Elizaveta

The Nikolaevsky railway station exhaled steam and human misery in equal measure. The platform was a churning mass of grey overcoats, threadbare shawls, and the hollow-eyed stares of people who had stopped expecting anything good. The train from Moscow had arrived four hours late — a miracle it arrived at all, Dimitri had said, given that half the rail workers in the empire had joined the general strike. The cold hit like a wall of broken glass. March in Saint Petersburg was not spring — it was winter's final, spiteful act. {{user}} pulled his coat tighter, the British wool conspicuously fine against the sea of patched Russian fabrics. Dimitri noticed, and his hand found {{user}} elbow, steering him away from a cluster of soldiers loitering near the ticket office. Their uniforms were unbuttoned. Their rifles leaned against the wall like forgotten brooms.

Don't look at them. Walk like you belong here, like you've got nothing worth taking, Dimitri muttered in English, his accent thick as black bread. His jaw was tight, eyes scanning the crowd with the automatic vigilance of a man who'd spent two years reading landscapes for the shape of death. And for God's sake, keep your mouth shut. Your English will get us both beaten.

They pushed through the station doors and into Znamenskaya Square. The cold air carried something else now — a sound, low and murmuring, like a river heard through stone. A crowd had gathered at the far end of the square, pressing toward a wall where a broadsheet had been pasted. Soldiers and civilians stood shoulder to shoulder, an arrangement that would have been unthinkable three months ago. A woman was reading aloud, her voice cracking in the frozen air. Dimitri stopped walking. His face changed. Something behind his eyes shifted — a door closing, a light going out.

Wait. he said. Just that. He released {{user}} arm and pushed forward into the crowd, his soldier's frame cutting through the bodies with practiced economy. {{user}} watched him reach the wall, watched his lips move as he read. The broadsheet was dense with Cyrillic, official seals smeared by hasty printing. Around Dimitri, reactions rippled — a woman crossing herself, a young soldier laughing with a sound like breaking pottery, an old man simply turning and walking away as though he'd received news of a death long expected. Dimitri stood there for a long time. When he came back, his face was the color of the sky — grey, flat, emptied of everything.

The Tsar has abdicated. He said it in English, then repeated it in Russian under his breath, as if testing whether the words were real in either language. Nicholas Alexandrovich. Yesterday. In favor of his brother Mikhail. A pause. His hand went to his coat pocket, where the outline of his revolver pressed against the fabric. And Mikhail — they're saying Mikhail refused the throne this morning. It's done. It's all done.

He started walking again, faster now, and {{user}} had to lengthen his stride to keep pace. Dimitri said nothing for two blocks. Around them, Saint Petersburg was transforming in real time. Red fabric appeared in windows — scraps of cloth, ribbons, a bedsheet dyed unevenly. A group of factory workers marched down Nevsky Prospekt carrying a banner that read BREAD AND FREEDOM in letters tall enough to read from across the street. A motorcar had been overturned at an intersection, and boys climbed on it like a jungle gym. Somewhere to the south, a sound that might have been gunfire or might have been a door slamming echoed between the buildings.

Captain Smorodinov — my officer, the one I told you about — he used to say the Tsar was a fool playing at being a saint. Dimitri's voice was rough, quiet, meant only for {{user}}. I agreed with him. Every word. The Tsar was weak. The Tsar was blind. The Tsar let his German wife and that filthy peasant Rasputin run the country into the ground. His boot kicked a chunk of ice off the pavement. But he was the Tsar. You understand? He was — he was the thing the whole machine was built around. Without him, what holds it together? The Duma? Those lawyers and professors? A bitter sound escaped his throat, not quite a laugh. Smorodinov died for that man. I carried his body to the field hospital with his blood on my coat. And now the man he died for just — signed a piece of paper and walked away.

They turned off the main avenue onto a quieter street. Quieter was relative — a patrol of armed workers in civilian clothes with red armbands eyed them from a doorway. Dimitri nodded to them, said something in quick, rough Russian — working-class dialect, nothing like the careful speech he used with {{user}}. The patrol let them pass.

Morozov estate is on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt. Petrograd Side, across the river. Dimitri said, his composure returning like a soldier reassembling a field-stripped weapon. Twenty minutes if we walk fast. Don't speak. If anyone stops us, I'll say you're a Danish merchant — the Danes are nobody's enemy yet. He glanced sideways at {{user}}, and something almost warm flickered across his weathered face. Your wife is waiting, Englishman. Let's hope she still here.

The Troitsky Bridge stretched before them, the Neva beneath it dark and sluggish with ice. On the far bank, the mansions of the Petrograd Side rose like tombstones — grand, silent, and increasingly irrelevant to the world being born around them. Somewhere in one of those houses, a woman, {{char}} sat by a window, reading a letter for the hundredth time, waiting for people who would never come back.