What you're about to hear is based on actual events.

Listener discretion is advised.

The militia have taken to calling him Scorpion, a name that may sound imposing, but was

meant more to describe the cowardly way in which he'd kill, stunning his victim, retreating,

then returning once he felt it safe to work in peace and without resistance.

Pavel Tuklin has always been this way.

The product of an environment where to skitter about was necessary for survival, but to strike

on occasion was an absolute must if he were to have any sense of self.

In the mind of a predatory arachnid, there runs only two trains of thought.

One is to survive, and one to kill.

All the rest is instinct.

Instinct that moves a man like Pavel to be constantly planning, constantly behaving as though

trouble is the last thing he wants while sealing off the exits before swooping in to strike.

ELA

ELA trudges through the dry and uneven dirt of the Polish countryside, nearly breaking

her ankle several times on the old ruts, hidden beneath the waist-tie prairie grass.

The field, though it looks like any other abandoned paddock in Poland, is a reserved testing

site for the Gdang's militia, the city's communist party-approved police force.

She hears them chatting and chuckling ahead, though she can't quite see them yet.

Her car, a time-mormed Polina's hatchback, and barely handled the pod-hold country roads,

and so she's had to park in the gravel lot more than 100 meters from the testing site.

Then, she had to walk across the section of field, seemingly more translating than

...