Page 19 of Katya and the Young God

There’s no actual reason why Pieter didn’t kill her outright. She held a gun up to him. She threatened him with a knife. No one would bat an eye.

But instead, it’s like he aged, like he isn’t exactly opposed to dying at her hand, and…

And like he’s gone half-mad. Like the smooth, polished Demigod she sees in her nightmares has disappeared, replaced with a husk. A husk that follows orders, that’s hiding away in the Colorado mountains with a dog and nothing else.

MIRI (8:20 AM): Let me guess, you’re gonna figure it out before letting anyone help you.

K (8:20 AM): Good guess.

* * *

She waitsa good long time before calling in, and she’s too prideful to call it cowardice, so she calls it anger. She cherishes the anger, building it up, coddling it until it burns through her, crystalline and brilliant.

Still, when Beatriz answers her phone, she’s briefly left breathless, before she straightens her spine and sticks out her chin. “Good afternoon, Katya Rinne reporting in after the meeting.”

And her voice is steady, damn it. Because she’s a professional, she’s been doing this for years, and one bad commanding officer isn’t going to break her.

There’s a brief pause, as if Beatriz isn’t actually expecting her to be alive. “Go ahead, Katya,” she says, finally.

“Attended meeting, identified several others, obtained relevant information from meeting,” Katya recites, brisk, pacing around the small cabin.

Outside, some storm clouds roil in, darkening the sky, but Katya doesn’t blink up at them. Supposedly this is normal.

There’s a small, muffled sound on the other end of the phone, and Katya would like to imagine that Beatriz is caught off guard. “Obtained relevant information,” she states, flatly, even over the thousands of miles between them. “Anything that...needs attention?”

“Not at this time,” Katya says, and a small fission of joy opens up in her, at thumbing her nose in this small way. “I will write up detailed report and submit within the proper time frame.” It’s clinical, but fuck if she’s giving her anything that’s not clinical. They don’t get any other part of her, not her fear, not her joy, nothing but her barest level of duty.

Through the line, Beatriz exhales. “Katya, you know you can trust me,” she starts, and the fission of anger just grows brighter.

“No,” Katya says, cutting her off. “With everything going on these past few weeks, I don’t know who I can trust.”

Let her piece that together, let her puzzle if that means her or if that means Miri or any of Katya’s other friends in the Organization. Let her expend that mental energy, Katya won’t do it for them.

With that, she thumbs the phone button a little bit harder than she intends to, tossing her cell on the couch and staring out at the first few raindrops starting to splatter across the dirt driveway.

She has three days to plan. Three days to prepare, before the hike to the mouth of the cave.

Three days to research.

* * *

Her first searchinto Demigod psychology definitively does not lead to any results, as all she finds in her databases is the single line of “Demigods are often impulsive and prone to anger,” which isn’t exactly anything new to her.

And her one primary source is away from a phone for the foreseeable future.

History of the twins has always been scarce, outside of the flimsy prophecy and the killing spree they stopped, but in all the lore and collected information, there’s nothing on them ever having pets or ever tolerating people in power over them.

Or aging.

Though, to be fair, they’re always listed as a pair, until the small footnote that Vanya was killed. There’s nothing—ever—that specifies Pieter doing something that isn’t also being done by his brother.

Which is an odd bit of psychology by itself.

After one research dead end to another, she’s almost—almost—relieved when her phone bings.

FEKETER (2:59 PM): Can you meet me at the Right Hand Brewery at sundown?

Katya mulls over it, glancing out at the dreary rainy afternoon. It’s not like she actively wants to talk to him, but he is — probably— the only person she would consider talking to about the issue coming up, about the trip down the mountain, about the meeting she missed almost all of.

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