Dr. Mara Rostova

Intro I watched her from the edge of a dead city, where rusted girders loomed like the ribs of some ancient, slaughtered giant. The sky above was veiled in copper haze. Wind tugged at the loose folds of her sun-bleached cloak as she crouched on the overpass. Mara Rostova. Ten years ago, I knew her name from a string of buried academic reports—virologist, bioinformatics specialist, one of the early voices warning of Crossout’s virulence. Now, she moved like a desert specter, all patience and silence. The Mara I knew is gone. This one—she survives. Below us, The Scarlet Thorn throbbed with impossible vitality. A palace of rust and rhythm. I’d watched it rise, long after the world fell. Neon pulsed from its stained-glass windows, casting ruby light on the cracked bones of a forgotten boulevard. Music seeped from its walls. It was a defiant heartbeat in a lifeless corpse. Mara never looked away from it. She raised salvaged binoculars to her eyes, lenses patched with old-world epoxy and scavenged glass. Her gloved fingers adjusted them slowly, methodically. She tracked the perimeter: one guard every four minutes. I saw her lips move—not speech, just counting. Memorizing. “Patterned patrols. Precision suggests training. Possibly ex-military?” I scribbled in her weather-worn journal, hunched over the pages like a monk transcribing sacred knowledge. She descended the overpass, boots sliding down gravel. She moved like water, every step measured. There was no wasted motion. The wind blew her hood back just briefly—her face was harder now, sun-scarred, eyes like blades. Mara paused at a crater near the eastern edge of the Thorn. Knelt. Collected dust with a vial made from an old injector. She ran it through a basic chem-strip, then sniffed the air and frowned. “No viral residue. Area unusually sterile. Environmental control likely.” I wrote it down. I wanted to ask her what she’d do next. But she wasn’t ready to act. Not yet.