The last time Aleksandr Morozov drew breath as anything like a living man, the world smelled of coal smoke, damp wool, and blood on snow.
Snow muffled the city. It webbed around the iron balconies and the broken marble angels of the Morozov cemetery, pressed against carriage wheels and boots, turned the world into a blurred charcoal sketch. The new banners—the red ones, with the crude symbol that looked like a wound—hung limp in the windless air above the gate.
He heard them chanting in the distance. The city had a new anthem now, one that tried to drown the old songs, the church bells, the whispered toasts to emperors and generals long executed or fled.
“Again,” Elizaveta said. “Your consonants are slipping.”
Aleksandr dragged his attention back from the city’s uneasy murmur. They sat on a carved stone bench against the crypt wall, under a blackened icon of Saint George that no priest had blessed in years. A single electric bulb buzzed overhead, a modern insult to the flicker of old candles, casting a harsh light over his sister’s face.
She was not his sister by blood, of course. Blood had nothing to do with it, not anymore. Eighteen years earlier, Aleksandr had died on a battlefield in Galicia with his lungs full of mud and his hands full of a useless rifle. He had woken in this crypt to Elizaveta’s cool fingers on his brow and her voice in his ear, coaxing him back toward a different kind of hunger.
Now her hair was coiled in a fashion that had been daring before the war and was simply odd now, her dress all sharp angles and dropped waist, the new Paris style. A narrow scar cut from her mouth to her jawline—a souvenir from a peasant with a broken bottle and an excellent aim, decades ago. In the harsh electric light, it was a fine silver thread.
“You are not listening,” she said.
“I *am* listening.” Aleksandr forced his gaze back to the notebook in his hands. He flexed his fingers around the fountain pen until the cheap metal creaked. “I simply do not see the point.”
“The point,” Elizaveta said, in that low, patient tone that meant she was about to do something unforgivable in his best interest, “is survival. Language follows power. You know that. The Empire falls, the tongue shifts. New slogans, new idioms, new lies. If you want to live among them, you must learn how they speak.”
He looked down at the lines he had painstakingly copied out in the new orthography—simplified, brutal, like everything else these people touched. The reform had come through two years ago, sweeping away old letters like old generals. The ancient hard sign at the end of words—as solid, as reassuring as the weight of a family crest—gone, erased with the stroke of some clerk’s pen in Moscow.
It felt like blasphemy every time he wrote his own name in the new script.
“You are the one who says we should not live among them,” he said. “That it is dangerous, with this… this chaos. That we bring attention.”
“The city is still hunting ghosts from the last regime,” she said. “The wrong kind of ghosts. Ours.” Her mouth flattened. “They are not looking for poets or hunters from the old courts. They are looking for *us*, Aleksa. Old money. Old power. Landowners who still believe their estates are theirs by divine decree.”
“They *are* ours,” he said, before he could stop himself. “We were *given* them. By decree.”
“And then they were taken,” she said sharply. “By decree. If you cannot adapt to paper, little brother, how do you intend to adapt to bullets?”
He flinched. She saw it; of course she did. Her expression softened, just a fraction. She reached over and tugged his scarf straight, the same absent gesture she had used when he had first staggered through these corridors still half human, lungs burning, hair caked with the blood of men who no longer had names.
“Read that line again,” she said quietly. “And try not to sound like a Turgenev heroine about to fling herself in the river.”
He exhaled slowly, made himself meet her gaze. Her eyes never changed. Decades went by: revolutions, famines, a world war. Men grew old and broke apart; cities burned. But Elizaveta’s eyes remained the same sharp, pale grey, like a river crusting in winter.
He read, forcing his mouth around the stripped-down syllables. “All… powers of the old regime… are hereby declared—”
“Illegitimate,” Elizaveta supplied when he caught on that word. “Again.”
He set the notebook aside. “We should leave,” he said.
“We *will*,” she said. “When it is safe.”
“When will that be?”
She said nothing. The single electric bulb hissed overhead. Somewhere closer to the river, a gunshot cracked, thin but clear. Aleksandr’s new heart did not leap, because it did not beat at all, but something in his chest tightened around the phantom of the old reflex.
The war had ended five years ago, in smoke and treaties. The true war—this one, here, in the streets—did not seem to want to end at all.
He rose and paced to the far end of the chamber. The stone floor was cold beneath his boots, but not as cold as it should have been. He missed the bite of real winter. The city was different now, too crowded with men who had never seen a proper ball, whose boots had never been polished by a valet.
At the far wall, an angel knelt in stone, its wings blackened by candle smoke. Beneath it, the empty niche where his father’s coffin had once rested gaped like a pulled tooth.
“They burned him,” he said.
Elizaveta’s voice, light as ash. “Yes.”
“And Mother.”
“Yes.”
“And Uncle Pyotr. And—”
“Stop.” She was at his shoulder at once, small and unyielding. She did not touch him. He wasn’t sure if it was for his sake or hers. “We have counted them. There is no need to count them again.”
“They were already dead,” Aleksandr said. “What threat could they possibly have posed?”
“We pose a threat,” she said. “Whether we move or not. Whether we breathe or not. That is what it means to be what we are. We are a threat simply by existing. They are right to fear us. And so we must be… careful.”
She said the last word as if it contained an entire world of strategy and sacrifice. Perhaps it did.
In the hallway outside, someone laughed. Men’s voices. Rough, young. Aleksandr went still, listening. The laughter skittered along his nerves like cigarette sparks.
“Gravediggers,” Elizaveta murmured. “The new ones. They drink cheap vodka in between burials and forget which graves they have filled.”
“They come *here*?” Aleksandr’s hand went automatically to his waist, where once he had worn a sword. It wasn’t there, of course. He had not worn one in years. There were other tools now. Revolvers. Bombs. Syndicated newspapers.
“They are too afraid to come inside,” she said. “Even the ones who spit on the old names. Superstition outlives empires, thank God.”
“God.” He laughed once, softly. “Do you truly think He has anything to do with this anymore?”
She gave him a look that was almost fond. “You sound like Lev when they banned the bells.”
Lev. Their “brother” in the blood, taller and broader than Aleksandr, with a laugh like an open door and a habit of switching from Latin to gutter French mid-sentence when he was drunk. He had gone east with their maker a month ago to arrange some crucial piece of passage. Or so Elizaveta said.
“When will they be back?” Aleksandr asked. It was not the first time.
“You worry like an old aunt,” Elizaveta replied. It was not the first time for that, either. “They will be back when they are back. Do not *look* at me like that. You agreed to the plan.”
“I agreed under the impression that ‘a short absence’ meant a week. Not a month.”
“A month is a week to us.” She spoke lightly, but her hand curled into a fist on the cold stone. “And time moves… differently, these days.”
He looked at her. At the hollow beneath her cheekbone that had not been there before the war. At the way she listened to the distant roll of carts, the footsteps of soldiers, as if counting them.
“You have not fed,” he said.
“Neither have you, dear one.”
He almost smiled. “I am not the one instructing future grammar.”
She rolled her eyes. “If I go out, I must be sure I can pass for one of them. They smell indifference to doctrine. Or so Lev says.”
“He says many things,” Aleksandr muttered.
“And most of them are true.” She reached out then and rested her hand on his arm, a quick, cool pressure through layers of wool. “You know what is coming. The seizures. The show trials. The purges. This is only the beginning. We have survived pogroms, tsars, foreign armies. We will survive this as well. But we must be cleverer than we have ever been.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
She took a breath she did not need.
“It means,” she said carefully, “that we may have to disappear for a time.”
He stared at her. “We are already hiding in a crypt in our own cemetery. How much more disappeared do you want us to be?”
Her eyes did not flinch away. “Longer,” she said. “Deeper.”
She glanced toward the far side of the main chamber, where the stone floor bore no inscriptions, no carved borders. Just polished, blank granite, as if someone had begun a tomb and then changed their mind.
He followed her gaze. Felt the weight of her intent like a change in air pressure.
“No,” he said.
“You do not know what I am going to ask.”
“I know you,” he said. “No.”
“Aleksa.”
“I said *no*.” His voice came out louder than he intended, bouncing off stone and dead air. The gravediggers’ laughter in the distance faltered, then resumed, lower.
Elizaveta studied him for a heartbeat—purely metaphorical; neither of theirs moved. Then she stepped away, smoothing her skirt with both hands.
“When you read history,” she said calmly, “it appears very orderly, doesn’t it? Upheaval, then consolidation. Heads on spikes, then a new bureaucracy. But inside it… it is madness. It is… smoke. You cannot see a week ahead. You cannot know when a careless word will mean a bullet in the back of your head.”
“We are not in their history,” Aleksandr said. “We stand outside it. We watch. We move when we must.”
“And when they learn to look at night?” she asked.
He had no answer.
She took his silence for permission—as she always did. “Lev has heard rumors,” she went on. “The new authorities… they have a department, unofficial, watching for… aberrations. For us. They have heard stories. A nobleman in Kazan who has not aged in thirty years. A woman in Minsk who heals from any wound. People disappear from their villages without trace. Wolves in places there are no wolves. They will come here, Aleksa. If not tonight, then soon. We are too obvious. This estate is a… a sentence in bold type. We are a legend they are eager to correct.”
He thought of the gates. The stone lions. The crest carved over the main doors of the house: a stag, a river, a crown. He thought of the winters he had spent there as a boy, before war and death and rebirth. Hunting in the forests. Learning to waltz in the ballroom with its mirrored walls and gaslight chandeliers.
“It is ours,” he said. It came out hoarse. “It is all we have left.”
“It is already gone,” she said gently. “They have signed the papers. They have given our land to the state. They will strip the house of anything gold and anything useful, and they will let the rest rot. You know this.”
He did. A clerk—so young he had pimples along his jaw—had brought the papers a week ago. A “nationalization decree.” As if the land itself could change allegiance, like a soldier in the field.
“It does them no good if we are still here,” Elizaveta continued. “Better a sealed myth than a live quarry.”
He lifted his chin. “I will not flee. I will not—”
“I am not asking you to flee.” Her voice softened. “I am asking you to *wait*.”
He looked again at the blank stretch of floor. The memory came back to him, unwelcome but vivid: Elizaveta, years ago, instructing the old stoneworker to reinforce that part of the crypt. “Just in case,” she had said then, when he asked. “There are other threats than peasants with pitchforks.”
“You cannot be serious,” he said now. “To lie in stone like some… some pharaoh, while the world moves on? For how long? A year? Two? Ten?”
“For as long as it takes,” she said. “Until this fever burns itself out. Until these boys with their slogans either grow old and bored or shoot each other into silence. Until… until we can walk in the city without being traced on paper, without someone remembering who we used to be.”
“That could be… decades.”
“Perhaps.” Her gaze did not waver. “We are not like them. Time is… different.”
“You sound like you are describing bad weather.”
“It *is* bad weather,” she said. “A storm. And we do what we have always done in storms. We go below decks. We lash ourselves to the mast. We sleep in the earth if we must.”
He heard his own voice, thin and incredulous: “*We*?”
She hesitated, and for the first time that evening he saw uncertainty flicker across her face.
“Elizaveta,” he said slowly. “What is the plan?”
She turned away from him, walking to the far wall, to the blank stone. Her heels clicked softly on the floor. She crouched there with effortless grace and ran her fingers along an almost invisible seam, tracing the outline of a slab.
“The old mason did good work,” she murmured. “It will hold. For a very long time.”
“Eliza.” The childhood nickname slipped out. Her shoulders went still.
“I will not sleep,” she said without looking at him.
It took him a moment to understand. “You—”
“I am older,” she said. “I know how to move among them. I can make arrangements. Guard the estate from afar. Stash what we can of the fortune before they seize it all. Lay foundations in other countries. It will be easier if they believe the Morozovs are truly gone. All of them. No heirs. No claimants. Just dust in a sealed crypt.” She laid her palm flat on the stone. “And when this… this madness ends, when there is some order again—any order—I will return. I will open this. I will wake you. And we will decide our next century together.”
He stared at her back. At the fine bones of her shoulders beneath the cheap wool of her dress.
“And if you cannot return?” he said quietly.
She smiled over her shoulder. It was a bright, careless flash, too quick. “Have you ever known a mob, or a revolution, or an empire that could keep me from doing something I set my mind to?”
“Wars kill even those who believe themselves invincible,” he said. “You taught me that.”
Her gaze held his. “I am not invincible,” she said. “But I am very, very stubborn.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No,” she agreed. “It is not.”
The electric bulb flickered. In the hall, the gravediggers finished their bottle and clattered away, voices dissolving into the layered noise of a city arguing with itself.
Silence pooled in the crypt.
“How does it work?” Aleksandr asked, because some part of him had already started to surrender.
Her shoulders loosened. She came back to him, her boots whispering on the stone. Up close, he saw the fine lines at the corners of her eyes. They had not been there in 1905. Eternity did not prevent you from learning to frown.
“There is a draught,” she said. “An old one. You have seen it used, when we needed to move someone across borders in a crate.”
“Yes.” He remembered: the heavy box. The transit through customs. The man inside, grey and still, more corpse than predator until they poured blood between his lips at the destination, and his eyes had snapped open, feral and shining.
“It slows us down,” Elizaveta said. “Makes us… less aware of time. You will feel as if you sleep. You may dream. You may not. And when it wears off… it will be as if no time has passed at all.”
“You said decades.”
“You will not feel them.”
“But *you* will,” he said.
She smiled again, smaller. “I have had many lively decades already. I can stand a few tedious ones.”
“You speak as if you already decided this without me.”
Her chin lifted. “I *decided* that we needed a plan, yes. And that this was the best one. But I was not going to force you. If you had refused, we would have fled tonight. Packed what we can carry. Bribed officials. Risked the trains. Tried our luck at a border that may or may not still exist by the time we reached it.”
“And Lev?” he asked. “And her?”
Her face closed, then opened reluctantly. “They know the options,” she said. “They will—”
She did not finish. Both of them heard it at once.
Boots on the path above. Not the shambling, irregular tramp of drunks. This was orderly. Measured. Several men, moving in formation out of habit if not instruction. Metal clinked; someone coughed, harsh and wet.
Aleksandr and Elizaveta went utterly still.
Voices, distorted by snow and stone, seeped through the crypt ceiling.
“…are sure this is the one? The nobles?”
A second voice. Older. Annoyed. “I can read a list, Comrade Sasha. Morozov estate. Cemetery. We check, we confirm, we move on. You want to be back before curfew, yes? Then we do not argue the necessity of orders from the Commissariat for… for this.”
“For what?” A third voice, younger. “For bones?”
“For proof,” the older one snapped. “They like proof now. Not just rumors. We prove we have destroyed the old… *elements*. Then we get our promotions, we get better tobacco, and we do not get sent to some mine in the east to die of bad soup and lice.”
The younger man snorted. “It is bad everywhere.”
Boots crunched over snow and gravel. They were heading directly for the crypt gate.
Elizaveta’s eyes flashed to Aleksandr’s. In a blur of movement, she snatched the notebook from the bench, tore the page with his clumsy new-script name on it, and shoved it into the stove. It flared, blackened, and curled into ash.
“Inside,” she hissed.
He hesitated. “We can fight. We can—”
“If they came alone, perhaps,” she said. “But these are scouts. If they do not come back, more will. With torches. With dogs. With… with priests, for all I know. And then the neighborhood will know. And then the city. There is no more room for theater, Aleksa. We go to ground now.”
The crypt door at the top of the stairs rattled. A key fumbled in the old lock. Someone cursed the cold.
“Aleksa,” Elizaveta whispered. There was steel in her voice. “Trust me. Or do you truly think you can take down an entire revolution with your grammar exercises?”
He almost choked on a laugh. The boot of a soldier thudded once against the heavy oak, testing the resistance.
“You will wake me,” he said, very quietly.
“Yes.” No hesitation.
“You swear it. On his name.” He jerked his chin toward the empty niche where their maker’s coffin had once been.
Her eyes flashed, hurt and anger and something like admiration all tangled. “I do not swear lightly,” she said. “But I swear it. On him. On Lev. On… all of them. I will open your stone when it is safe. I *promise* you, Aleksa. We will dance in some ridiculous new club in Paris and laugh at what this city has done to itself. But first, we survive.”
The lock gave with a crack. Cold air breathed down the stairwell, spiced with tobacco, cheap wool, and gun oil.
Elizaveta moved.
Later, Aleksandr would not remember how the minutes between the first broken lock and the sealing of the stone passed. They blurred into a flurry of precise gestures, the way a battle collapsed into noise and instinct.
He remembered the narrow side passage behind the main crypt, the one that smelled of damp brick and old incense. He remembered the slab of hidden stone hissing aside on well-oiled rollers, revealing the narrow, coffin-shaped hollow lined with carved runes so old even Elizaveta could not translate them. Leftovers from some previous tenant, perhaps, some pagan who had paid good money to sleep safely through a different century of fear.
He remembered the vial she pressed into his hand. The liquid inside was thick and dark, clotting slowly as it sloshed against glass.
“Drink, now,” she said.
“What is it?” he murmured.
“An old friend,” she said. “Trust me.”
He did.
It tasted like bad wine and iron and the undercurrent of something else, something old and metallic and bitter. For a second, his throat rebelled, his body remembering that it was not meant to swallow such things anymore. Then the draught slid down, heavy as molten lead, and settled in his gut.
Cold spread outward first, numbing his fingers, his lips. Then a strange warmth, like sinking into a hot bath after a day in the snow. His limbs went heavy. The sounds of the soldiers forcing the main crypt door seemed to recede, as if they were happening in another building, another city.
“Lie down,” Elizaveta commanded.
He did, clumsy suddenly, his elegant immortal balance gone like a trick candle. The hollow of the hidden tomb fit his body almost exactly. Someone had measured very carefully. He chose not to think about that.
Above him, Elizaveta’s face hovered against the low ceiling. Her eyes were bright, jaw set.
“This feels—” He groped for a word that did not sound like cowardice. “Strange.”
“If it felt normal, I would be worried,” she said. “Close your eyes.”
He did. The faint, filthy light from the bulb beyond the wall vanished. He could still sense her, though, her presence like a familiar scent.
“Their boots,” he murmured. “I can still hear—”
“You will not, soon.” Her voice was closer now; he realized she had leaned into the hollow, her lips near his ear. “Listen to *me*, not to them.”
He swallowed. Tried to keep his eyes closed. They fluttered open once, on reflex, and he caught a fragment: her profile, outlined in dim light. The curve of her stubborn mouth. The way her hand hovered over his chest, as if longing to press down and keep his unbeating heart from… from what? Stopping? Racing? Changing?
“Elizaveta,” he said thickly. “If you do not come back…”
“I will,” she said.
“If you do *not*,” he insisted, clinging to the thread of his own voice, “I do not want to wake alone. Underground. In a world that has taken everything. If you cannot return… destroy this stone. Destroy me with it.”
“No.” A whipcrack.
“I am asking you,” he said. “I am *begging* you. Do not leave me like some forgotten relic for them to dig up. Better—better ash than that.”
For a long moment, she said nothing.
He felt the brush of her fingers against his temple, feather-light. A gesture from another century, when touching his hair had meant smoothing a rebellious cowlick before a ball.
“I am not in the habit of breaking my promises,” she said. “Do not complicate this with more. Sleep, Aleksa. When you wake, this will be over. We will be somewhere stupid and beautiful and very far from here, arguing over politics we have no intention of obeying.”
“Promise,” he whispered, but the word slurred. His tongue felt thick, his lips numb.
“I promise,” she said.
Stone scraped. Heavy. Final. The world narrowed, pressed in against him. For a wild second, panic flared—trapped, suffocating, buried—but then the draught surged again, soothing, dark.
His last clear thought was not of soldiers or slogans or burning coffins. It was of light on the ballroom floor, and Elizaveta laughing as Lev spun her too fast, and their maker watching from the stairs with a glass of something very old in his hand, amusement and pride and hunger in his black eyes.
Then the world went far, very far away.
Above him, beyond layers of carved stone and damp earth and snow, men with rifles moved through the Morozov crypt, counting bones and names.
Aleksandr Morozov slept.
And the century turned without him.
***
He dreamed, for a while, maybe. Or maybe memory curled around the emptiness like smoke.
Wars he had only half understood. Flags changing color in the distance. The first electric streetlamps in the city, flickering like trapped stars. A girl in a green dress on a balcony, her pulse thrumming in her throat like a trapped bird.
Then even those images thinned.
Silence swallowed everything.
Time stopped trying to get his attention.
The world went on.
He did not.