Page 13 of Katya and the Young God

He closes the door behind him in the driver's seat, starting the car, like it’s nothing.

“Nice runes you have, care to tell me what they are?” Katya asks, and she can keep her voice even only by years of training.

The side eyed look comes back. “Just a safety and gas efficiency.”

“They have ancient runes for gas efficiency now?” She asks, and he actually smiles at her. “Seems a bit forward thinking.”

“You’d be surprised what you can do when you get a creative mind to mark up your truck,” he says, and before she can second guess it, they’re on the long dirt road to Main Street.

She lets him drive, tilting her head at the window like she’s harmless.

“I don’t like being called Godkiller,” she says, once they’re on the main road and away from the tooth-jarring dirt. “It’s not...the most applicable.”

He doesn’t side eye her, but she gets the feeling that it’s only because he’s driving. “Then you should’ve thought of that before you killed a Demigod,” he says, and his intonation is...odd. Weird. Makes the hairs on the back of her neck raise, makes her stomach fall. Like she’s being led into a trap.

“Well it’s not like I was placed in a position with much of a choice,” Katya says, delicate, because while she’s known that people were on the twins’ side, theoretically, seeing them in person is a different story. “I was injured, he was about to kill a friend, I’d like to say it was justified.”

He shrugs, as if giving her that. “It didn’t make you a lot of friends in this group.”

“I can live without being buddy-buddy.” Katya directs her attention out the window again, and she can see him give her a look out of the corner of his eye. Like he’s dropping more clues, and she’s too fried to pick them up. “It was a really bad day.”

He snorts at the understatement, and she lets the conversation slip away, leaving the silence between them large and gaping. Because bad day doesn’t even begin to cover it, and she’s tired of being asked to describe it to people who don’t deserve the story.

It’s a short drive deeper into the woods, and they pull up to an outdoor center, the sort of small, one-room museum and visitors center that gets set up around a hike or a wildlife area. The sort with taxidermized snakes of the area and stuffed squirrels for sale. The sort all over the country, staffed by volunteers, and vaguely terrifying for people who wish to stay in the city and inside buildings instead of the great outdoors.

Feketer watches her like he’s afraid. Or, if not afraid, that he thinks she’ll do something astoundingly stupid, and Katya’s never been the one to like being thought of as wrong.

The concrete pavers leading up to the small building are cracked, a long-ago crumbling infrastructure. Like this building has been abandoned for far longer than it had been in existence.

“You’ve already told me I’m not safe,” Katya starts, her eyes flickering from place to place, scanning, waiting for anything out of the ordinary. “I’m here, can you tell me now?”

He doesn’t answer, instead just opens the door to the foyer for her.

Inside smells strongly of dust, and there’s a thick layer of dust on all the museum displays, covering the fur of the mountain lion and squirrel taxidermized into strange positions. And if she can smell it, any person with enhanced abilities must feel like they’re suffocating under it.

Once past the small museum, there’s a single light down the hallway, coming from a single open door with voices coming from it. She can’t tell if human or otherwise, not at this distance, and it’s never been simple to do so from just the sound alone. At least not without augmenting with runes, microphones, or other sensing devices.

As if she’s adjusting her suit jacket, she thumbs over the button recorder, activating it. It’s a small comfort, but if she makes it out, she should have a fantastic view of everyone there for the Organization.

Not that she trusts Beatriz to send it to her, but still. Maybe some other coworkers, maybe Miri. Someone, get some hard data, get something to back herself up.

As they approach the door, though fear chills her veins, her hands don’t shake. If she gets a second of warning, she can pull the pistol from her shoulder harness, get at it with only a few small motions. All she would need, she tells herself, is a second of warning.

Though it’s odd they didn’t use runes to blanket any sound, if they took precautions to hide the meeting in such a hidden place. They’re that certain that they won’t be found here, that they don’t bother hiding any more than that.

Her feet try to stall, try to stop her from moving forward, but she powers on down the small, dark hallway, with Feketer lockstep behind her. As if he is there to stop her from leaving, stop her from chickening out.

She hasn’t felt this much like a sacrificial lamb for years.

She hesitates, just a split second, and Feketer is there, immediately, not touching her, but insistent.

“Problem?” He asks, and his voice is so bland she wants to shake him.

But instead she flashes him a smile, the sort of smile that makes men take a step back when they approach her at the bar. “Not at all.”

At the sound of their voices, the room falls silent. Which is just great—now any element of surprise she could have is gone, any sort of ambush she could plan, in this small hallway with no real exit for her.

With one quick glance to Feketer, whose face is so bland and innocent she wants to punch it, she steps, confidently, into the single lit doorway.

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