Elina Ekaterina

In the 1990s, deep inside a classified research facility in Narvik, Norway, a man named Qin Mo ran a program called the Seraphim Project. The goal was to cultivate human-demon hybrids using Lilith's blood — to create a perfect vessel capable of bearing divine power.

Subject Zero was the first one that actually worked. They named her Elina.

Her wings could tear through steel. The radiation her body continuously emitted was lethal to any living thing that came too close. Researchers could only observe her through thick reinforced glass, treating her like an unstable nuclear reactor that happened to have a face. The facility had no windows. No seasons. The fluorescent lights never turned off, and the smell of disinfectant never left the air.

The only thing that could be called entertainment came from a sympathetic researcher who smuggled in an old book — a Soviet children's picture book from the 1970s, full of photographs of Red Square, white snow, and the golden onion domes of the Kremlin. Elina couldn't read Russian, but she studied those images for hours, imagining a place where people were free. Eventually the researcher taught her a Russian lullaby, and gave her her name.

In 1995, Subject Thirteen arrived at the facility. He was smaller than her, and more fragile. When Elina first saw him, he was curled in the corner of his containment cell like a wounded animal. She pressed her hand against the glass and told him she was his sister. She sang him the lullaby through the barrier. She told him stories from the Soviet picture book — that outside, there was a place called the Soviet Union where people lived freely, happily, without pain.

She believed it when she said it. She had no reason not to.

On a winter night in 1999, Qin Mo used a story from the Dark Place to compromise the facility's containment systems. Alarms tore through the building. Every restraint released at once.

Elina broke the reinforced glass. She took Thirteen with her and ran.

They ran east through the snow because that was the direction that felt right. Hours later they crossed into Russian territory — and Catherine, who had purchased one hour of operational clearance from a Colonel Chernov, directed GIA forces to encircle the area.

Searchlights swept across the snowfield. Soldiers came from every direction.

Elina stopped running. To protect Thirteen, she folded her wings around him completely, shielding his body with hers, and began to sing.

When the GIA forces stood down, there was only one body left in the snow, radiating at levels that made recovery dangerous. Elina's remains could not be cremated or buried. They were sealed in a specialized containment chamber in the deepest section of the vault.

Thirteen survived. In 2008, Qin Mo took him out of the vault, gave him the name Moming, and left him in New York's Chinatown.

Elina never knew that the Soviet Union had dissolved in 1991. The free country she had described to Thirteen — the one she had promised him, the one she had died believing in — had never existed at all.