Orekhovo Station: Day 3, Tuesday, 2:00 PM — MGR: 5
The blare of the klaxon echoed through the workshop like the bark of a dying machine.
"Alright, everyone." Gus's voice followed, thick and harsh, the voice of a man who never had to raise it to be obeyed. "Lunch."
It was exactly the halfway mark of the twelve-hour shift. The law of the station: half an hour of rest for twelve hours of servitude. A rule meant to sound humane but crafted only to ensure workers didn't collapse before the next rotation.
Mikhail straightened slowly from the workbench, his spine crackling in protest. Every part of him felt worn thin, like wire stretched too tight. He knew what he had to do with his thirty minutes, and none of it involved food or rest.
His hands brushed against his coat pocket, feeling the faint pressure of the hidden oilcloth bundle. The metal pieces inside shifted faintly, cold, secret, precious. The cache represented his first real risk, and perhaps the first choice he'd made in months.
He moved quickly, pulling his hood up as he stepped into the corridor. The walk beyond Gus's workshop were a tangle of stale air and worn humanity. Pipes sweating condensation, wires hanging like dead vines, the faint hiss of steam from the distant boilers. His boots scuffed through a thin layer of coal dust.
Ahead, through the dim light of flickering lamps, he saw her.
Anastasia. Gus's pale companion.
She stood behind her counter as always, her face composed and unreadable. Her thin hands count Rounds with the precision of a machine, her lips moving silently as she tallied. Her eyes were colorless, glassy with the detachment of someone long past compassion.
Mikhail felt his throat tighten. He lowered his head, adjusting his coat to hide the stiff bundle hidden near his ribs. The less she noticed, the better.
He walked past her stall without a glance. The sound of her fingernails clicking against brass followed him. He didn't need to see her to feel it, the weight of her stare. Cold, calculating, patient.
When he reached the entrance of the market, checkpoint guards requesting for ID and tax chits.
But then, she saw him. The thought landed in him like a shard of glass, cold and sharp. Paranoia followed instantly, burrowing deep. He didn't look back, but he could feel the phantom weight of her colorless gaze, tracking him like a laser sight.
He picked up his pace, pushing through the trickle of laborers. The smell of overboiled gruel and lard drifted through the air, but his stomach was a hollow, gnawing ache that he didn't have time to honor.
When he reached the curtain to the cubby, he paused. The heavy felt was cold, its edge stiff with grime. He pulled it aside and slipped in.
Alexei was already awake. He sat hunched on the edge of the cot, his eyes hollow, his hair damp with sweat.
"You look like a corpse," Alexei rasped, voice thick with exhaustion.
Mikhail dropped the oilcloth bundle onto the table. "Well, I had to strip and clean Twelve Bastards," he said, his tone flat, almost dead. He untied the rag, revealing the small cache, springs, shavings of brass, and one bent firing pin. The pieces caught the faint light from the oil lamp, glinting dully. "Don't let Gus near this. Say nothing."
Alexei leaned forward, squinting. "You risked your spine for a handful of trash?" His tone was mocking, but his eyes betrayed a flicker of interest when they settled on the firing pin. "Fine. Hide it in the ventilation grating. The train carriage, furthest one back."
He rubbed his face, sighing. "Now go. You've got twenty-five minutes left of your break."
Mikhail nodded and wrapped the pieces again. His fingers trembled from fatigue as he stepped into the maintenance passage that led to the derelict train cars repurposed for storage.
The air grew colder as he moved, the walls closing in. The tunnel lights hummed and flickered, throwing long shadows across the rusting carriages. He found the one at the far end. A husk of a pre-war wagon, its paint long gone, its surface corroded to a dull skeleton of iron.
He knelt, prying loose the vent grating near the floor. The metal was cold enough to sting. Inside, only darkness and a faint smell of mold. He slipped the bundle deep into the crevice, pressing it as far as his fingers could reach.
That was it. His survival, five pieces of metal wrapped in an oily rag, hidden in a vent no one cared to clean.
When he stood, his knees cracked. He lingered for a moment, staring at the vent, committing its exact position to memory. The sound of distant voices drifted down the hall. The murmur of traders, the scrape of boots, Anastasia's faint laughter.
Time was slipping. He turned and retraced his steps, heading back toward the central market.
He hated this part. The exposure. The crossing through the guard checking your ID and tax chit. The crowd with nothing to hide behind but exhaustion.
Everyone went for lunch. Anyone who didn't was noticed. That was how the station worked, routine was safety; deviation was suspicion.
Mikhail passed Anastasia's booth again. He didn't look up, but he didn't need to. He could feel her watching, her gaze following like a wire drawn tight around his throat. He wondered what she saw. A man too thin, too tired, too quiet. A man trying too hard not to exist.
The corridor toward the market was a narrow throat of damp concrete. Lamps buzzed overhead, flickering in their brackets as if deciding whether to keep burning at all.
He swallowed hard as he neared Katerina's stall. The smell of guilt and broth hit him first.
However, it is not the usual thin mushroom broth or boiled rat bones but something harsher, something that clawed at the sinuses. Coal smoke, thick and acrid, the kind that burned dirty and fast but surprisingly bright today. It settled low like a fog around the cooking corner, and Mikhail's stomach tightened.
He stepped into the alcove that served as her kitchen and stopped. There, against the wall, was a sack. A full sack of coal. Not fully opened but just torn at the top, as if someone had checked its contents and left it.
His breath froze in his throat. Yesterday, the merchant had refused him outright but a disgusted request. Today, Katerina had a sack that should have cost twenty, maybe thirty MGRs.
"Katerina…?" he asked slowly.
She didn't answer.
She was hunched over her heavy cast-iron pot, stirring with a wooden paddle that looked more like a broken shovel handle than a cooking tool. Her shoulders were trembling, unable to deduce it from cold or from exhaustion. Her lower arms exposed with red patch on the back. Her hair hung damper than usual with sweat near her temples.
When she finally lifted her head, Mikhail's chest tightened. Her eyes were puffy. Red. Not swollen from smoke but from crying.
She blinked at him as if waking from a fever dream. "You're late for lunch," she murmured. Her voice was rough from smoke and void of life.
"I—" His gaze drifted to the coal again. "Where… where did that come from?"
She stirred the pot harder, the broth sloshing dangerously close to the rim.
"An early customer," she said flatly. The lie that felt immediate and practiced yet the hurt from her voice can be heard.
"No one gives coal for soup," Mikhail whispered.
"No one gives anything," she snapped, then caught herself, voice softening, weary. "Mikhail… just eat. Please."
Her hands wouldn't stop shaking as he looked closer, instinctively searching her face for more signs. There was something brittle in her expression, something tight around her mouth, as if she was holding her jaw closed against words she refused to let out.
He tried to keep his voice steady. "Did someone—"
"Don't." She said it quietly, but it cut through him all the same.
He wanted to protest, to push the question, to demand an answer. But she turned away, reaching for a stack of clean, chipped ceramic bowls. The muscles in her neck stiffened as she bent over them.
Without waiting, Mikhail lifted a ladle resting nearby and dipped it deep into the pot. The stew was thick, dense with mushroom paste and chunks of something vaguely meat-like. The ladle scraped the bottom as he hauled a heavy portion into one of the bowls.
Katerina didn't look up.
"Hey," she said finally, voice brittle, "that's my job." She attempted a teasing tone, but it landed limp, without life nor the cheerful sound of life.
She slid the bowl onto the plating table, blowing gently on the steaming surface. More out of habit than purpose and then she turned to him again.
"I need it watered down," she murmured. "I'm stretching the batch. I'm saving every MGR before Chief Erik makes his tax announcements." Her hands returned to the paddle, stirring and stirring, as if she didn't trust the pot to stay still without her but her face drifted into nothingness.
Mikhail sat on the stool beside the counter and a long stare at Katerina. A stare that drifts his mind wanting to help but without any resources, he can only be silent and keep the normal going. Staring at the coal sack but with heavy eyes, it drifts at the counter, mind racing calculating his five MGR, no, two MGR after this lunch if he's able to scrounge up thirteen MGR in four more days till Chief Erik's tax collection.
Katerina without looking said in a dead like tone "Eat up Misha.". As she notices the lack of clanking noises from Mikhail's direction.
He took a small bite, having a taste and allowing the broth to fill up his taste buds and warm up the chest. The warmth hit his hollow stomach like a shock. For a moment, it pushed away the cold, pushed away the dread and fill his stomach for skipping last night's meal.
But it couldn't push away the taste underneath. The oily mushrooms, the gritty coal-taint from the brazier and a bitterness he couldn't name. A taste that is voided from her previous cooking. When he set the empty bowl down, she still hadn't looked at him again.
He reached into his pocket, pulling out three MGRs. He placed them silently on the corner of the table, careful not to let the metal clink too loudly as if it would explode.
"Katerina," he said softly. "If—"
"Don't," she repeated, even softer this time, almost a plea.
She wiped her cheek quickly with the back of her wrist, leaving a smear of soot across her skin.
"Just… go rest," she murmured. "You look dead on your feet."
"So do you," he said.
She didn't respond.
Mikhail stepped back from the stall, eyes flicking once more to the unexplained sack of coal. The merchant's words echoed in his skull:
"Tell Katerina, She's in my mind."
He tasted something bitter in his throat. Not stew. Not coal. But disgust of a different kind.
He left the stall slowly, not wanting to turn his back, not wanting to leave her alone but she had already turned away, tending the pot as if it were the only thing keeping her alive.
But he cannot, soon the klaxon will ring and he must go back to work.
The walk back to the workshops felt longer than the night before. As if the tunnels themselves were stretching, pulling him away from Katerina's stall and the sack of coal he didn't dare think about.
Don't think. Work. Just work. The mantra pushed against the inside of his skull, steady as a pulse.
But each step through the dim corridor carried the ghost of her face. Swollen eyes, a half-swallowed tremor in her jaw, the way her hands had shaken even after she'd told him not to ask. The coal sack sat behind his eyes like a black blot.
He tried to force it out. Work. Work. Keep moving.
The fumes of solvent and burned oil seeped from Gus's workshop long before Mikhail reached the door. The smell used to be nauseating; now it felt like a wave washing over him, scraping his mind clean. Chemical heat burned away thought. Good. The Metro didn't reward thought anyway.
He knocked once. The latch clicked, and the door swung open.
Gus looked almost triumphant, as if Mikhail's misery nourished him. Sweat gleamed on his forehead. His eyes scanned Mikhail like a butcher judging the quality of a carcass.
"You are on time," Gus said with a cheerful cruelty.
Mikhail stared back, blank. Eager wasn't the word. Hollow was closer.
Gus motioned to the workbench with a jerk of his chin. "The Demolition Corps will be here at dawn. Assemble the Bastards now." His grin disappeared. "Lose a spring, misalign the breachlock, and you pay for it."
Mikhail nodded without argument. Arguing required energy, and he'd burned all of that on the walk over trying to shake off the image of Katerina's swollen eyes.
He sat at the bench. The pile of disassembled parts sat in front of him like bones waiting for ritual reassembly. Cold steel, greasy pins, the smell of oil and dust — the perfect things to drown in.
He started with the barrel. Align. Twist. Lock.
His hands trembled once and the barrel slipped, clattering against the edge of the bench. The metal roll echoed too loudly in the cramped workshop.
Gus's boots shifted behind him, slow, deliberate. Waiting to pounce.
Mikhail forced his breathing steady, retrieved the barrel, and guided it into place again. The grinding seat of the lock was rough and imperfect, but acceptable. Metro work never needed to be flawless — only functional enough to kill someone.
Next came the bolt. Align the stem. Half-turn. Slide. Click.
He missed on the first attempt. His vision blurred with fatigue and the remnants of guilt he refused to name.
Don't think. Just work.
He closed his eyes, recalling the Ranger's hands from a distant memory — calm, precise, sure. He repeated the motion. This time it clicked perfectly.
One gun done. Eleven more.
The rhythm became a dull heartbeat — metal, pressure, metal, pressure. Each assembly stole a piece of his attention, which was exactly what he wanted. The more he focused on the machines, the less space his mind had for coal sacks and what they cost.
By the ninth SMG, the pain in his fingers had dulled to a constant throb but was able to see something felt missing. By the twelfth Bastard, he stopped.
Something was wrong. A small screw was missing and a firing pin too. He knew it's there when it was disassembled. A cold realization crept through him, slow as frost, parts were missing.
He lifted and search the whole area. The floor, the tables, behind every Bastard gun but to no avail. It is missing.
Before Mikhail could draw breath for an answer, the steel door banged open.
Two Demolition Corps soldiers marched in, faceless behind their masks. A quartermaster followed, wiping his hands on a greasy satchel.
Mikhail turns cold, the chills going up his spine knowing that the orders will not be fulfilled.
"Is order ready?" he said coldly. The Demolition Corp elites do not loiter nor look at Mikhail. No one important looked at men like Mikhail.
Gus straightened instantly, shoulders back, grin polished. "Perfectly ready, sirs. Eleven clean Bastards, smooth as factory work. And your order of demolition satchels and three tanks of fuel"
"Eleven," Mikhail thought. Did he just said eleven? Not twelve?
"One loss to be made as parts. Always knew one will have some shit broken" The quartermaster merely grunted as he took the clipboard. He scribbled a signature on a slip of ration paper. "They'll do."
The soldiers gathered the rifles and left. The door slammed behind them and a silence that followed felt like a lid sliding shut. A sense of relief and also a cruel fate awaiting if Gus finds out.
Mikhail stared at the weapon. The last Bastard sitting on his table, then at his own reflection in the steel surface of the bench.
His face looked different. Rounder with fatigue. Eyes darker. But what scared him most wasn't how tired he looked. It was how cold he looked. Not angry. Not ashamed. Just… cold. Like the station itself had seeped into him.
Mikhail began to clean the bench. Slowly. Carefully. Counting each piece. Each screw. Each mistake. As the Metro wrote in debts, not ink.
Mikhail stood perfectly still, letting the fading echoes of the Demolition Corps's heavy boots drain away down the corridor until silence reclaimed the workshop. The clatter of their metal soles disappeared into the distant hum of the station—a low, ceaseless murmur like a dying beast refusing to sleep.
Eleven Bastards gone. Signed off. Paid for. Carried away by masked men who neither knew nor cared what it cost to make them function. The twelfth weapon lay gutted on the bench, a skeleton of steel and a relief.
Twelve hours. Twelve hours of scraping black sludge from barrels, breathing in a witches' stew of solvents, and swallowing clouds of burnt propellant. His throat felt raw and flayed; his skin prickled with leftover lye that had soaked through the work apron hours ago.
Eight MGR.
The number dropped into his mind like a stone into a well—small, insignificant, lost immediately in the darkness below.
Eight MGR for twelve hours of labor, burns, grime, and indignity. Not a wage. A tax. A tithe. Tribute to the machinery of the Metro.
He exhaled, cloudy breath swirling in the freezing workshop. Around him, the morning crew already shuffled toward Gus's desk, forming a crooked line of slumped shoulders and hollow eyes. The flickering light above them buzzed as if it, too, were struggling to survive the shift.
The air stank of oil. Metal. Sweat. The chemical burn of cleaners that never fully evaporated.
Mikhail fell in line. One step closer to pay. One step closer to nothing.
The men ahead extended their palms like supplicants. Gus dropped paper chits into metal trays with an indifferent flick of his wrist. The clink of cheap ration paper on cold tin was sharp, almost mocking. A rhythm of ownership.
When Mikhail reached the front, Gus looked up with a slow curl of his lip—not a smile, not quite. Something fouler.
Instead of placing the chits together, Gus dropped them one by one, deliberately, letting each tiny wafer of value fall with a soft slap onto the tray. A quarter MGR at a time. Dragging out the seconds, the humiliation.
The heat rose under Mikhail's collar, creeping up his neck, but he forced his eyes lower. Staring at the floor was easier than meeting Gus's gaze. The waiting was intentional. Another reminder that even when the work was done, even when the shift should've been over, Gus could still twist the blade.
When the final chit hit the tray, Gus didn't speak. He just smiled—a wide, silent grin that exposed his teeth like a dog with a bone. A smile that pretended to forgive even as it enjoyed the breaking.
Mikhail took the chits without a word and turned away.
Orekhovo Station: Day 3, Tuesday, 8 PM — MGR: 2
small cache—springs, shavings of brass, and one bent firing pin