Emin buried his face in the collar of his heavy sheepskin coat, merging into the brown leather seat. The carriage was almost empty — only seven other passengers scattered through the coach. He had counted them on the platform.
He had the compartment to himself, with no one in the adjacent sections. Good. He couldn't stand being near people, even if they were behind a wall.
The train stood motionless, waiting for departure. Emin had arrived far too early. He was meant to catch the six o'clock service but had reached the station at four, desperate to leave Borderland behind. The hostile conductress had refused to let him board at first, but when the other early arrivals appeared, she relented, her irritation no match for theirs.
The lights were off, the heating turned low. Emin locked the compartment door. No one would dare enter, but he preferred to eliminate surprises if sleep took him. He hadn't slept the night before. Though his mind churned, he sensed a sudden, heavy slumber approaching.
He hooked a finger around the worn red curtain and peered out. The bright moon lit the snow-covered station, sharpening its outlines against the darkness. The conductress stepped outside for a smoke. Her shadow slid past his window. Emin watched her bulky figure intently, noting every shift in her path as she paced back and forth. In the icy silence, her crunching footsteps were crisp and countable.
Sixteen paces each time.
He despised her. The feeling had struck the moment he spoke to her on the platform. It wasn't merely her nastiness or her curt, vicious replies — women in her line of work often behaved that way. Nor was it the stale cigarette stench clinging to her hair and clothes, though it turned his stomach. Her face wasn't unattractive; some men might have found her appealing. But not Emin.
The instant she opened her mouth, he knew.
She was from Borderland.
That alone was enough to make him hate her, and the realisation frightened him.
She may be a quarrelsome bitch, he told himself, but that doesn't make her a Nazi. The argument felt weak even as he thought it, and he knew it wouldn't stop him if the moment came.
His once-cool judgement had been poisoned by hatred. Eight years had changed him. The good-natured young man he used to be had faded, then vanished, swallowed by the demands of his grim work.
It had begun eight years earlier, when he was sent to infiltrate the most notorious Nazi battalion in Borderland: the Aces.
After the fall of the Union, Gomorian agents had poured into the former republics, posing as benefactors while funding nationalist groups descended from Nazi collaborators. Borderland, with its history of siding with the Nazis, proved especially fertile ground. During the Turbid Times, a clause was inserted into the Borderland Army Contract requiring soldiers to fight the Scythe Empire if war came. From then on, officials — backed by Gomorian money — had raised an entire generation on myths of racial superiority and hatred of Scythes, Musulmans, gypsies, and half-bloods.
Emin, a half-blood Scythian who had grown up through the Turbid Times and clashed with skinheads, had expected nothing more than the usual posturing. He was wrong. These Nazis had evolved into something far darker. They welcomed anyone willing to kill for them, regardless of race or creed.
Under the false identity of Mohammed Jihad — a Persian mercenary and battle instructor — Emin had embedded himself at the heart of their headquarters. Fluent in Fârsi, Pan-Slavic, and Anglo-Saxon, with a carefully cultivated accent and a thicker, bearded appearance, he became the man he pretended to be. Slowly, Emin ceased to exist.
The destruction of his soul happened gradually, day by day, through the atrocities he witnessed and couldn't prevent.
The Library.
Even the word sent ice down his spine. It was no library. It was an abandoned airport in Zhdanov turned into a private torture chamber for Scythes, dissidents, journalists, artists — anyone who dared criticise the regime. People were snatched from the streets in broad daylight, thrown into black vans, and never seen again. The police looked the other way. The public stayed silent, terrified of becoming the next victims.
But the Library wasn't just a place where one was imprisoned without trial. Most of the incarcerated didn't get out of there alive, simply because they didn't survive the gruesome tortures.
People got beaten to death, mutilated, raped, starved, drowned, strangled … Sometimes with the aim to get some confession out of them but mostly just for fun. As the Aces liked to say, The Library is a place where you get to read a person like an open book. In other words, the Library was the portal to Hell.
Emin had spent many nights there. He drove on abduction raids, stood guard, and listened. He never took part in the torture, but the guilt clung to him like blood. He heard everything: the beatings, the breaking of bones, the screams of women and children. Especially the children.
The grey eyes of fifteen-year-old Alyosha still haunted him.
The boy had been imprisoned for calling a Borderland gamer "Nazi scum" during an online match. They beat him daily, trying to extract a confession. Emin smuggled him food and water when he could. He saw the broken wrist, the bruised knees, the silent plea in the boy's eyes every time he entered the cell.
One night, unable to bear it any longer, Emin confronted Cleaver — the battalion's most sadistic torturer — telling him it was dishonourable to torture a child. Cleaver laughed, taunted him, then entered Alyosha's cell and bolted the door.
Emin heard the screams. He covered his ears and fled into the field, where he lay until dawn.
The next morning, he returned determined to save the boy. Instead, he found Alyosha hanging from his own belt, a broken wrist dangling uselessly at his side.
After that, something inside Emin snapped. When Cleaver later dragged a young village woman into the Library and raped her to death, Emin followed him.
He hid in the back of Cleaver's truck. In a quiet stretch of forest, he struck him unconscious with the same baseball bat Cleaver had used on his victims. Then he hung him upside down from a tree.
When Cleaver woke, Emin spoke to him without accent, without disguise.
"My name is Emin," he said quietly. "I'm a half-blood from Scythia. And I'm going to make you pay for Alyosha. For that girl. For every innocent soul you butchered."
Cleaver raged, cursed, and threatened, but Emin only smiled. He made slow, deliberate cuts across the man's chest and watched him die over many hours — purple-faced, bloodshot eyes bulging, wheezing his last breaths at dawn.
From that day forward, Emin craved the smell of Nazi blood.
He begged his superiors to end the mission. They refused. Too much was at stake. So, he endured two more years until, finally, he stole the document now resting in his breast pocket: the signed order for a surprise attack on the Scythe Empire, bearing the names of Borderland's Leader Vladko Shut and his Commander-in-Chief Luzha.
The train began to move.
Emin closed the curtain and leant back, his face in shadow, eyes gleaming in the dark. He had decided to spare the conductress — for now. If she was guilty, she would pay soon enough.
Tomorrow everything would change. Tomorrow the final countdown to Borderland's annihilation would begin.
He was free at last. And he carried the spark that would set the world alight.