By the time Mira Okonkwo found the Morozov estate, most of the city had already decided it was easier to pretend it didn’t exist.
The taxi driver refused to take her all the way to the gates.
He stopped two blocks short, pulling up with an apologetic squeal of brakes beside a bus stop whose sign leaned at a permanently hungover angle. The sky had that grey, washed-out look particular to late autumn afternoons when the city couldn’t decide whether to rain or snow.
“This is as far as I go,” he said, killing the engine. “Road is bad there.”
Mira glanced past him, up the narrow street. The asphalt cracked and buckled as it sloped toward the hill, frost heaves and old tree roots tugging at its surface.
“It doesn’t look that bad,” she said. “If it’s about money, I can—”
He shook his head quickly, too quickly. “Not about money, devushka. Not worth the tyres. Not worth… anything. You walk from here, yes?”
She studied his face. Mid-fifties, maybe. Weathered, with deep grooves around his mouth from too many cigarettes and too many disappointments. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Superstitious?” she asked lightly.
He made a warding gesture with one hand, half a joke, half not. “Old place. Bad stories. People go there when they want to drink in peace or… other things. They say it is haunted.”
She smiled. “Everything in this city is haunted. That’s why I’m here.”
He blinked at her, then snorted. “Academics. You all think ghosts can be measured with tape recorders.”
“I’m not that kind of academic,” she said. “I’m here for deed records, not disembodied voices.”
He opened his mouth to retort, then seemed to think better of it. He shrugged, glanced at the meter, and turned it off.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “There is a number for another taxi on the card in the back. But if it gets dark, call early. We do not like to wait up here.”
“You and the ghosts?” she said.
He did not smile this time. “Me,” he said. “And the kinds of people who go to places other people avoid. Be careful, devushka.”
She nodded, slid her backpack onto one shoulder, and stepped out into the cold.
The wind slapped her across the face at once, a thin, needling gust that snuck under her scarf and down the back of her coat. She shivered, zipped up, and turned toward the hill.
The Morozov estate had been a rumor before it was a cause. Two years ago, when Mira had first arrived in the city on a fellowship that was supposed to be temporary and had quietly became more permanent, someone had pointed up toward the hill at the edge of the old quarter and said, with the offhand certainty of people who grow up around ruins, “That’s where the house is. You know. *The* house.”
“What house?” she’d asked, because of course she had.
“The big one. The old one. With the lions.” A shrug. “Morozov. Used to be. Before. Now nobody knows who owns it. Or everyone does and they won’t admit it. Same thing. Kids dare each other to break in. Sometimes they don’t come back.”
“Because they fall through rotten floors,” Mira had said dryly.
Her colleague had rolled her eyes. “You’re not from here. You don’t know.”
Now, two winters later, Mira knew a little more.
She knew the estate was officially listed as a municipal historic site, in theory protected from demolition, in practice ignored. She knew there were competing claims about ownership: distant cousins scattered across continents, the city’s cultural department, a state-owned construction firm with suspiciously good political connections. She knew the roof had collapsed over one wing fifteen years ago and no one had repaired it. She knew the garden had long since become a small, unmanaged forest. She knew that on drunk summer nights, students lit illegal bonfires in the grounds and told each other stories about aristocrats who fed on blood.
She also knew that three months ago, a development consortium had filed a request with the city to “rezone and redevelop” the parcel of land the estate sat on.
“Luxury residences,” the brochure had promised. “Respecting the historic character of the site while bringing it into the twenty-first century.”
Mira had read that line, snorted, and taken the brochure home to pin to the corkboard over her desk under the heading: ENEMIES.
Now her nonprofit—three staff members, two interns, and a part-time lawyer with a martyr complex—was the only thing standing between the Morozov estate and a shallow, glass-fronted grave.
To win, they needed proof.
The city worked on paper and precedence, not on sentiment. It didn’t care that the estate’s cracked facade and sunken porch made Mira’s stomach ache with the same mix of awe and frustration she’d felt as a teenager visiting abandoned slave castles on the West African coast. It cared whether the building was officially recorded as “culturally significant” or “structurally unsafe.” It cared whether anyone with enough political clout could make a fuss if the bulldozers rolled in.
Mira’s job, more or less, was “to make a sustainable fuss.”
Today was reconnaissance.
She trudged up the hill, boots crunching over packed dirt and old gravel. The houses thinned as she climbed, giving way to empty lots and the occasional lopsided wooden shed. Overhead, the clouds hung low and sulky. A crow watched her from the skeleton of a naked tree, head cocked, as if considering whether she was worth following.
When she reached the top, the first thing she saw were the lions.
They flanked the gate, shoulder-high, carved from pale stone that had greyed with soot and rain. Once, their manes had probably been intricately detailed. Time had worn them down, smoothing the fur into stylized waves. One lion’s nose was chipped, giving it a permanently sneering look. Someone had spray-painted a crude penis on its haunch a few years back; the outlines still showed under a half-hearted wash of grey paint.
“Dignified,” Mira murmured, catching her breath. She unshouldered her backpack and rested for a moment, hand on the cold iron of the gate.
It was chained shut, of course. The links were thick, rusted, looped in a messy knot through the bars. A faded city notice was zip-tied to one side, the words WARNING: UNSAFE STRUCTURE bleached almost blank by sun and snow.
Beyond the gate, the driveway curved away into a tunnel of overgrown trees. Bare branches clawed at the sky like black veins.
Mira dug in her coat pocket and pulled out a pair of cheap knit gloves. She tugged them on, flexed her fingers, and reached into her backpack for the bolt cutters.
The first time she’d carried them through airport security, she’d expected a small war. Instead, the bored woman at the x-ray had barely glanced at the monitor, waved her through, and returned to her phone.
“People bring worse,” the lawyer, Dima, had said when she told him about it, laughing. “You are not as dangerous as you think, Mira.”
He wasn’t entirely right.
The bolt cutters bit through the chain with less resistance than she’d expected. Rust fell like dark confetti. She eased the gate open a crack—just enough to slip through—and pulled it carefully closed behind her.
The air on the other side felt different. Colder, somehow. Or maybe that was just the lack of traffic noise. The city seemed to fall away all at once, swallowed by the trees. Her own footsteps sounded too loud.
“Okay,” she said under her breath. “Hi. I’m like a conservation dentist. I’m just going to have a little look at your cavities, no need to—”
She stopped herself. Talking to buildings was a habit she tried not to confess to people who didn’t share it.
The driveway, once gravel, was mostly dirt now. Weeds had elbowed aside the stones and grown, died, and grown again, building up a thin, spongy layer of decayed matter. Her boots squelched softly as she walked.
The house appeared gradually, a dull ghost through the trees. First, she saw the balustrade of the main terrace, sagging a little in the middle like tired shoulders. Then the top floor windows, glass mostly intact but filthy, staring out blind. Then the central portico with its columns, one cracked in a jagged line from capital to base.
“Wow,” Mira breathed.
Even in this state, the place was enormous. Three stories, U-shaped around a central courtyard she could only glimpse, wings stretching out to either side like open arms. The roofline bristled with chimneys and small dormers. Once-white stucco had greyed, peeled, and fallen in places to reveal the red brick underneath. Ivy had claimed entire sections, wrapping the walls in a dead, brown net.
A single metal gutter hung loose at one corner, swaying slightly in the wind with a faint, lonely creak.
Mira fished her phone out of her pocket and took a few quick photos, rotating slowly: facade, terrace, right wing, left wing. She zoomed in on the cracked column. On a series of carved stone panels above the windows, each painted once, now faint: a stag, a river, a crown.
An echo of a family crest, stripped of its color and power, clinging stubbornly to the wall.
She had seen it before, in archives. On wax seals. On a yellowed newspaper photograph clipped out and glued crooked into an old police file. The caption, handwritten under it in tidy, pre-revolutionary script: “Estate of the Morozov family, scene of the illicit gathering, 1905.”
She wished she could have seen it then, all lit for a ball. Musicians in the balcony over there. Light spilling from every window. Women in dresses with impossible waistlines. Men in uniforms that still meant something. Someone laughing too loud on the terrace, a scandal in progress.
Now, dead leaves skittered across the flagstones.
Mira dropped her phone back into her pocket and approached the front steps.
They were stone, stained and worn, the edges rounded. A patch of moss clung to one corner, bright green against the grey. The heavy double doors at the top were wood, carved with a pattern of vines and berries, the once-fine details filled with grime.
A modern padlock, newer than the chain on the gate, fastened a horizontal iron bar across them.
She eyed it, weighed her options, and then circled to the right.
The ground-floor windows were tall, once elegant, now clouded and broken in places. Boards covered a few. Others gaped open, jagged glass teeth waiting. She ducked under a low, arched side porch and found what she was looking for: a door half-hidden behind a tangle of dead ivy, its lock long since forced.
She pushed. It scraped open a hand’s breadth, protesting. She put her shoulder into it, grunted, and shoved it farther until she could slip through.
The smell hit her first.
Old buildings each had their own scents. Some were musty but clean, like closed-up attics. Some smelled of dust and paper and a faint ghost of polishing wax. Some smelled like damp sweaters and cabbage, the residue of too many people living too many lives in too little space.
This one smelled like all of that, and something older. Stone and cold and the faint, metallic tang of long-rusted metal. Underneath it, she thought—maybe she imagined it—an echo of incense. Or just mold. Hard to tell.
She clicked on her flashlight.
The beam cut through the gloom in a clean, white cone, catching motes of dust that drifted lazily despite the cold. She stood in what had once been a servants’ corridor, she guessed—narrow, with plaster walls cracked into a map of fine lines. The floorboards creaked under her weight but held.
She breathed in, slow, steady, then out. Her pulse, which had been beating that little bit too fast ever since the taxi driver’s parting warning, settled.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Let’s see if we can find you some paperwork, old man.”
The legal theory was simple enough: if they could prove that parts of the estate had been in continuous—or at least recent—use as anything other than a derelict ruin, they could argue it wasn’t just a hazard but a “site of ongoing cultural activity.” It was harder to evict an active ghost than a dead one. Occasionally, the city even respected that.
If they could find any original documentation tucked away—plans, diaries, letters—they could sweeten their case with appeals to heritage, uniqueness, the kind of phrases that made international grant committees open their wallets.
Mostly, though, Mira wanted to know who had lived here. How. For how long. What they had left behind when they fled and who had claimed the space afterward.
The corridor opened into a larger room. A kitchen, once, with a massive brick stove along one wall, its iron doors rusted orange. A wooden table stood at a crooked angle, one leg gone so it leaned on a stack of bricks someone had shoved under the corner. Broken plates and a few rusted utensils lay scattered on the floor, half-buried in dust.
“Charming,” Mira muttered. Her breath fogged faintly in the beam of light. The building trapped the cold.
She moved methodically, as she had been trained: first floor, second floor, then attic if there was one, then, *if* she had time and if she could find a safe route, the cellars. Only a fraction of her mind registered individual objects. The rest took in structural details: cracks, sagging beams, places where water had chewed at the plaster.
The house had been looted in waves. First, probably, the revolutionaries, taking anything obviously valuable: silver, art, portable furniture. Then the government functionaries, scavenging the more mundane but still useful: bed frames, chairs, maybe even doors. Later, teenagers looking for a thrill and something to break.
Yet here and there, tucked in corners or caught between floorboards, little pockets of life remained.
In a small sitting room on the first floor, she found a cracked teacup on a windowsill, its rim chipped but intact, a faded ring where it had once held liquid long since evaporated. Beside it lay a book half-eaten by mold. She could just make out the title: a French novel, printed in 1896. Someone had underlined a passage in brittle, brown ink. She traced the lines with her gloved finger, imagining some long-dead lady of the house sighing at the romance.
In a bedroom whose ceiling had partially collapsed, letting in a slant of milky daylight, she found an old shoe under a heap of plaster dust. Small, narrow, with a heel that would have destroyed her knees. She held it up by the laces, shook out the debris, and could almost see the foot that had filled it.
“Who were you?” she asked, to the empty air.
The house did not answer. But it listened.
On the second floor, she found the ballroom.
She knew it the moment she stepped through the double doors. Even under decades of grime, it had a certain hush, a quality of space that marked it apart. The ceiling soared, painted once in pale colors now speckled with water damage. The walls on either side were lined with tall mirrors, most cracked, some shattered, spiderwebbing her reflected flashlight into fragments.
The floor was parquet, warped and grey but still mostly intact. She walked carefully, testing each section before putting her weight fully down. Once, her boot broke through a rotten plank and she yanked it back with a sharp curse, heart spiking. The hole gaped, showing the dark of the room below.
“Okay. Not that way,” she told herself, skirting it. “Not dying today. Not being the idiot who falls through a floor in pursuit of a thesis that won’t even get her tenure.”
Her voice echoed softly, repeating “tenure” back at her like a taunt.
At the far end of the room, a balcony jutted out over what must have been the musicians’ stage. A broken chandelier lay in a heap under it, its crystals scattered like dull, dirty ice.
She stood for a while in the center of the room and closed her eyes.
It was a trick she’d learned years ago, in a crumbling palace in Benin. Sight could overwhelm. Sometimes, if you turned it off, you could sense a space more… honestly. The way sound carried. The particular way air moved. The thickness of silence.
She imagined the room full: people talking, laughing, the scrape of shoes on the floor, music swelling. A man’s low voice at her ear. The faint rustle of silk, the sharper rustle of illicit paper. The weight of eyes from the balcony as someone watched, measuring.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, making her jump.
She exhaled, opened her eyes, and fumbled it out. The screen showed Dima’s name and a thumbnail of his scowling face.
“Yeah?” she answered, hitting speaker and tucking it between her cheek and shoulder so she could keep the flashlight steady.
“You alive?” Dima asked without preamble. His accent flattened some vowels in a way that made him sound perpetually unimpressed.
“So far.”
“Any falling masonry?”
“No more than usual.” She rotated slowly, giving herself a 360-degree scan of the room again. “I’m on the second floor. There’s a ballroom. It’s beautiful, in a sort of tragic, tetanus-risk way.”
“Stay away from the windows,” he said. “If the wrong idiot with a drone sees a light in there, we’ll have police and developers up your ass in ten minutes.”
“Romantic imagery,” she teased. “You should have been a poet instead of a lawyer.”
“I am a poet. I just chose a different meter. How is the structure?”
“Not about to collapse, but not thrilled I’m here either.” She shifted, angling the flashlight toward a series of double doors at the far corner of the ballroom. “No obvious fire damage. Water infiltration, yes. Vandals, yes. It’s salvageable if the city doesn’t drag its feet another twenty years.”
He grunted. “I sent you the scanned documents from the regional archive.”
“I saw them.” She had. Last night, huddled in her cramped apartment with a mug of tea balanced on a stack of case files, she’d scrolled through grainy scans: a typed inventory of “confiscated assets” from 1923, including “one estate house of stone construction, three stories, with outbuildings; one family crypt.”
“The deed transfer in ‘98 is the key,” Dima went on. “They sold the entire property to a company that technically no longer exists. If we can demonstrate irregularities with the valuation, we can argue for a review of the sale. Maybe even a reversion to municipal ownership, which—”
“—would at least slow down tearing it down, I know.” Mira nudged open one of the side doors with her toe. It groaned and stuck halfway.
“You’re looking for the crypt records?” Dima asked.
“And anything else that might make an international heritage organization clutch its pearls and throw money at us,” she said. “Yes. The inventory says ‘Morozov family archives removed to secure location’ but it doesn’t say where. There might be some clue here.”
“Might be vampires,” he said dryly.
“Then they’re very patient ones,” she said. “The last time anyone bothered to officially catalogue this place was 1978.”
“Maybe they are introverts.” He paused, then his tone shifted. “Listen. I got a weird call this morning.”
She hesitated, fingers tightening on the flashlight. “Define weird.”
“A man from… let’s say a private security firm. He asked if our organization has any interest in bidding on the property if it ever goes to auction.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Bidding? With what money? My student loan debt?”
“That’s what I told him. He was very… polite. Too polite. The way men are when they want something and are not sure how badly you will make them work to get it.”
“That’s all?”
“He mentioned your name.”
She stopped dead. “What?”
“Said, and I quote, ‘We are aware that Dr. Okonkwo has been active in community engagement regarding the estate.’ He also said you should be… cautious in your field visits.”
A prickle traveled down her spine. “How would he know I’m on a field visit today?”
“He didn’t say today. But his timing was… not random.” Dima cleared his throat. “I called you because you are currently trespassing in a structurally dubious monument to feudal decadence, and because I am fond of you in a strictly professional, platonic, and occasionally annoyed manner, and because if something happens to you I cannot find another historian willing to work for what we pay.”
“Touched,” she said. Her mouth was suddenly dry. “Did you get a name?”
“Nothing that will help. He called himself Mr. Lebedev, which is like calling yourself Mr. Johnson. The number was from a burner. I traced it as far as I could. It ends in a corporate labyrinth.”
“Developers?”
“Could be. Could also be… other people. The kind you read about when you dig in the right files.”
“Organized crime?”
“Or disorganized,” he said. “Listen. Be quick, okay? In and out. No snacking. No dance with the ghosts. If you do not text me in one hour, I am calling the cavalry.”
“The cavalry being…?”
“My cousin in the patrol police. He owes me money. I will tell him you have gone to meet the vampires. It will amuse him.”
“Comforting,” she said. “Okay. One hour. I’ll start with the ground floor archives, then see if I can find a way to the basement. That’s probably where the crypt access is.”
“Why are you smiling when you say ‘crypt’?”
“Because I’m a ghoul,” she said. “Talk soon.”
She hung up, tucking the phone back into her pocket. For a moment, she simply stood, listening. The house waited.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Let’s go find your bones.”
***
Finding the entrance to the crypt took longer than she’d anticipated.
On the ground floor, a corridor at the back of the house led to a row of tall windows overlooking the overgrown garden. At the far end, half-hidden by a toppled wardrobe, she found a door of thicker, darker wood, fitted with an old iron lock long since snapped. The stairs beyond led down, spiraling, the air growing colder and damper with each step.
Her flashlight beam picked out old graffiti on the walls: initials scratched into plaster, a crude drawing of a skull, a declaration of love for someone named “Nastya” dated 2004. The handrail, once polished, was sticky with grime.
The stairs opened into a squat, low-ceilinged room that smelled sharply of earth and stone. A few broken crates lay against one wall, their labels illegible. Wine racks, long since stripped of bottles, lined another. Mold spotted the bricks, white and fuzzy in the corners.
“Cellar,” Mira murmured. “Promising.”
She swung the beam slowly, carefully. Doorways led off in three directions. One showed a glimpse of another storage room, with the collapsed remains of what might have been sacks of grain. Another opened into a narrower passage, its floor slick with something dark.
Her flashlight hit the third doorway and caught on metal.
The gate was beautiful in an ominous, morgue-architectural way: wrought iron, intricate scrollwork forming the shapes of vines and lilies. A stylized letter M sat at its center, flanked by two lions that echoed the ones at the estate’s main gate. Beyond it, the darkness deepened into something almost tangible.
Mira’s breath curled white in the cold. She stepped closer, lips parted.
“Found you,” she whispered.
The gate was locked, of course. The keyhole, old and ornate, had long since rusted solid. Someone had, at one point, chained the bars shut as well, but the chain hung in two sad, broken halves.
She put her hand on the iron and pushed gently.
The gate resisted, then yielded with a torturous, drawn-out creak that echoed down the hall. Dust sifted from the ceiling. She winced.
“Stealthy,” she muttered. “Very ninja.”
She slipped through the gap and into the crypt.
The air changed again, denser. The smell of earth was stronger, laced with a faint, dry cold like the inside of an unplugged freezer. Her flashlight threw long, skeletal shadows along the low arches of the ceiling. Niches lined the walls, some filled with stone slabs, others empty. Names carved into the faces of the slabs blurred under her light—Aleksai, Tatiana, Lev, years, titles, all in the old orthography, complete with the dignified hard sign at the ends of words.
She’d seen photos of noble family crypts like this, in glossy coffee-table books and dismal microfilm. Seeing one in person was something else.
“Hello,” she said softly to the company of the dead. “Don’t mind me. I’m only here to make sure no one builds a parking lot on your heads.”
Her voice came back to her, thin and tinny. She moved carefully along the central aisle, sweeping the beam over each slab in turn. Some had been pried open at some point—perhaps in the 1920s, when the new regime had gone on a morbid treasure hunt, looking for gold fillings and secret compartments. One lay askew, showing a dark gap. She did not look too closely. She had not eaten yet today, and she did not particularly want to see what a century did to human remains.
Near the far end of the crypt, the architecture shifted slightly. The ceiling dipped, the floor rising to meet it in a few shallow steps. The air felt… thicker. Not just in temperature, but in something else she couldn’t name.
Her flashlight caught on something that wasn’t stone.
An electrical fixture.
She blinked. A single naked bulb hung from the ceiling by a fraying wire over a small, square chamber beyond the main crypt, its presence as jarringly modern as a smartphone in a portrait gallery.
She stepped under it, shone her light upward. The bulb was long dead, spiderwebs clinging to its glass. Someone had electrified this space at some point, which meant someone had used it after the house was built. Her historian’s nose twitched.
The chamber itself was unadorned. Plain stone walls, no carved names, no saints or angels. Just a smooth, blank floor that looked… wrong. Too even, too clean. As if someone had laid it later, covering something.
“Interesting,” she murmured.
She crouched, ran her gloved fingers along the edges where the slab met the older, rougher flagstones. A faint line. Not quite a seam, but… maybe.
“You’re hiding something,” she said.
Her phone buzzed faintly in her pocket, muffled by fabric. She ignored it for the moment, her focus narrowing to the floor.
It was probably nothing. A covered drain. A storage pit. A trick of light.
It could also be exactly the sort of thing that made her career.
She ran her hands again, more slowly. There—just there—her fingertips brushed over a tiny depression, like the head of a concealed bolt. Another on the opposite side. Two more near the far corners.
“Hello,” she breathed.
The rational part of her mind said: This is a crypt. The rational part said: Whoever built this had more money than sense and probably constructed a labyrinth underneath your feet because they could. The rational part said: You should call Dima, mark the spot, come back later with proper tools, maybe a structural engineer, at least one other human being, and not die alone, flattened under a slab of stone or trapped in a hole.
The less rational part—which often, unhelpfully, sounded like her grandmother—said: If you don’t pull on the thread, how will you know what the cloth was supposed to look like?
She rocked back on her heels and blew out a breath.
“Okay,” she said to the stone. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Her phone buzzed again. With a sigh, she fished it out and glanced at the screen.
Dima: 30 minutes. Status?
Mira: Found the crypt. Found something weird. Alive. No angry ghosts yet.
Three dots appeared as he typed, disappeared, reappeared.
Dima: Weird like “maybe smuggling vault” or weird like “maybe sacrificial altar”?
Mira: Jury’s out. Floor panel. Later addition. Looks like it opens. Don’t freak out.
Dima: Already freaking out. Send location.
She snapped a quick photo of the chamber, the panel, the bulb overhead, and sent it with the phone’s GPS pin. The signal down here was spotty; the message took a few seconds to send.
Dima: Do NOT go underground alone.
She looked at the slab. At the almost-invisible bolts.
Mira: Just looking. Promise.
It wasn’t *technically* a lie. She wasn’t underground yet. She was just… contemplating.
She stuffed the phone back into her pocket, feeling a flicker of guilt, and stood.
There were no obvious handles. No hinges. The bolts, if that’s what they were, sat flush with the surface, giving no grip. Whatever mechanism had once lifted this panel, if it was meant to be lifted at all, was likely corroded solid.
She pressed her palm flat against the stone and pushed down, then side to side, testing for give. Nothing.
“Stubborn,” she muttered. “Like everyone else in this country.”
She stepped back, scanning the walls. If there was a mechanism, there might be some clue. A notch. A loose stone. Something.
Her flashlight beam swept over rough masonry, then snagged on a faint, chalky mark at shoulder height on one side. She stepped closer, squinting.
Someone had scratched something here, shallow and hasty. It was almost entirely worn away, but she could just make out the impression of a circle. And inside it, perhaps… a stylized letter. Or just a flaw in the stone. Her brain wanted it to be meaningful.
“I’m going to regret this,” she said softly.
She set her backpack down on the edge of the chamber, braced her boots wide for balance, and crouched again. This time, she placed both hands flat on the stone and pushed with more intent, engaging shoulders, back, legs.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then, with a reluctance that was almost a moan, the slab shifted under her palms.
She gasped, muscles straining. The motion was small, maybe half a centimeter, but it was enough. Air hissed up from the gap that opened, colder even than the rest of the crypt, with a smell that made her recoil on instinct: dry, metallic, old.
Not rot, exactly. Not damp earth. Something else.
She froze, heart pounding.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
She waited, half-expecting a rush of bats or a ghostly hand.
Nothing happened. The cold breath subsided. The house held hers.
When her racing pulse settled, she wiped her palms on her thighs, took a firmer grip, and pushed again.
The stone moved more willingly this time, scraping along hidden tracks with a flinty rasp. A line of darkness widened at one end, blacker than the shadows around it.
The smell came again, stronger now. It wasn’t unpleasant so much as… *empty.* Like the air inside sealed packaging when you first rip it open. Air that hadn’t been breathed in a very long time.
Her skin prickled. Her ancestors would have told her to leave it alone. Her training told her to document everything.
She braced herself one last time, teeth gritted, and shoved with all the strength she had. Her shoulders burned. Her hands slipped once, stone biting into her palm through the thin knit of her gloves. The slab slid another twenty centimeters, then another ten, then stopped with a muted thud as it hit some kind of limit.
The opening it revealed was roughly coffin-sized.
Mira wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist, even though the air was cold enough to make her breath smoke. She angled her flashlight over the edge and peered down.
At first, she saw only stone. Smooth, pale, perfectly fit walls. Then the beam caught on something that wasn’t stone.
Fabric. Dark. Worn.
She focused, heart suddenly hammering again for an entirely different reason.
A figure lay there.
Not bones. Not a collapsed, anonymous mound of dust and long-decayed clothing.
A body.
Dressed in a long, dark coat, its collar high, its cut… old-fashioned. Not costume-party old-fashioned. Genuinely, precisely out-of-time. The fabric looked thick, heavy wool, the kind that cost more than her monthly salary now, let alone then. A scarf lay twisted under the jaw, neat even after god-knew-how-long.
The face—
She had to force herself to look at the face.
She was braced for horror. For the leathery, mummified distortion of features she’d seen in textbooks. For skull and parchment and empty sockets. For the undeniable, inarguable *deadness* of long-decayed flesh.
Instead, what she saw made her brain stutter.
The man—because it was a man, clearly—looked… asleep.
Pale, yes. Very pale. His skin had the faint translucence of someone who hadn’t seen the sun in a very long time. Dark hair—black, or nearly—fell across his forehead in loose, unfashionable waves. His features were sharp, lips colorless but full, nose straight.
His eyes were closed.
His chest did not move.
Of course it didn’t move, she told herself sharply. Dead bodies did not breathe. Even exceptionally well-preserved ones.
Except—she had seen exceptionally well-preserved ones. In glaciers. In bogs. In sealed tombs. They did not look like this. They looked… *other.* Closed, yes, but in a way that declared There is nothing left in here but meat and history.
This man’s face looked… lived in. Lines faintly creased his forehead, the corners of his mouth. Not many. Thirties, maybe. If he’d been human. When.
Something inside Mira leaned forward, years of training and instinct vibrating like a tuning fork.
“No way,” she whispered.
She swallowed, throat dry. Her fingers twitched, wanting to reach down and touch his cheek, check for warmth, texture, anything. She pressed them flat on the stone instead.
“Hello?” she said softly, feeling ridiculous. “You’re… very rude, you know. Sleeping through a revolution or two while the rest of us do all the work.”
No response. Obviously.
“He’s dead,” she muttered. “He *has* to be dead. Get a grip.”
Her rational mind said: There is no oxygen in that space. There hasn’t been for decades, at least. Possibly a century. No one can survive that. No one human.
Her less rational mind pointed out that this stone was very carefully hidden. That the chamber had once had electricity. That rich people did strange things to avoid the consequences of history. That the estate’s myth among the locals had always included whispers of vampires.
She was not, by nature, a superstitious person. She had grown up with ghosts of a very particular kind: historical, imperial, the kind that lived in archives. Her grandmother had believed in other ghosts, older ones, and had told her stories when she was small about ancestors who walked in dreams and argued with the living.
Mira had chalked most of that up to poetic metaphor.
Now, staring down into the long, narrow hollow with its impossible occupant, she felt the thin skin between metaphor and reality go translucent.
Her phone vibrated violently in her pocket.
She jumped, bit back a curse, and yanked it out with clumsy fingers. The light shook in her hand, beam jittering over the man’s still face, making his shadows dance.
Dima: 45 minutes. This is me freaking out. Respond.
Mira: I’m here. Found… something. Not sure if it’s a dead body or a very committed performance art piece.
Dima: Not funny.
Mira: I’m sending a picture. Don’t @ me.
She took a photo before she could talk herself out of it. The flash made the man’s skin look even paler, blowing out all subtleties. His closed eyes glowed faintly like marble.
She hit send and waited, heartbeat ticking in her throat.
The three dots appeared, vanished, reappeared.
Dima: …Is this a joke?
Mira: I wish.
Dima: A wax figure? Some kind of religious relic?
Mira: He looks… new. Like if I touched him he’d be room temp-ish. But he has to be dead. There’s no air. No food. No water. So. We’re going with “unlabeled cadaver” for now.
A pause.
Dima: Get. Out.
Mira: We can’t just leave him here. If the developers come in and find this—
Dima: He has been there long enough that another ten hours will not make a difference. Call the police. Call me. But get out.
Her gaze dropped again to the man’s face.
If she called the police, one of two things would happen. Either they would shrug, chalk him up as some historic oddity, drag him out, and stash him in some morgue drawer, where he would become a footnote in an internal report no one read. Or they would see *value*—not cultural, but monetary—in a perfectly preserved corpse in a noble’s secret tomb and quietly sell him to someone who collected such things.
If he was not just a corpse…
She cut that thought off.
“Okay,” she said aloud, to no one. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I am not going to do anything stupid. I am going to document and retreat. Then we will make a plan.”
Her own voice sounded unconvinced.
She tucked the phone away again, tight in her pocket, and leaned a fraction closer to the opening. Not close enough to fall, but enough to bring her face within a meter of his.
The cold from below rose against her skin, smelling of stone and something faintly metallic. The light picked out details: the faint stubble along his jaw, as if he’d needed a shave the day he lay down. The worn edges of his collar. A tiny tear in the scarf, neatly darned with thread just slightly darker than the wool.
“How long have you been down there?” she whispered.
Silence.
Her hand moved before she could stop it. As if something in the air between them had reached up and tugged her wrist.
She stretched her fingers toward his face, hesitated for one last, high, breathless second, then brushed the back of her knuckles very lightly along the line of his cheekbone.
His skin was not ice-cold.
It was cool, yes. Cooler than her own chilled fingers. But not the absolute, unyielding cold of stone. There was a subtle give under her touch. A texture.
Her breath caught.
“Jesus,” she said, almost soundless.
She left her hand there for a heartbeat. Then another. Then a third.
Still nothing.
Then—
So faint she almost convinced herself she imagined it, a tremor ran along the fine muscles under his eye. The skin twitched.
Mira yanked her hand back as if she’d been burned, heart slamming against her ribs so hard it hurt.
“Nope,” she said out loud, voice high. “Nope. That did not happen. That did *not*—”
His eyelids fluttered.
Just once. A slight, almost imperceptible quiver. Then again, more definitely. As if whatever had held them shut from the inside was losing its grip.
She scrambled back on her knees, hands slipping on the stone, nearly falling. The flashlight skittered from her grasp, clattered against the slab, and landed on its side, beam tilting crazily.
Below, the man’s lashes—unreasonably, unfairly dark—lifted.
His eyes opened.
They were not the cloudy, unfocused orbs of someone whose body had been preserved but whose brain had turned to soup. They were clear. Pale.
And they were looking directly at her.
For a second, everything in Mira’s world narrowed to that gaze.
There was no house. No crypt. No city. No developers. No century.
Just the impossible fact of an *awake* man in a stone coffin under an abandoned aristocrat’s estate, and his eyes like winter water, and the way they fixed on hers as if she were the first real thing he’d seen in a very long time.
His lips moved. Cracked, or perhaps only stiff with disuse. No sound came out.
She realized, with a detached, hysterical layer of her mind, that she’d been holding her breath. She let it out in a shudder.
“Hi,” she croaked.
Her voice echoed off the stone.
The man blinked slowly, as if the act took effort. His throat worked. When he spoke, finally, his voice was rusty, the syllables thick and old-fashioned.
“*Elizaveta?*”
***