They left the office, went to the far end of the corridor, then down the stairs to the first floor and down to the basement. It turned out to be a large parking lot, now also divided into separate rooms. Still without numbers on the doors, which were aluminum barriers. Behind the one they entered were two men looking at the severed human heads lying on the floor. There was plenty of blood, but apparently the heads themselves had not been severed here, or else it would have been stained not only inside the room, but would have leaked out.

One of the head examiners approached Cobra:

– Only two have been identified…

– As expected…" replied Cobra. – Leave us…

When Cobra's two handmaidens came out he pointed at the lying heads with his hand and continued:

– See those heads. Thirty-two to be exact… Someone interrupted the Bravo team when they were guarding the approach to the Deez sector from the industrial pipe, and then fired mortars at us. And your patron pointed out at the time that 80-millimeter mortars were too heavy for the Maquis to carry that far… But what surprised me more was not that, but that someone had gotten so stealthily close to the Bravo group that not a single shot had been fired. And during the whole time they were interrupted, too… Their heads were left for us not far from an industrial pipe with a stick buried nearby, to which a still-living snake was nailed. It's clear that it's a message to me. You can still move, but you can't do anything… Someone knew too well when they acted. Too quiet, too stealthy, too sure and too aware of everything. And then he withdrew just as quietly… While the shelling was still going on, I ordered to change the frequency, and on the spare frequency I had already told the neighboring units to go around the attackers' position from both flanks      Then I

switched to the old frequency and heard a familiar voice from there, which announced to me that they knew all our moves and it would not be possible to take them      Of course, we did not take

anyone, but only found booby-trapped corpses without heads      What do you think about this story?

– Obviously whoever interrupted Bravo's group knew them personally. Just why didn't they report seeing someone, even if it was their own.....

– Yes. That's the question I was most concerned about. And now we know the answer to it…

See these heads," Cobra pointed to the severed and mutilated heads of people.

– Yes, you are.

– Only two of the Bravo group are actually lying here. The others are so disfigured that they are unrecognizable.      But we have our own methods of doing this. And not everyone knows about

them.      We measure the skulls of all the fighters so we can distinguish them if they die. It is most

likely that at least in some form the skull will be preserved, so it is more likely to be recognized… Whoever did this didn't know about this trick of ours. And hoped to remain anonymous      Well,

almost.      Because the answer to why Bravo Team didn't report someone arriving is that no one did.

It was Bravo's group that fired on me, having previously killed the two who didn't want to be involved, and having prepped the bodies of the apparently dead Maquis beforehand. That's where all the awareness and confidence in their actions came from. And that's why the voice was so familiar, though he tried to change it. It was Bravo's group commander…

– Looks like we need to pay more attention to our own safety. – Tikhomirov smiled a little this time. He was pleased that he had thought of SMERSH himself before he heard the story.

Masha

It's a very strange feeling when you get used to something no longer being the same in your life. When someone is gone, someone you never imagined life without. When that someone used to fill all the space in your life, and now they're not there at all. And this feeling of continuous emptiness in a place previously filled all the time, on the one hand, makes you stop feeling anything, and on the other hand, makes you sometimes look at everything too detached. It's as if there was never any of this before. It was always empty.

That's how Masha started thinking about six months ago. And now that the baby was born.

Her baby and Raphael's baby, she had a new life. And that life filled a void. This boy filled that void. And strangely enough, he slept most of the time.

He was almost a month old now, and he was still sleeping quietly, only waking up occasionally to drink his mother's milk. And then to sleep again.      And it was very surprising,

because she herself had seen how newborn babies scream at night when they were teething, how they did not let everyone sleep, and only absolute fatigue does its job, cutting off to sleep the working somas.

She remembered Raphael hugging her and the baby screaming somewhere nearby. It was probably not only because he was teething, but also because there was nothing to eat. Everyone was still sleepy, and those who were exhausted did not even hear the crying, while those who were not so tired continued to listen to the baby's cry, sometimes grumbling a little about it.

Raphael thought then of what might still be lacking in someone who had just begun to see the world with his eyes and hear its sounds with his own ears. Such a small creature would certainly lack the connection between the movement seen by the eyes and the sound that would correlate with it all. He had read about an ancient toy for children, called the most important among others-the rattle. The next day he made one: a small wooden ball on a stick and with bits of charcoal inside.

Each time he swung it, the charcoal hit the walls and made a sound.

The child liked the toy very much. Now he rattled it half the night and then slept quietly. Not to say that the crying was louder than the constant beating of the coal against the wood, but it was easier for everyone. Everyone knew that it was easier for a child to grow up that way, so he could at least feel that there was something under his control – a little rattle made by a slave.

Masha dreamed that one day she and Raphael would have a child of their own, who would also rattle a toy like this, growing up and becoming independent. A person should be independent, that's when he or she could feel alive.

If she had thought then what those words meant to her husband. That he wouldn't be able to accept that their life was one big ordeal with no choice in the matter. That he would want to change that. Including at the cost of his own life. And that the only thing that would come out of it would be to lose him to her. And now his son was starting his life without even seeing his father.

Masha thought about it, and she didn't have an exact answer for what she would do if she knew ahead of time what she knew now. That he was gone. Would she have been able to keep him from that? Or would all her words have been nothing to him? She didn't know the answer to that question. All she knew was that he was no longer alive. And that his son would someday grow up and start thinking like him. She didn't even doubt that… But what would the world be like when he grew up?

The dreams she'd been having lately were jarring in their harshness, their omnipresence. She felt that she was dreaming on the threshold of the changes that awaited everyone. And it concerned above all the fact that the plagues would lose their power, granted to them by the Black Stone…

How exactly, she did not understand. And it didn't even occur to her what the plagues could lose, what they were using now. What could their great relic even give them now? It opened a portal to Earth for them. It jammed all human electronics. But now that they've conquered humanity, what do they need from all that the Black Stone has given them? Open another portal for someone else to invade and conquer the Chumans? To turn on electronics that no longer exist, and no longer even have people capable of using them to their full potential?