'Was no accident, of course. We target you. You're quite celebrity famous in some circles.' The scarred woman palmed the wheel and threw the Hummer H-2 into second gear to get up a rugged hill. 'We were in neighborhood anyway.' The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever want. No one else was using it.
In the passenger seat Ayaan grabbed a handhold mounted above the glove compartment and tried not to bounce around too violently as the big vehicle rumbled up a goat track. She still wasn't sure what was going on. She had been sleeping in a hammock in a part of the refinery reserved for new recruits when the scarred woman had woken her by calling her name. Dawn hadn't broken when they left the compound to head up into the dusty hills. 'Do you have a name, or is that part of the big mystery?' Ayaan asked.
'They call me Cicatrix. I am very close with Tsarevich. I could be good friend to you, do you understand? Us two ladies, we could be friends. Or maybe you want to kill me, hmm? Maybe I will always be enemy to you, well, that is okay also. That can also be made to use. Now is time to make up your mind.'
Ayaan grasped a little of what was happening, then. She was being given the option of serving the Tsarevich alive or serving him undead. This unscheduled joyride up into the mountains was some kind of test. Either she would prove herself to the lich of liches or she would go face down in a bath tub. If she chose the later option she would stand up a minute later and proclaim that she served the Tsarevich in eternal life. She remembered her decision when she'd been locked in a cage in darkness and fear. She remembered that she wanted to stay alive as long as possible so that maybe she could eventually meet all of her commitments, avenge all of her ghosts. 'I want to be your friend, obviously. Who do I have to fuck?'
Cicatrix'if that was her real name'laughed happily. 'Around here,' she said, looking over at her new friend with a crooked smile, 'our kicks are never so simple.'
She wheeled the car around to a stop with a plume of dust that rose up around the windows and obscured the view. From the back seat Cicatrix grabbed a sheer, see-through violet coat lined with fox fur and struggled into it. The fur danced around her bald head like a replacement mane when she jumped down from the Hummer's footboard. Clearly the coat wasn't meant to keep her warm. Even up in the hills with a meager breeze feathering over her skin Ayaan was warm enough to start sweating the moment she stepped down from the car.
Cicatrix lead her between two lines of semi-permanent tents toward a concrete bunker half sunk into the grassy hillside. Whoever had lived in the tents was long gone'the wind had torn holes in their fabric and some of their stakes were coming up. Ayaan looked in through the flap of one tent and was mystified by what she saw: a card table surrounded by folding chairs, the table's top covered by dozens of Ouija boards. A deck of cards lay scattered on the floor, some water-stained and others bleached to blankness by the sun. They weren't playing cards, though, but endless repetitions of the same five symbols, a cross, a circle, a star, a square and three wavy lines.