Prologue

  The stranger the dream appears, the deeper the meaning it carries.

  Sigmund Freud

  The frenzy of corporate raids, led by powerful figures, has engulfed the entire country.

  His firm, where my husband worked as a CTO, was not spared from misfortune either.

  The former technical director of a small company, who was fired due to the conflict and ?squeezing of money? between new and old owners, has been unemployed for the second month now, just ?sitting? at home.

  I quietly got our child ready and took our four-year-old daughter to daycare, leaving early to work for the salary of a public university employee, which this month will not even be enough to cover our family's food expenses. I don't disturb my sleeping spouse. Let him rest; he's smart, he will be able to figure out how to get out of the deep financial abyss our family has unexpectedly fallen into.

  One might reasonably ask how famine can stalk a land where people toil. Yet, in Russia, this grim paradox is frequently seen, born of relentless economic turmoil and the wrenching transformation of society, each bearing down upon the lives of ordinary people. A relentless surge in prices wins the cost of survival spiraled beyond the reach of the diligent worker's average wages.

  September 1st. Knowledge Day. All educational institutions in Russia have opened their doors to new students. Students, pupils, first-graders. And so, his spouse rushed off to work.

  Waking up that day, still in the grip of sleep, he couldn't come to. The dream he had was unsettling. And he didn't try to get out of bed. Is it the mystique of dreams that holds him?

  Knowing that he would soon forget what he'd seen in the dream yet still remembering everything that had happened, he forced his body to get up, sat at the desk, took out a pack of papers and a ballpoint pen.

  The year was 2004.

  The personal computer, once regarded as a luxury and a sign of prosperity, had been sold the previous month so the family could somehow make ends meet, with no chance to keep such a valuable item just as a word processor.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Letters poured from the pen, turning into the scribbles of rapid handwriting. The skills polished over hundreds of hours of lectures at his alma mater—the city's main technical university, which he graduated from nearly ten years ago—proved useful.

  Having transcribed into nearly indecipherable scribbles what he remembered from the dream, he leaned back in his chair, but the sense of satisfaction from the task didn't come. Feeling a vague anxiety, my husband turned on the TV…

  School number one.

  Sons and daughters.

  Fathers and mothers, right in the next block, but helpless to DO anything.

  Shock.

  ?What's in your head? In your head? Zombie? ? - The terror for the children, for their children, innocent children, our children, taken hostage.

  Ignorance and fear.

  ?What are they doing with the lives of these kids?!?, desperation, anger, and wrath engulfs millions.

  Beslan. September 1, 2004.

  Chaotically, across all news programs.

  Television frames flickered, filling the screen and surrounding space with the blackness of blue radiation, squeezing the heart and churning the blood with the energy of OUTRAGE.

  Scene One. The Calling

  Quiet splashes of water rise with a crescendo and enter my skull. Waves of sound reflect inside, trickle down the back of my neck with a rustle, slide down, run along the spine, and the rustle of this tremor turns into a loud whisper, ominously imprinting words, one by one, into an inner part where, reluctant to hide, imperious letters crawl out, and the frail defense of closed eyelids fails, and the words blaze before my eyes:

  ?I am near! ?

  With my mind, I understand that I almost see the speaker; he hides behind the letters, he's somewhere close, behind a bloody tangle, and I force my brain to find at least something from which I can piece together a picture of what's happening.

  "Help!"

  The ripples, forming a wall behind the inscription, disperse, combining the rows of lines into whimsical zigzags. I see no details. I peer. No. None of the details of this face can I discern. I feel an inhumanly strong anxiety, realizing that such encounters do not happen by chance. I concentrate, trying to understand: "What can I, specifically I, do?"

  "No. It cannot be!"

  A thought, furiously repelled by understanding, pierces the body like a steel needle; my legs give way, and I fall to my knees.

  "Why?! Why me?!"

  But the one inside me (certainly not the conscience), not trying to hold back, raises the transparent fabric of a banner with new frighteningly large letters of a crimson-venous color.

  ?Ask yourself! ?

  Breaking vessels, blood rushes down, filling the heart with such longing that it's about to burst, making me moan with the howl of a grey wolf.

  "Why?! What can I do!?"

  All the sounds fade, time slows down, stops, and the gripping pain in my chest, but I catch myself standing and smiling calmly.

  "Me. Of course, me. Because I won't let down. I'm better than all of them. I am the chosen one."