Chapter Text
DT-001-319 Containment Breach Incident: ~T +10 hours
Yura Beletsky hated being alone. Correction - he hated being alone while sober. He could smile until his cheeks ached, but when nothing answered his helplessly spiteful grin, it felt like fistfighting a concrete wall. Yura wasn't that bright, he heard many times, but he definitely was not dim. And when there was no one to annoy, nothing to do, no music to pierce his skull, and no substances, liquid, smoking or otherwise, to fill his world, he was beginning to think. And this was terrifying.
The City had three prospective roads for the young man Beletsky. After school, it could have been a loathed Technikum, followed by a miserable slaving in trades or at factories. It could have been college - Yura had no belief in his academic excellence carrying him anywhere near a proper university, and consequently out of this dump. Or it could have been crime. And it so happened that his bio teacher managed, after an incredibly poorly executed blackmail attempt on Yura's part, to hook him up with a class of criminals considerably more prospective than racket or dope slinging. Working with Sergei Kazarin on the stalker business. Yura understood Nikita Danilych clear as crystal as he left Kazarin flat that day - if authorities happened to be notified of the stalker's den, Yura's family would be answering for that. Only fair, he supposed. This thought made his lips stretch in a grin. To escape the moment, he willed himself through the hungover, slid down on the floor, and met the summer afternoon at the window with a morning cigarette. Mom was asleep, he was certain, and Anya was somewhere out. The flat was too quiet for Yura's taste. Which meant that it was time to text Sanya.
She was real fun ever since he helped her to crack the shell Sergei had built for her. Not that she wasn't nice before, he supposed. But ever since she picked up that bat, the whole gang got something of a new feel to them, and in this fucking place anything new was good. He grinned again at the thought, typing "Did Arthur kiss anyone tonight, or should I have spiked his shit more?". The grin receded in a more natural smile as Sanya's "BITCH go do a flip" came through. The day had finally started.
DT-001-319 Containment Breach Incident: ~T +16 hours
Yura winked right at Manhattan's enraged mug before slamming into his side. Gangster was already off-balance, dodging Sanya's bat on the loud and flashing Molodzyozhny's dance floor, and the push sent him sprawling on the ground. One of Manhattan's goons took a swing and missed. He had no time to throw another - Vanya's mighty frontal kick sent him crashing into the crowd. Yura's snorting kackle got lost in the bassy beat and in the sounds of the scuffle. With Artur and Tsar joining in, and a rival gangster apparently hanging out with a lighter team than usual, the "misunderstanding" was resolved before the song change. Some cola on Manhattan's shirt, apparently, warranted stomping a kid only if the kid was alone. Serves the bastard right, he supposed.
"Thank you so much!" came an excited voice through the club's noise.
Yura knew who was speaking before he turned. In the noise, shadow, and flashes, he felt a tug, like standing on the edge of a cliff. It looked like a freckled kid. She was a freckled kid, and seeing Yura's battle-high smile, she returned one herself.
"What's your name?"
A bass drop made her answer barely legible, and Yura heard only consonant "k" and "t".
"Katya?" he guessed, and the kid's face lit up even more than it already was.
"I'm Yura!" he supplied, "Wanna meet people who you actually gotta thank?"
And just like this, this Katya excitedly shook Sanya's hands. The whole gang got to say hi at least, before Vanya immediately disappeared alongside Yana, and the Tsar-Arthur duo slipped away soon after. The summer evening reached the point right before the twilight, and once they made it outside for Yura's cig time, Sanya raised a question he wanted answered.
"Uughh, Sergey will want me back in half an hour, maximum," the albino girl groaned.
"Means we have one and a half hours, at least," Yura jabbed, before looking at their new friend, "Katya, what about you? What time your folks would want you back?"
The freckled girl lost her smile for a moment.
"I.. I don't want to come back to them. I run away from home."
A lot of this in these parts, he supposed. Still, Yura was Talanted enough to know this was not the whole story.
DT-001-319 Containment Breach Incident: ~T +00:50 hour
“Fuck!” Lidia Morgan swore the last time before collapsing on a folding bunk.
Unpainted walls, a sheetless bed, a toilet seat, and a glass eye of a CCTV camera constituted the entirety of her world for the last half an hour. She was somewhere underground, in a windowless concrete cube. The only door appeared to be blast-proof and 6 inches thick. Not like she got a good look at it while being thrown in. And for what? She just saw two kids running. Then the air shimmered with blue, a wall of the visitor section exploded, they were gone, and Lidia’s “guide” ordered her to freeze, pulling a pistol from an armpit holster.
It was a forth time PhD student Lidia Morgan was in Alferov’s Institute for Anomalous Research - and she visited for the first time this week. A miracle on its own merit, and long in the making. Her entire career, even.
Her Bachelor's thesis at Brown was a meta-study on officially published and smuggled out Eastern Commonwealth anomalous material science papers. She looked to add to the mass of academic literature, poking holes in the obvious fabrication that was the existence of the Zone. She took two additional semesters to reconcile the data with her hypothesis.
It didn’t work. Overlooking the entire thesis with her supervisor, flanked by the entirety of the Scientific Integrity board and by a larger part of the School of Engineering professorial staff, she had to concede. Either the fundamentals of the scientific method were incorrect, or the analysis pointed to anomalous research being scientifically sound. Not an unheard position in Western academics, but it turned her world upside down.
Her master's thesis at MIT made national news. It was insanely hard to achieve access to anomalous material in the US, but scavenging, begging, and writing novels' worth of letters gave her sufficient funding. The result was a single flax plant growing on a piece of steel rail and photosynthesizing under X- and gamma-radiation. After she submitted and presented her work, the supervising board recommended that she publish. After the paper made it through peer review, The Washington Post reached out for an interview. And then all hell broke loose. Somewhere between deleting another batch of death threat emails and setting up a laptop for another interview, she checked her mailbox to find something other than ads or bills.
The letter carried two additional stamps. One in English - clearing contents as not subversive, from the Federal Bureau on Un-American Activities. Another in Russian, in which she recognized “Directorat” and “Comitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti”. Inside was a neat English penmanship, giving extensive feedback on her thesis. It ended with a recommendation to reach out to the Commonwealth embassy in Washington in case Lidia had any interest in more detailed communication.
The letter was signed by a Senior Research Fellow Dr Temnova.
Even with a direct recommendation, it took a year to negotiate a visa. Publicity might have helped the process to take off at all, but it certainly made the experience much harder. Finally, Lidia crossed the Atlantic, changed at Heathrow, and boarded an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. She was welcomed by a pleasant guide and an assigned driver, and taken to the intra-Commonwealth airport in a Mercedes with tinted windows. The helicopter ride took a couple of hours, and stepping on the airfield tarmac, Lidia Morgan witnessed the towering dome of the Zh. I. Alferov National Institute of Anomalous Research.
She visited the Institute four times. Presentations - related to her specialty, material science, and nothing more. She hadn’t even had time to meet Dr. Temnova. Then, apparently, she saw something she wasn’t meant to.
It should have been about an hour since she was detained, Lidia thought. Fluorescent buzz was the only thing she had heard for forever since the door slammed shut.
PhD student Lidia Morgan went from the best she felt in her life to the end of her rope in a little less than an hour. She curled up on the bunk and turned her back to the camera.
However, there was a reason for the timeliness with which FBUA cleared her correspondence with Temnova, and later the Commonwealth embassy, so expediently in the last year. Soon after she sent her first response, back in Massachusetts, two gentlemen had a conversation with her during an interview request for the journal that never existed. For this interview, she came down to Fairfax County, Virginia.
Maybe Phd student Lidia Morgan was done. But for CIA SAC-PAG operative Lidia Morgan, it just meant a new mission development. A dire development, but seeing what she saw, it only meant she had to extract by any means necessary.