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They brought the boy to Moscow some time in the winter of ‘98. His mother and father accompanied him, two sharp-eyed Canadians scanning the row of attendees before the Department of Otherworld Defense. They had sat in long meetings for months before this across from representatives with saccharine smiles and polished contracts and promises to remake their lives. David, just a mechanic. Yuna, a waitress. Childcare was expensive. Rent was expensive. And still there was always a threat that some day while they were separated (Shane counting castles in a sandbox behind his school, Yuna tucking a sneer against her teeth when she’s sent back to the kitchen for the third time, and David draining oil from a car miles away at a shop in the city proper) one or two or all of them would be smashed beneath the hand of a level 3 kaiju or cut to shreds by a ghoul witch’s dual swords.
“Think of what Shane could do,” they had told them. “If this test is accurate, if his and Ilya’s soul convergence scores are this high, they can change the world. Every time a level 1 kaiju appears, an average of 10,706 people are either seriously injured or killed before the threat is contained. Imagine how many lives they can save by killing even ten kaijus. Now think about how many people they will save throughout their entire careers as meister and weapon.”
It had been an arduous process to crack David and Yuna Hollander. They loved their son, but they were only people at the end of the day. They were susceptible to pressure like anyone else. They believed the lies that the training would be very light until the boys turned twelve, that they were free to abandon the program at any time. And as much as they tried to hide it, they were especially persuaded by the selling of their dingy two-bedroom apartment and subsequent ownership of a five bedroom house in Ottawa and another in Moscow (“just down the street from the defense building”). They were not granted citizenship, however, and would spend the majority of their time working jobs in Canada while their son went from boy to blade in another country without them.
Shane was six. Ilya was a month younger.
They taught Shane Russian first. It wasn’t the first time that prospective meister and weapon pairs were selected from the international soul exam. When the matches came from different countries, the country who deported their citizen last would host the training and then the other would house the pair during their careers. The last time Canada and Russia had a match together was a decade ago. Canada had hosted the training. Russia had housed them. Now Shane was expected to remain with Ilya until they were sufficiently trained and prepared for the field, when both he and Ilya would return to Canada as permanent residents.
Shane mastered the language quickly. He was young and had nothing else to do. It was part of the appeal at finding matches this young. They could be molded.
After a month, the nighttime tears ceased. In two, Shane stopped asking to see his parents.
After three years, Shane Hollander was speaking Russian fluently and had an accent when he conversed with his parents over the phone. His mother cried the first time she noticed. She said they should bring him back, but the Hollanders had signed their son away. In fine print, Shane and Ilya could leave the program at any time, but the boys had been so thoroughly deprived of a natural life that the thought of leaving confused them.
Ilya liked to tease Shane by stealing his dessert during meals and not telling him where he hid them. His preferred hiding spots were underneath his sleeve, beneath his plate, and sometimes on the food cart if Shane was distracted enough for him to sneak away. Each time Shane would whine and complain.
“Give it back!”
“Give what back?” Ilya feigned interest by shrugging. He had done this only four hours ago at breakfast.
“My strawberries. You stole them.” Shane got out of his seat and looked under it.
Ilya still laughed like a child should, and his high-pitched voice echoed through the metal-walled cafeteria. “Why would I put them there?”
Shane stood to glare at him. “So, you did steal them.”
“No, I didn’t.”
After Shane gave up and sat back down to pout, Ilya would retrieve the food from where he’d placed it, presenting it to his meister like a gift.
It was the only time Shane saw him smile so bright. Ilya hated their instructors. He hated their training and the bruises and ice baths. He hated family visits when they wore makeup and dressed in normal clothes and had to pretend it wasn’t odd to be having a picnic. He hated his father, especially, and his snotty-nosed brother who scowled throughout all their visits. In fact, the only other time Shane saw Ilya smile was when he was alone with Irina Rozanova and the woman was whispering something in his ear that made him snicker. (Ilya stopped smiling entirely for a time after he received the news over the phone).
Shane would come to realize over the course of their ten years institutionalized in Russia, and the years to come in the field hunting down monsters over and over and over, that Ilya was his soul twin in more ways than one. They fought together, ate together, and kept one bed cold while they huddled together in the other in every room they shared. All the broken bones. All the lectures he took and the drills he made until he passed out from exhusation—Ilya was there, his constant. His scythe. His friend.
And later, his lover.
Unsurprisingly, Shane had a much easier time reintegrating into Canada than Ilya did. Although accented, his English was still strong from his phone calls with his parents. Ilya did not understand half the things people told him. People would approach them in the street after they had killed a kaiju or ghoul witch with a single swipe of Shane’s wrist. They would ask for pictures and tell them about how they had read all about them in the newspaper, read about their awesome training in Russia and their many missions in Canada. They were superheroes. Hunters were already heroes in their own right, but Shane and Ilya were in a league of their own.
Shane would answer for them, and Ilya would frown all the way home.
“You’re getting better!” Shane would say in Russian, a casual switch that only furthered Ilya’s frustration. “You knew she was asking for a picture this time.”
“Because she was shoving her phone in my face. How could I not?”
Shane shook his head. “Your English is fine.”
“It needs to be perfect.”
“You’re already perfect enough, Ilya.”
A subtle smile Ilya hid by looking out the window, but Shane always knew it was there. Part of Ilya lived inside his chest now and would continue to until the day one of them died.
Russia didn’t start sending the assassins until they were twenty.
Shane and Ilya’s deployment had caused quite a stir. They weren’t just generational hunters, they were once-a-millennium. They cut down level 1 kaijus in seconds. They were ultra-fast and super-strong. They marched in uniform suits and overcoats like soldiers trapped in the bodies of business men. Very quickly they became not just defenders of Canada’s people, they also became assets.
Russia was not happy they had lost their draw to control them. They had known their potential when training but it wasn’t until they began going on official missions that they realized the godly power that the two wielded together.
The first time, a group of twenty came after Ilya when he was alone on a day off. Shane was in the next town over, and even if he sensed Ilya was in danger, he would not be able to return in time. Ilya was a terror even on his own, but he would be nothing without Shane to wield him in scythe form.
The leader followed him onto the top of a bus, and as they whipped through the city, he raised a blade at the young man. In Russian, he spoke. “It would be easier if you just sat down and let me finish it, or your meister is gonna come back to you in pieces.”
Ilya stuck a finger in his ear and blew a raspberry. “Nah.”
“The fuck did you just say?”
“Today isn’t the day I die. Sorry!”
“What are you, slow? I just said we’re gonna fucking kill you!” The masked man waved his hands, and Ilya took notice of the other masked men in cars following them and running over roof tops. Oh, he thought. This would be a problem. But not one that couldn’t be solved.
“I’m just gonna warn you one time,” Ilya began, wiggling a stern finger at the assassin, “and I really hope you think well about it because you’re deciding for all your friends here. If you try to fight me, you will die.”
The assassin scowled. “You might get a few of us, but if you think for a second you’re walking out of here alive, you’re fucking nuts. In fact, now you just pissed me off. After we kill you, I’m gonna crush your skull and spread it over your cunt mother’s grave.”
Ilya’s expression hardened in cold fury. It was gone in the next moment, however, as he spread his arms out, coat billowing behind him in the breeze. Light erupted from his body as scythes grew from his forearms and his head, the upper half of it transforming into a silver construction to hold the blade there. “Well, if you’re gonna kill me, come fucking do it already!”
The news would say a fight broke out in the city center at 10:51AM on March 17th, 2012. Ilya evaded his pursuers as he sped past cars and pedestrians, cutting down the ones that came too close. He scaled buildings using the force of his soul’s energy output to push him up. He took a bullet to the arm while dodging a spray from someone’s automatic rifle. He ran and ran until he got to the city’s park, cresting the hill where he knew his meister would appear.
Shane stood atop it, the sun behind him, fanning shadows across his face and making his wrath all the more evident. They kept secrets of their own about their abilities. When they said they could never be separated for long, they meant it. No matter where they were in the world, one would call and the other would answer.
Ilya transformed into a scythe the moment their hands met. Shane spun him into place as he always did, crouching in preparation to fight. Their pursuers paused in horror.
Ilya spoke in Shane’s mind, “Don’t kill the tall one there. He’s mine.”
There were many meetings after the fact and a tearful reunion with Shane’s parents. Although it was mostly Yuna, who had never forgiven herself (and never will) for letting men in suits take her baby to a different continent and turn him into a soldier. She held Shane, then Ilya, and breathed a sigh of relief.
“I forget how strong you are,” she said, wiping tears away.
“They won’t get us, Mom,” Shane said with so much confidence it scared her. “There’s no one else out there like us. Even Otherworld creatures aren’t strong enough.” His voice dipped an octave lower. “We’re invincible.”
Ilya’s support showed in his eyes as he smiled at Shane. They were the strongest beings in the universe, that was certain. No one could hurt them.
Yuna Hollander had a horrible realization: these boys had never struggled on a mission. Ever. What would happen if someone out there found a way to make it happen? What would happen to her boys?
It would come to be, two years later in the height of spring, three days before Shane’s birthday, that someone out there did find a way. A ghoul witch’s sword through Shane Hollander’s gut. A night spent in surgery, and a life flickering in and out while another crumbled outside the door.