique shift deep into the uncanny valley.

“Ture.”

“What?”

“I will not make the same mistake with you as I made with Juan. I will learn to appreciate you. I will start by saying I have noticed and appreciated how much kinder you have become.”

Ture looked away. Maybe he was blushing, but it was hard to tell in this light.

“Yeah, well… with Ratna around we can’t have two assholes stinking this place up.”

“There is one more thing I would like to ask of you, Ture.”

“Anything for you, boss.”

“...I would like to try to cry. Would you please play the saddest song you know?”

He smiled, and nodded.

“Yeah. I can do that.”

A single thrumming guitar string took to the air, and Dave Grohl started singing the acoustic version of “Everlong”. Teresa closed her eyes, inviting the music to wash over her, and Ture, his smile fading, followed suit.

They listened quietly for as long as they could get away with it.