Earth did not explode with wailing sirens and flashes of nuclear bombs. We simply… replaced one tsar with another.
Like an old house into which new owners moved: first they carried out the furniture, then repainted the walls, and then began to live as if they had always been here.
At first there was nothing, and then somehow they appeared and the era of the immortals began, that's what it's called now in the official chronicles, with a capital letter and a respectful sigh.
In twenty-seven months. Four continents. Seven "Days of the Red Dawn," when the sun rose crimson because the air was thick with ash and blood.
The vampires did not win with armies in the usual sense. They simply stopped hiding. They crawled out of basements, abandoned mines, and old ancestral nests.
It turned out there were millions of them and they had existed among us for a very long time. Not tens of thousands as the hunters and the government thought, millions of years.
Humans did not lose because they were weaker. They lost because they kept fighting by the old rules, while the enemy played by new ones.
Now, a quarter of a century later, the war is considered over. That's what they write in the newspapers printed on gray recycled paper and sold only during the day, in yellow kiosks labeled "Daylight Hours."
West.
Night Berlin-Noe (formerly just Berlin) shines with neon and cold ultraviolet. The streets are divided by invisible but palpable boundaries.
There live the useful people. Engineers, doctors, technicians, life-support systems programmers. They have artificial sun under the domes, 18-hour workdays, synthetic food that tastes like cardboard, and mandatory evening "donor shift" once every ten days.
Blood is collected neatly, almost painlessly — thin needles, local anesthesia, bonus vouchers for an extra 200 grams of protein in the ration.
In the east, darkness and fangs rule. Tall vampires in long coats of black silk and leather from unknown animals walk on rooftops as if on parquet.
Their servants, lesser vampires and bound humans, wear red ribbons on their wrists, the sign that their blood is already reserved. Ordinary people only enter here with passes.
Or if they are brought for terrible things.
Tonight is an ordinary night.
At the corner of Leipziger Straße and the former Friedrichstraße stands a queue.
About forty people, mostly young. In everyone's hands — small plastic cards with a chip and a photograph. On the card: blood type, Rh factor, date of last donation, hemoglobin percentage.
The queue moves slowly.
At the doors of the former bank, now the Blood Control Point, two figures in black uniforms with silver "Sanguis Civitas" patches. One vampire, one human. The human looks older.
He has no fangs, but his eyes are just as dead.
"Next," the vampire drawls lazily without lifting his gaze from the tablet.
A guy about twenty-three hands over his card.
The vampire scans it.
The screen flashes green.
"Hemoglobin 138. Good reading. Go to booth 7."
"Double portion today, bonus."
The guy nods, but doesn't smile. No one here smiles when they hear about a double portion.
Behind him a woman around forty.
The card flashes red.
"Hemoglobin 102. Shortfall," the vampire's voice becomes slightly softer, almost sympathetic.
"Three days inpatient. Enhanced nutrition, erythropoietin injections, or a $4,000 fine."
The woman is silent.
Then quietly asks:
"And if I can't do three days? The children…"
The vampire raises his eyes. Vertical pupils, like a cat's.
"Then the fine doubles. And the children will be taken to the orphanage. You know the rules."
She nods and steps aside, where another queue is already standing, those who didn't pass.
In the old district of Rome, in what used to be Rome, where the free population now lives (that is, those who have not yet been classified as a resource), a ten-year-old girl named Lara sits on the windowsill of a broken window.
In her hands, an old, yellowed photograph. On it: mom, dad and herself, three years old, in a bright yellow jumpsuit.
Everyone is smiling; behind them you can see the sea and the sun. Real sun, not lamps under a dome.
"What's that?" a boy about nine asks, peeking over her shoulder.
"It was before," Lara answers.
"Back when people weren't… food."
The boy frowns.
"Food? Nobody eats us. We donate blood ourselves, voluntarily."
Lara looks at him for a long time, then turns back to the window.
Outside the window, curfew. The streetlights burn dull red. A patrol moves down the street: three vampires and one human guide with a lantern around his neck (the sign that he is untouchable until morning).
The guide carries a cage with white doves. Every hundred meters he opens the cage and releases one bird.
The dove rises, makes a circle, and falls dead a few seconds later. Sunlight isn't needed, the ultraviolet traps on the rooftops are enough.
"They say it's for safety," Lara whispers.
"So no one wanders at night. But really… they're just checking on us."
The boy is silent, then asks:
"And the sun… was it really yellow?"
Lara nods.
"And hot. So hot it burned your cheeks."
She slips the photograph under the pillow. There are already three more there: her parents' wedding, the first snow, a birthday. Nothing else remains.
In the very heart of the New York quarters, on the roof of a former skyscraper, now the Residence of House von Eisenstein, sits a young vampire named Kael.
He is only one hundred and eighty. By the standards of the Elders, a child.
He smokes a thin cigarette with synthetic blood aroma and looks down at the city lights.