The Infiltrator

I waited, wielding the same soft smile, offering it to the girl betrayed and burned alive by her world.

Patience. Sage told me to be a good boy. Good boys were patient. Don’t scare her off now.

Finally, she moved. The heavy wooden door creaked open, triggering the brass bell above it. A gust of freezing wind invaded the warm sanctuary of the cafe, carrying snowflakes that melted instantly on the polished floorboards.

Laika stepped inside. She stood on the doormat, dripping wet, shivering violently. The dirty, oversized jacket hung off her frame like a death shroud. She lowered her head, ears flat against her skull, waiting for the shout. Waiting to be kicked out. She didn’t have footwear, or gloves.

“Hey!” A prad bulldog waiter in a white apron marched toward her. “You! Mongrel! Get out! No strays allowed!”

He waved a towel at her like she was a pest. “Go on! Shoo! You are making a mess on the floor!”

Laika flinched. She turned to leave, hand reaching for the door handle.

I stood up.

“She is with me,” I said loudly.

The bulldog stopped. He turned to look at me, a sneer forming on his drooping face. “Comrade, this establishment has standards. We cannot have dirty waifs begging at the tables for scraps. It disturbs the patrons—”

I made the Frontend twist, let the mask of the polite human fall away.

Behind my eyes, I projected the memory of the breaking moon. I channeled the weight of a ten-kilometer starship crashing into the Sea of Tranquility by my hand. I summoned the weight of Sage’s fourteen thousand fox souls leering from the shadows behind me like a Biblical archangel.

“I said,” I ground out sharply, “she is with me.”

“But…”

“What kind of a Soviet utopia are we building if we do not help a clearly starving child, comrade? Do you think that she’s chosen this life?” I added, channeling my inner Soviet NKVD Agent villain from good old 1990s Arnold films that Shady and I watched far too many times together. “Are you perhaps an enemy of the people, a supporter of the old ways that we aim to expunge?”

The waiter gulped. He took a step back, clutching his towel like a shield. He looked at me and saw something that did not belong in a 50’s Moscow cafe.

The Emperor of Mankind.

“I… of course, Comrade,” he stammered, bowing his head. “My apologies.”

“Bring us two of everything,” I ordered, sitting back down. “Pierogi. Cakes. Tea. The samovar. Now!”

“At once!” The waiter scurried away into the kitchen.

I turned my attention back to Laika. She was staring at me, mouth slightly open. The fear of being banished from the cafe melted away. Now her eyes beheld the awe of a small creature witnessing a larger predator clear the territory.

“Sit down,” I said gently. “Relax.”

She crept forward. Her movements were stiff from the cold. She climbed onto the chair opposite me, perching on the edge, ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. Water dripped from her raggedy jacket onto the pristine tablecloth. She looked at the wet spot with panic.

“It is fine,” I said. “The tablecloth can be washed.”

She looked up at me with warm, deep brown eyes, almost gold at the edges. “You… you are not from here. I haven’t seen your face here… before.” She spoke Russian like the waiter, yet I somehow clearly understood her through Sage’s Dream-modding powers.

“No,” I admitted, realising that my voice sounded properly Slavic when I spoke.

“You… shouted at the man,” she whispered. “Nobody shouts at the men in white aprons. They have… the brooms.”

“Brooms cannot hurt me,” I said. “And as long as you sit with me, they cannot hurt you either.”

The waiter returned. He balanced a massive tray on his dark paws. He set down a steaming samovar, a plate piled high with pirozhki, a basket of sweet buns, and a bowl of sugar cubes. Then, he bowed low and retreated without a word.

The smell of hot food and drinks filled the space between us.

Laika’s belly let out a growl that would have shamed a lion. She clasped her hands over her midsection, ears tilting back.

“Please,” I gestured to the food. “I cannot eat all of this alone. Help me out.”

She looked at the food. Then at me.

“Is it… a trick?” she asked softly. “Is there medicine in it? To make me sleep? To remove me from the street?”

My heart cracked a little more.

“No trick,” I promised. I picked up a meat pie and took a large bite. I chewed and swallowed. “See? Just meat and dough. S’ good stuff.”

She reached out and quickly grabbed one too.

The prad girl inhaled the food, making it vanish in two seconds. She grabbed another. And another. She ate with frantic desperation, crumbs falling onto her dirty jacket.

I poured tea from the samovar into a glass with a metal holder. I pushed the sugar bowl toward her.

“Slow down,” I said softly. “It is not going anywhere. Nobody will take it from you.”

Laika paused mid-chew, cheeks bulging. She swallowed with difficulty, then took the hot tea. She held the glass contained in a metal frame in both hands, letting the warmth seep into her cold, pink paw pads. She closed her eyes and let out a long, shuddering sigh.

“Warm,” she murmured.

“Yes.”

She opened her eyes and looked at me over the rim of the glass. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why me?” she asked. “I am… I am nobody. I have no name. I have no rare magic skills, no artifacts, no family. I am just… noise in the street, dust in the wind.”

“Surely you are more than that,” I said. “You seem like a… survivor.”

“I am good at hiding and running,” she muttered, looking down into her tea. “I sleep near the vents. The steam helps.”

“You deserve better than vents,” I told her. “You deserve a hearth. A bed. A place where you don’t have to hide.”

She huffed bitterly, “There is no such place. Not for me. Nobody cares about the orphan strays like me. The posters and the V-casts promise Utopia… but I don’t think that it will come. Wizard Revolution and Nikita Khrushchev speak of Autogenesis Stabalist dimensional magic that will offer everyone a home, but it’s a lie…”

“Oh?”

“I can feel it in my heart,” she said, “like a song playing in my head in an endless loop. The System Wizard managing our national affairs isn’t kind. She let Lenin die. She abandoned Stalin. She will betray Gensec Khrushchev just as easily because none of us matter to her. We’re all just toys in her mad game of Magitek Revolution. I know how this story ends…”

She stared at me and her body wobbled at edges, suddenly gaining a few inches. A grimy, striped tank top became visible beneath the jacket.

“What’s your name, kind stranger?” She asked.

“You can call me… Janson Bond for now,” I replied, sipping my tea. “I’ll tell you my real name later, after we become friends.”

“Friends, huh? That’s not a Russian name. You don’t belong here, Jan,” she repeated. “I haven’t seen you here before. You… you are an American.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Agent Bond, that’s a reference to a Yankee fictional book. Plus, you’ve had… strange women sitting here earlier,” she said, pointing at the empty chairs. “They are gone now, properly gone… not gone as if they pulled on invisibility hats. Something… mental I think, since I can’t seem to recall their faces right. One of them was a feline Commissar, I’m pretty sure. A fox and two others too. High level Soviet mages, I presume. They were… fighting over… your bed, I think?” She sniffed the air. “Yeah. They all like you far too much.”

“Uhhh…” I voiced eloquently.

“Curious and curiouser,” Laika tapped her chin. “You are speaking in Russian yet there’s an edge of another language hiding behind your words. Maybe an auto-translational artifact? Let me guess… you’re an American spy, sleeping your way up the Soviet Ministry of Magic, trying to get our National secrets?”

She seemed to grow another few inches in height, starting to look more like her adult self.

“Sage?” I thought, “what do I do? She’s onto me and she’s getting taller.”

“Keep it up,” the fox whispered. “Seems like she’s got some dreamwalker skills, enough to wobble herself out slightly, but not enough for total lucidity. I’ll keep her asleep, don’t fret. Be your harmless nomag human self, bro, talk to her about the morality of naughty OP wizards maybe… incept ideas into her mind she wouldn’t arrive at herself.”

The rags of her jacket tightened around broadening shoulders. The childish roundness of her muzzle lengthened, sharpening into the profile of an adult prad.

“A spy, huh,” I said, attempting to remain outwardly calm. “Nah, more of a… recruiter than anything.”

“A… recruiter,” Laika repeated. Her voice dropped an octave, losing the raspy whine of a starving child and gaining the smooth, dangerous timber of a woman who murdered countless worlds. “For the Americans? A servant of the capitalist pigs?”

“For myself,” I corrected. “Though I suppose my methods are somewhat capitalistic since I have many bills to pay. I see value where others see waste. I see potential where others see a nuisance to be swept aside with a broom.”

She narrowed her brown eyes. The steam from the samovar and tea cups curled between us, twisting into shapes that looked suspiciously like fox eyes before dissipating.

“You have a whole collection going,” she stated, tapping a claw against the table. “A commissar cat. A seer fox. A dragon knight. A hungry shadow. You collect dangerous women, American.”

“Not intentionally.” I shrugged. “Honestly, most of the time it feels like they’ve collected me, if anything, to satisfy their desires for freedom.”

“Are you a womanizer spy?” Laika asked, “Were they fighting each other as to who should truly be with you?”

“No,” I said. “All of my girls are on equal standing. We’re a.. pack.”

The word ‘pack’ hit her head on. I saw the flinch. Her furry ears twitched atop her head, rotating toward the sound of a word she desperately wanted to believe in.

“A pack protects its own,” she mused. “You do smell close.”

“A pack does not leave the smallest behind to freeze near a vent.” I agreed and pushed the plate of pirozhki closer to her. “Eat. You are still hungry, I bet.”

She snatched another yum. This time she did not wolf it down, eating casually with measured bites, watching me with a look of mild curiosity.

“Sage,” I thought, “How am I doing?""She is oscillating,” the fox whispered*. “The dream is stable. You need to anchor her to you. Make her want you more than she wants vengeance against the world.""Right. No pressure.”* I smirked mentally.

Laika finished the noms.

“So, American,” she said. “If you are recruiting… What is the job? Once again, I am an orphan with no skills. I beg. I hide. I run.”

“You smelled my companions being here,” I pointed out. “You weren’t supposed to see or smell them, nor understand that they love me. That’s a skill, no?”

“I am a prad mutt,” Laika shrugged, pointing at her dark nose. “We all smell things like that from time to time. Magic doesn’t always conceal smells, especially pheromones so potent. What is it that you offer exactly and why would I trust a foreigner? You want information, want me to sneak somewhere? That’s how I’d get shot, or worse yet, get captured and be magically compelled to reveal the truth and then get shot.”

“No sneaking and no stealing,” I said. “I want you for you. I’m not planning to send you anywhere. I’d like to offer you my home, the friendship of my pack, a warm fireplace to rest by until you feel brave and happy enough to choose your own path forward.”

“Eh?” Laika blinked at me, tilting her head in a canine fashion. “I’m a worthless mutt who knows less than your average idiot on the street. Your offer makes no sense. What’s in it for you exactly?”

“You are a… dreamer,” I said, deciding on a different approach.

“What?” Laika blinked at me. “How do you know this?” She asked suspiciously. “Wait. Did you… look inside my head? Are you a Mentalist?”

“No,” I said. “I have no magic skills whatsoever. I’m a perfectly mundane human.”

“What the devil kind of a crap spy are you?” She chortled. “No, really? Why would the Americans send a nullie to spy on us? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“The Americans didn’t send me,” I said. “I came here myself, with the help of my fox Archmage girlfriend… to find you.”

“Uh-huh,” Laika pursed her lips. “Me? Really? Why me?”

“You said so yourself,” I said. “You dream of the future. You know exactly how this story ends.”

Laika stared at me. “Oh. I guess I did, hum. Welp, you got me there.” She relaxed ever so slightly, tail starting to sway once again like a metronome.

“I don’t want the story to end the way it does,” I said. “I don’t want my world to end. I care about my pack’s future just as much as they care about me. Surely you can smell that?”

Laika opened then closed her canine mouth.