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Kostya stood, red painting his pants from the knee and below. Like before, he closed the fallen human's eyes, apologetic.



Syntax had never been so eager to use actual words before, even if he spoke in technological terms and little else, without much sense that connected them.

The next body was someone his own age, in a leather jacket not unlike one he'd owned. Fake, that is, and to give off an air of coolness that he never quite exuded. From the looks of his pimpled face, the teen before him had not succeeded, too. Again, the ritual. Bring them mercy, close their eyes, send them on.

He was doing them a kindness.

Kostya left the trailer, not looking around for Jane. The next trailer was nicer than the last one, or at least, not in quite such a state of disrepair. He felt numb all over, inside and out, stomach wobbling, heart pulsating in a staccato beat.

As Syntax predicted, he tracked bloody footprints in the muddy snow.

The inside of the second trailer held the same sort of feral carnage as the last. A whirlwind of upturned furniture with deep gouge marks, bodies strewn with limbs at awkward angles. He was not smart enough to know if it had been chaotic or just calculatedly planned to be as such.

He grappled with the fact that he knew he should feel more. The heroes in movies and books always did, lamenting with the greatest toska over a failed attempt to save the hapless civilians, over the loss of them at the hands of villains. Instead, there was...

Well.

It wasn't nothing, Kostya surmised, pulling over a body that had been laying face down in a puddle, steadfastly checking for a pulse and finding none.

There was...relief. The same sensation as a duty fulfilled, as good as being told that his cooking was passable, that his construction was sturdy, that his paperwork was filed neatly and correctly.

Relieve them of their suffering.

With calm and fluid movements, Kostya carefully navigated the trailer's remaining wreckage. Strewn bodies, formerly a family of five, including the first victim he found. Limbs and blood, guts and no glory at all. Peeling wallpaper and cracked picture frames. A bone picked clean. Severed fingers and a half-devoured heart. The things left behind in the wake of a nightmare, and Kostya made a note to ask Jane exactly who or what had been responsible.

He closed the eyes of three more bodies, but the fourth had none left to close.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed. A fly buzzed. Otherwise: silence, all encompassing. There was no one else left, here. In Kostya there was a grace, a peaceful tranquillity that he'd never possessed before. His entire life had been full of apathetic atrophy, languishing.

Rep had once told him there was a difference between simply existing, and living, and he hadn't understood the difference, before.

But he was free, now.

Relieve them of their suffering.

Kostya stepped out of the trailer, blowing into his hands to warm them. For a change of pace, he went towards the first RV, the front door hanging open, off its hinges.

There was no one behind him, he knew. But still, he felt their gaze on his neck. It lingered there, watching him. Observing. Learning.

Appraising.

(We serve, we serve, we serve. Ask for a jump, here's how high. Walk into the fire. Jump into the pit. Impale yourself upon the spike, if he asks. Hang yourself if he doesn't. A dozen ways to die, if only he'd request it.)

Kostya's eyes panned over the room, methodical. There were survivors, on the far side of the room, but despite their pleas, he checked the other bodies, first, not deviating from his ritual: check pulse, close eyes, repeat.

He took in their facts, as if someone had starkly reduced them to black ink on paper, times new roman size twelve, single spaced and double sided.

If anyone is too old to join to Deus or simply too injured for swift recovery...

Jane's voice was mild, generic at best and forgettable at worst. Already, the words sounded like his own, and he repeated them in a litany. She had given him instructions, clear cut without room for argument.

The shackles of a defunct moral compass-- one that had been half functional at best-- continued to fall away. Gently, he kneeled, close to them, offering a gentle hand, gingerly inspecting the arm that ended abruptly. The tourniquet was made of a torn shirt and hope, it seemed, and little else.

"There is alvays being time," Kostya said with a smile, gentler than his hand. His eyes went soft: almost fond, in fact.

Relieve them of their suffering.

The boy had to be dealt with first. Predators always pursued the weakest member of the pack: the sick, the injured. (Later: the old. But she was later.) He raised his hand to press against the other man's forehead, feeling the fever that had set in.

"Can help you," he whispered, eagerly. "Can help you."

Syntax prepared another blast, the glow and whir intensifying.

Her eyes were so full of pain that it hurt: a raw, unfortunate ache that made him feel more acutely than ever before. She was full of a hurt that Kostya could not understand, not in the same way. He felt pain when Obadiah offered himself to the wolves without believing that the wolves were out there, but it was not the same.

It was a loss of utility. Of good company, that America had partaken of, too. Obadiah's end meant knowledge being eliminated, a body with a weapon that had advanced far enough that Deus could not afford to lose it.

Kostya looked into her eyes, and there was only pain and terror.

Relieve them of their suffering.

"It vill be okay."

Two blasts went off within the RV, an arrhythmic beat of a healthy, healthy heart.

He emerged, his clothes sparsely covered in gore, his glasses splattered with blood and bits. There was a smile on his face, and the look in his eyes was far, far away.

(A throne of bones, a crown of thorns, a prayer, we serve. We serve. We serve. Obedience.)

Kostya kept to his ritual when checking the remaining structures. Check the pulse, close the eyes. He had done his part to guide three souls to a better place, and it was the closest he had ever felt to elation. Was this happiness, the way that his pulse fluttered, his ears pounded? This desire to lick his teeth and smile and smile and smile for days?

The smile faded.

"Oh," he said, blinking almost owlishly. "I see."

Kostya looked at Jane, his eyes slipping back into something vacant, something that stared through her rather than at her. It was...thoughtful. This was new information, packed away for analysis at a later time.

"They have been relieve." Kostya held up three fingers, stained with red. "Cannot return to Deus, in this vay." He gestured at himself, as though it'd be like tracking mud inside. "Somevhere to clean?"

If he could eliminate the evidence of a room burnt to the ground, then he could remove something as simple as stains of blood.

Kostya parsed her words for instructions, nodding to her to acknowledge his understanding. "Of course."

We weren't here. Robert burned the room down. Mimsy is stable. I care about you.

Lies and lies and lies upon lies, but lies were a tool in the kit of a Death hunter. They had utility, and could be cleverly crafted and wonderfully sewn together, stitched together so well that no one could tell that they had started as lies at all.

"Use attack as chance to change heart of vuns less loyal to O cause," Kostya hazarded, "and to 'scare straight' vuns that are, maybe, a little considering."

He turned his head to look back at the scene. "Unfortunate," he said, "tragedy only if loss of future hunter occur. Vhere some Bloodline canditate on site?"

Jane was steadily becoming his favourite person, even in the small amount of time he'd known her-- she even used his favourite word: utilized.