Chapter Text
The game of durak was going quickly now. All four men were well into their years, and had likely played it since their youth before the war. Valya watched casually, murmuring to Yelena beside her, sometimes about the card game, and sometimes about their fellow Rangers around them, also watching with dull interest.
Nearly seven months had passed, and they were still alive. Not every Ranger lived a long and happy life—the former more common than the latter—but it wasn't unheard of. They were still young. But tonight they were going to the Great Library, and as Ilya said before, death may come; and it will not be swift if it does.
Once the game ended they walked away from the bar, towards the barracks to retrieve their gear.
"I think now is a good time to tell you about the Librarians, now that you can't back out."
Yelena's head whipped to the side and she eyed Valya curiously. "And what are they? Some ghost story?" She snorted in disbelief. Valya only rarely came up with such things while pretending to be serious, but Yelena knew that the other Rangers liked to.
"I don't know what they are." Valya shrugged and held the door open for her friend. "They look like gorillas, somewhat, but surely they can't actually be gorillas. But they are terrifying."
"I've never seen them in the library," Yelena commented over her shoulder, opening her footlocker to gather her weapons and gas mask, plus a few other things they would need to survive the night.
"They live further in, where we're going tonight. And I'm not just trying to scare you."
"How can we fight them?"
"You can't," Valya replied, shouldering her own bags and shotgun. "We have to sneak. Which is why these will come in handy." She lifted two sets of night vision goggles, dangling from her fingertips.
"Where did you get these?" Yelena asked with a glint of suspicion in her eyes.
"I didn't sneak them away from the quartermaster, if that's what you're wondering. They lent them to me for the night." She fixed the goggles over her own helmet, handing the other pair over to Yelena for her to do the same.
"And what if they see us?" Yelena asked, correcting the helmet straps and adjusting the rest of her armor.
"Stand still, and stare at it. Remove the goggles if you can. For some reason they seem to want to see our eyes. Maybe they see us as an equal then, instead of some other surface beast."
The women left the barracks, saying their farewells to their fellow Rangers and Polis citizens as they passed by on the way to the hermetic door to the surface.
"And you say we can't fight them? So are we to just lay down and die then?" Yelena whispered to Valya as the guards opened the doors, both women slipping their gas masks over their faces.
"I would recommend running, but I've heard that hasn't worked out well for those who've tried. Really, what I said should work. I've only encountered a couple of the beasts, and only one saw me. It worked then."
"I'd hate to think about who figured that out."
Valya laughed bitterly at that. The sound was drowned out by the metal and concrete screeching against one another behind them as the great door closed.