#narrative post.

Kerstin leans forward when Aino walks into the room, eyes narrowing to a single dimension. That dimension is pure suspicion.

"You, Ruotsalainen, what's your angle here? You walk into my office yesterday and tell me you need an express, twenty-four hour turnaround to approve this American's business registration, while also neglecting to tell me this same American is the one who got up on a tribunal and explained patiently to the world that we have lizard-people like Putin walking among us? How the hell do you expect me to see this and say nothing more than, well, everything seems to be in order here? Do you see what is wrong with this picture???"

"Hej, Kerstin," is all Aino says.

"Don't 'hej' me, Aino, I want to know what kind of fresh shit I'm wading into here before I publicly broadcast that it is open season for aliens from planet America to tromp all over our land and buy our business and god knows what else. Are the lizard-people mind-controlling you? Will they mind-control us all???"

Aino can't help an exasperated sigh. "Kerstin, no," she begins, as if that's supposed to calm her down, at all. "Human or not, Ms. Scordato is promising to invest a great deal of money into Stockholm's economy, and is offering to take on the responsibility of running a casino which the government has no longer found profitable. By the projections submitted with this application, even aside from the single payment for ownership of the building, the tax revenue alone should allow the government to recoup its losses within two years. This is a cut-and-dry deal, here."

"But the lizard-people—"

"Kerstin."

"I'm just saying, first it's Putin, and then—"

"Kerstin."

Now it's her turn to sigh. "Fine. But don't tell me I didn't warn you."

—

II. Förberedelser (Preparations)

The first and most difficult obstacle is out of the way. With the business deal authorized, and ILR all-but-assured, Aino can move on to quickly dispatch the more mundane facets of preparing Stockholm's newest business for its grand opening. A few short phone calls with Bran give Aino all the information she needs to contract the refresh and redesign of the casino, and on the abbreviated timetable of her demands—made all the more fearsome by the prospect of certain brödraskap enforcers overseeing the projects—everything is ready sooner rather than later, and the grand opening is palpably near.

Fucking Swede. Serves him right. Though she's done her best to cleanse her inner sanctum of the poisonous fucking serpents, there's only so much she can do in a city where only one percent of people are Finnish; she just has to content herself with the knowledge that her plans will take a long time to come to fruition.

These first few weeks of her administration have already been more successful than she could possibly have imagined; already, thousands of children are being introduced to Finnish immersion classrooms for the first time. She'd laugh, the way she's managed to bend a city to even her most insubstantial of whims, if it didn't make her look like a mad scientist. That her goals of world domination might begin with getting Swedish kindergarteners to spurn their native tongue! But, truth be told—even taking into account her intense xenophobia for those fucking fika-taking assholes—it's less the fact that she's indoctrinating their children with her native tongue and more the awareness of the sheer power she holds over them.

The bror says something in Swedish, and though Aino can very well understand him she barely pays it any mind. She has larger problems than the ramblings of a jailbird thug who can't possibly understand the breadth of her ambition. First on the list is her realization that just because she may have scored a coup within the city of Stockholm does not mean her influence reaches any further.

Well, she thinks, not yet.

But presiding over its people, over a city of sloth? Well, that's something else entirely.

Already in two weeks this great big careful treaty, or alliance, or proof of fucking worship or dependency or allegiance or something, god fucking knows, that she's forged with who else but the Big Kahuna's son himself, the Big Kahuna in this case being her not even ancestral but kind of half-assedly-adopted legendary King of Finns who habitually shacked up with valkyries and other assorted divine beings of the Norse canon. Thinking about it too hard fucks her up; how did she go from being a good little Muslim girl to an Evangelical Lutheran to an avowed atheist to a reluctant Finnish pagan to—well, and now here she is consorting with Norse gods who are actually Finnish princes.

This is what it means to preside: to dominate a city, to comprehend it in all of its workings, not only to work but also to allow its work to become a part of you in this sort of terrible, sickening, blood and guts and stale boozy puke in the sewers kind of way and her blood is in the sewers now too, in the streets and the rivers and the fresh vivid streams that fall from her fingers as Wayland binds his hand to hers in a covenant she thought she'd outgrown a long time ago. Lättja's corpse bleeds still, and they finalize the deal before his body's even cold on the ground. His veins leak into the system too, somehow, somewhere. That's the unpredictable part.

—Leave it, Wayland says, when Aino flashes a glance towards the lumbering giant's frame, and he fucking grins. —Cleaning up that mess can wait for another day.

To preside is to slide money to a brotherhood, to watch it grow from a prison gang to a couple of off-the-book bodyguards to informal police to city institutions to regional powers, and to do so while holding the leash so tight her fingers go white: whether it's from the cold snap of an early winter, or from the way they strain against the stiff leather collar of her control she couldn't possibly tell, and it doesn't really matter, anyway, not when this has already become so normal that it is just work again, and the real task hangs like a moon in the midnight sky, just ahead, just out of reach.

To preside is to lose control, and to gain it once again. To fly off the rails of a rollercoaster and spend those few harrowing blissful moments in the sky before landing. The jump, that was the gambit. The challenge of Lättja, the recruitment of Wayland.

Now she's landing.

A brödraskap guard knocks at the door.

—Moikka, he says. He's a Finn. Aino thanks Wayland silently for not burdening her with another fucking Swede today. It's a new day in Stockholm, and under her studious blind eye, it will become the crown jewel of her aspirations of power. —You needed something, ma'am, he says, head bowed just a little bit in deference.

Sir, we have a problem, she says, as if her saying that is going to make him perk up and pay attention. Lättja isn't really the perky sort, but she figures that out pretty quickly, and backpedals into something of a more civilized demeanour.

What's your name, Lättja asks. He doesn't bother to make it seem like he's even going to address the girl's problem. No point in rushing to accomplish anything—he's had thousands of years without difficulty doing things at his own pace, after all.

She says Jana, and then looks at him with a kind of awkward screwed-up face like she wants to be looking at him expectantly but figures it's not really appropriate to do that, what with him being a presiding djävul and anything, so she ends up looking more constipated than anything. Lättja laughs, and his laugh is so raw and dry and guttural that his spit flips from his fatty lip onto Jana's face with a graceless flick.

Jana does flinch, flinching being the sort of thing that humans seem to be much more interested in doing than he is. Is that funny, sir, she says, then pauses to clarify. My name, I mean.

Lättja doesn't answer, again. He doesn't really think questions need to be answered, unless he's the one asking them. What's the problem he says, the one that had you all up in a fuss when you walked into the room.

Jana looks away nervously, bites her lip. We're not going to win the election tonight, she says, the red-greens have pulled an upset victory.

He can't help but burst out into another peal of laughter, doing the same thing again where little wet blobs of saliva and spittle fly through the air and land on Jana's face almost like they're homing missiles. Seeing her covered in his spit is so amusing that he almost does the whole song and dance again just for the hell of it, just for his own damn amusement. You think that's never happened before girl, he asks. How old are you, twenty, he asks again.

I'm thirty-five sir, she says, trying her very best not to be offended, and having failed completely, trying her best not to look it.

Lättja isn't even really listening, though. We lost in 2002, he says. Didn't change a thing. They're still beholden to us either way. Why are you coming out here to bother me with something like that?

Jana says well that's the thing, sir. We have reason to believe they're not following the plan. They're nominating their own mayor, someone who isn't part of our group.

Lättja looks up, sees the phone she's holding up to his face. What he sees, he can barely believe. Girl, he says, why didn't you tell me they were nominating a fucking Finn.

She's scarcely a day from having her papers in line when her machinations begin.

Everything's been put into place over a long, expansive period of time, motivations beginning with a war chest of Sicilian mob money and transforming, over time, into something else: this amorphous beast of ambition and pride and shadowy motivation from her spreading roots in organized crime but with a curious caveat, too. It's not the money that motivates her—the spoils of an inheritance from a dead father who's more a wisp in the wind than a pillar or a lionized giant that looms in her past, well, that's more than enough to allow her to coast on a tidy retirement for the rest of her days, and either way the money from the stark sheer corruption that the rapidly congealing ring of financiers, crooked cops, drug runners, and entrepreneurs is already providing is not for her; Aino won't be sitting back and sipping prosecco on an Adriatic beach while she reaps the rewards of others' work—ah, well, it's not such a bad thought, she muses as she ponders her options—but instead using her wealth to cultivate a kind of gentle charity for those she invites into the fold.

Part of it all is a perverse undertaking of hers, one with roots deep in a nebulous chauvinism and patriotic pride in a country that isn't even hers by birth, and what can she even call it, really, beyond a bald attempt to institute the same kind of linguistic colonization of Sweden that the Swedes did to Finland, but most of all it's about the hazy warmth of having the power concentrated within her to carry it all out.

[The following security footage captures part of a conversation between Magnus Enquist, head of Stockholm University's Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, and his wife. Trans. Torbjörn Västerström.] ME: Hey, sweetie. ME: What am I doing now? Ehh...not much, well, no, that's not true at all. I've been left scrambling a bit here. ME: You know Aino, right? In the department with me. ME: Yes, the very young woman. Finnish. Teaching about neopagan revivalism in Scandinavia, lately. ME: ...No, I still don't know how she managed to earn her doctorate so quickly! I'm not sure I could survive the blow to my ego that would result if I did manage it, though. Perhaps it's best to leave that question unanswered. ME: Anyway, yes, about her. Can you believe she came into the department today and handed in her resignation? ME: I couldn't either! Just thirty years old, with a promising career ahead of her, and goodness knows, a tenure position must not have been far off, as far as I can tell. She's certainly bright enough to have gotten it— ME: —Yes, that's what I said as well! For god's sake, Aino, think over the decision a little bit, but, but wait until you hear why she's resigning. ME: If the red-greens win in the city council, they're going to appoint her finansborgarråd. ME: Of Stockholm, yes! Mayor and financial commissioner of the whole city, at thirty years old! Can you imagine? There are people trying to get their degrees who are older than that!

To everyone outside the dark spheres of political finance and—darker still—of organized crime, it will seem like nothing short of insanity. An untested child—what's more, with the ink on her naturalization barely dry—plucked from an academic career and thrust into the role of commissioner? But Aino's accustomed to that kind of naysaying already. And when she's done with the city, these petty quibbles will be the least of their concern.

A family visit, she explains to her co-workers—perfectly natural, of course, a brief biennial pilgrimage to relations tied up if not in blood then at least something like it, some kind of intangible mutual understanding and trust that hangs in the air like a toxic fungus-spore that has to stand in ersatz for the gene-bound allegiance of parenthood. She has Eino, at least, the half-twinned resemblance present more in demeanour than in visage, and the other half of his material kinship settles the knot in the family tree, completes the neat vinculation of Aino to her father Juho, otherwise stranger to the cells within her.

When Eino meets her by the baggage claim, wraps her up in a brotherly hug, one could be forgiven for thinking them lovers, their complexions a lovely, disparate complement that marks one as the product of generations of ethnic pedigree, and the other, immediately, as an outsider. Aino's never minded; either way she's from elsewhere in her new home, and looking out of place alongside her brother, who towers over her by more than a foot, is no different from that.

But once they've exchanged the greetings, Aino drops the warm expression and regards her brother with a grave expression.

– Hei, Eino, she says, eyes glancing away with a kind of regret, a kind of recrimination that she has to involve him in something she's wanted to keep hidden as long as it's been part of her life. – Vihaan kuormittaa sinua tässä. Todella. Mutta en voi jäädä tänne ja käymään ja isä. Minun täytyy saada takaisin lentokoneessa.

« Hey, Eino. I hate to drop this on you. I really do. But I can't stay here and visit you and Dad. I have to get right back on a plane now. »

Eino looks confused, and a little distraught. She hasn't been hinting at having any problems, so to have this sprung on him leaves him at a loss for words.

– Miksi ei?

« Why not? »

Aino sighs, face pulling from frustration and pent-up anger. He deserved better, didn't deserve what happened. But he also deserves the truth.

– Te tiedätte, miten äiti kuoli, eikö? Aino asks slowly, deliberately. – Se ei ollut onnettomuus.

« You know how Mom died, right? It wasn't an accident. »

His eyes grow with a widening horror, and Aino confirms the worst fears rising in his heart.

– Aion tehdä asiat oikein, she says, and there's a careful pause, and then an almost-smile crosses her lips. – Niin, ja muuten, Eino. Tietoja Suomenuskoa? Olit oikeassa.

« I'm going to make things right. ...Oh, and by the way, Eino, about the Finnish mythology? You were right. »

And with that she vanishes from the baggage claim into thin air, leaving her brother holding her small three-day suitcase and a bus ticket back into the city.