Budapest » [Clintasha]

Chapter Five: Enrolment

I woke up in a dull bunk room, chaffing brittle wool covers cloaking my tiny frame. The room was more like a cellar. The walls were plain crumbling brick and the floors were water coated cement, a glossy layer sitting on the grey surface.

Splotches of decaying damp crawled across the ceiling, bubbling under the plaster and tainting it with it's rotting green hold. The room reeked of it, in fact.

Then I became aware of the pain still residing in my body as left its dormant state and I transitioned into true consciousness. The white hot pain that had been blazing in my head had dulled into a subdued throbbing across my temples and the stinging agony in my muscles was but an ache. But everything was different...

I sat up in the bed and rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of the order of events. My head, it was cloudy, thoughts seemed to lie in empty spaces, everything was tidy and tucked away. There were gaps, gaping holes in my memory. The order of events was scrambled, everything was hazy in my mind. Apart from the ballet, that was clear, clear as day. As I tried to clutch at some of the more distant images and memories, pain rung out in my head like a shotgun. And as the pain overtook me, the thoughts drifted further and I ground my back teeth together.

I felt a warmth dripping down one side of my face and as my fingers went to swipe my cheek, it met with the trickling line of scarlet. From my left ear was dripping a small trail of blood. In fact it stained the pillow I had been lying on. There was a dark crimson patch blooming on the fabric.

Everything was odd. Everything was wrong. I looked about the room, my vision sharper than it usually was and I zoned in on the beds around me. Many other girls were stirring awake, seemingly experiencing the same disorientation and confusion.

That's when an alarm sounded and a voice drifted from speakers dotted around the room.

"Get out of bed and stand to the right side."

I locked eyes with a few of the girls, a silent communication of defiance in the face of authority and explicit order.

"Belova and Romanova get out of bed."

I looked at the blonde who was also frozen stiff and followed her lead as she obediently rushed to her feet. She looked older and seemed a far more human figure to align myself with than the rest of the robotic troop.

Many of the girls faces were catatonic, as if under some curse and were completely compliant to instruction. I looked down at myself and then around the room. We were all clothed in identical uniforms: black catsuits with the Russian star branded onto the shoulder. That's when I made a revelation - this was the KGB.

A scientist appeared through a door in the wall before us all and he strode in with a menacingly blank face and observed us in our lines: silent and still.

"Girls and ladies alike; I am here to talk you about why you are here. All twenty eight of you are here to serve your country. This is the red room: here you will be taught how to fight, how to obey and how you must always put the motherland and the supremacy of the Russian empire before yourself. You should count yourselves as lucky, only the elitist of young women such as yourself made it. Many were... Eliminated. And you must know that should you choose to disobey direct instructions, you, yourself will be eliminated."

The man, draped in his scientific lab coat, paced, eyes scanning the hand picked squad of us. I felt vulnerable, exposed. His eyes met mine for seconds, seconds that seemed to drag like hours, curious and explorative in an enigmatic way - he was unreadable, completely unreadable. Then when he finally ripped his gaze away, I remembered to breathe again and allowed myself to blink. My skin was crawling, not just from the frigid draught, but from his icy gaze.