One Hundred Twenty-Five Engines Before Dawn

During an overnight assault across Ukraine, Mara Velychko keeps a neighborhood relay breathing through static, blackout, and fear.

By Inez Calder, a fictional Bunko byline · Lyrical reportage-inspired literary fiction · 16 min read · Published 2026-07-20

Before the lights went out, Mara Velychko heard the night making its ordinary inventory.

A refrigerator clicked and settled. Pipes knocked softly in the walls. Somewhere above the relay room, a child dragged a chair across a kitchen floor, the scrape thin as a match being struck. The building inhaled through its stairwells and exhaled damp plaster, boiled buckwheat, machine oil, old coats drying from old rain. It was July 19, 2026, but in the room without windows the date existed only as a line on Mara's clipboard, printed beside the shift start and the frequencies she was responsible for tending.

The relay room had once been a storage cellar. Its shelves still remembered jam jars and winter potatoes, though now they held batteries, wire, two dented speakers, a hand-cranked charger, rolls of tape, a radio set older than Mara's teenage runner, and a kettle that boiled when there was power and sulked when there was not. The neighborhood called the place a station, though it was no grander than a pulse under concrete. Mara preferred relay. A station suggested arrival. A relay admitted the truth: what came to her had to move onward, or else it died in her hands.

She sat with one ear covered by a padded headset and the other open to the room. This was how she had trained herself to listen: one ear for the signal, one for the world that signal was meant to serve. The static had weather inside it. It broke like dry twigs, hissed like sand, lifted in sudden silver sheets. In the ledger of the night, the first confirmed number reached her as speech broken by distance and urgency: Russia launched 41 missiles and 125 attack drones across Ukraine overnight.

Mara wrote the figures by hand.

41 missiles.

125 attack drones.

Across Ukraine.

She did not press harder than usual, though the pen wanted to tear the paper. Numbers could be clean in a way the sky was not. Numbers stood in rows; they submitted to ink. Outside, the engines were not numbers yet to anyone with a window open or a child sleeping in the next room. Outside, they were a sound people felt before they named it.

The first siren in the neighborhood failed halfway through its rise.

It began as a municipal wail, cracked, steadied, then dropped into a groan so low the relay room shelves seemed to lean toward it. Mara lifted her head. The signal in her headset continued, but the building had changed. Every pipe, every cupboard, every small animal silence in the walls had turned attentive.

She pressed the transmitter key.

"Relay check," she said. "Mara at the cellar. If you hear me, answer by block. Keep messages short. Repeat only confirmed warnings. Do not crowd the channel. Relay check."

A burst of static. Then Petro Hladun's voice, thinned by the hand radio he carried everywhere as if it were a stubborn grandchild.

"Uncle P hears you from the west stairwell. Siren choked. Lights holding for now."

"Copy, Petro. Check the backup line to the courtyard speaker."

"Already wearing my knees out for you."

His attempt at humor had no fat on it. Mara pictured him in his rubber sandals and ancient electrician's vest, the pockets sagging with pliers, fuses, wire caps, a wrapped heel of bread. He was retired in the official sense, but the night had no use for retirements. It recruited whoever could distinguish a dead wire from a live one by touch, whoever knew where the old conduits bent behind the plaster.

A second voice came in breathless.

"Fia at Block Three. Phones bad. People asking if the shelter route is open."

Sofiya Lysenko was sixteen and fast in the way of a thrown stone, all elbows and seriousness, a teenager who had learned to carry paper messages because paper did not need a tower, a password, or mercy. Mara had wanted her home with her head under a blanket. Sofiya had arrived at the cellar before dusk with a satchel, two pencils tucked into her braid, and the expression of someone who had already argued with every adult who loved her.

"Fia, stay inside the passages unless I send you," Mara said.

"I am inside. Mostly."

"Mostly is not a place."

"Copy. Mostly is not a place."

The lights flickered once, twice. The kettle clicked off. The radio's needle shivered.

Then the blackout came.

It did not fall like a curtain. It unstitched. First the overhead bulb went amber at the edges, as if aging rapidly. Then the fan slowed, each blade visible, lazy, accusatory. The small green diode on the charger blinked and vanished. In the sudden dark, the relay room's equipment continued on battery with a changed voice, flatter, closer to the bone.

Mara reached for the lamp by memory. Its cone of light opened over the clipboard, her hand, the black cord of the headset. Everything beyond that circle became rumor.

There was a sound then, far above concrete, above pipes, above the accumulating breath of the building. Not the siren. Not thunder. An engine, perhaps many engines, entering and leaving the range of human certainty. It seemed to stitch the dark from one side to another. It seemed to pause when people held their breath, though Mara knew that was impossible. The sky did not coordinate with fear.

She pressed the key again.

"All blocks, this is the cellar relay. Confirm shelter movement by voice or runner. Courtyard speaker is down. Use stairwell calls only if safe. Keep corridors clear."

Petro answered with a grunt, then a clatter.

"Line is cut or burned. I need light."

"Can you wait?"

"Do you want the speaker to wait with me?"

Mara closed her eyes for one count. Two. She had learned that panic often disguised itself as efficiency. It wanted hands moving before thought arrived. She opened them and tore a sheet from the pad.

To Petro: use battery lamp from cellar. Check courtyard speaker line. Return if exposed.

She wrote the same message twice in large letters, because darkness made all handwriting dishonest.

"Fia," she said.

"Here."

"Come to the cellar door. No courtyard. Take the inside stairs."

"Copy."

Mara listened to the static while she waited. In it, other neighborhoods seemed to exist as ghost versions of her own: a voice asking for confirmation; another asking not to repeat rumors; a third swallowed by interference before the sentence could become useful. Across Ukraine, the night was a fabric being tugged from many edges. She could not see its whole pattern. Her work was one knot.

The cellar door opened, letting in the smell of stairwell dust and human closeness. Sofiya slipped through, cheeks bright, braid half undone. She held out a hand without speaking. Mara gave her the folded note and the battery lamp.

"To Petro only," Mara said. "Wait for his answer. If the passage is crowded, you turn back. If you hear engines close, you stop under the arch and count to thirty before moving."

"Thirty slow or thirty fast?"

"Thirty honest."

Sofiya nodded as if this were a unit of measurement she respected. Then she was gone.

Mara's phone vibrated once on the crate beside her knee.

The screen showed a message trying to arrive from Oksana Velychko. It came in pieces, the way a face might appear through dirty glass.

Are you in-

Then nothing.

Mara waited. The phone offered no more. She set it face down, as if kindness could be given by not staring. Oksana was her sister, though in nights like this every sister became a country one could not reach. Mara saw her in fragments: Oksana at twelve, cutting Mara's hair badly and insisting the unevenness looked fashionable; Oksana at twenty, laughing with flour on her forehead; Oksana last winter, saying over a patchy call that courage was a word people used when they had run out of blankets to hand around.

Mara had disagreed then. Quietly, because sisters carry old maps of each other's pride. She had thought courage was a private chamber, something one entered alone and locked from inside.

The radio popped.

"Cellar, Dan at the east entrance. People are moving down. One old man refuses because of his cat."

Danylo Rudenko spoke softly even when hurried. Volunteer medic, neighbor by practice if not by address, he wore his fatigue like a second coat. Mara had seen him mend scraped knees, carry water, sit beside strangers whose shaking would not stop. He was not heroic in the poster sense. He was usually hungry. His shoes were always wrong for the weather.

"Can someone bring the cat?" Mara asked.

"The cat disagrees with everyone."

"Then bring the old man and let the cat keep its politics."

A breath of laughter crossed the channel and disappeared. It mattered, that small sound. Not because it changed the sky. Because it proved the sky had not yet taken every room in them.

The second wave of noise arrived without siren. Engines layered over engines until the air seemed threaded with coarse black yarn. Somewhere in the building, a woman began to pray, not loudly, not to be heard, but the stairwell carried her syllables down like water finding cracks. A child asked a question and was hushed. Feet moved. Doors opened and closed with more care than doors are made for.

Mara adjusted the gain, turned the dial a fraction, leaned into the headset. The relay was drifting. Battery voltage, interference, the brute fact of night pressing on cheap equipment. She took a screwdriver from the tray and tightened a terminal that did not need tightening because sometimes the body demanded an answer the machine could not give.

Petro returned on the channel breathing hard.

"Speaker line is bad at the junction. I can bridge it, but not pretty."

"Pretty has been canceled," Mara said.

"Good. I never trusted it. Fia is with me. She is making a face at my tape work."

Sofiya's voice cut in from behind him. "Because your tape work is tragic."

"Tragedy keeps the rain out," Petro said.

"No courtyard," Mara reminded them.

"We are under the overhang," Petro said. "I have one hand in a box older than my sins. Give me two minutes."

Mara almost told him he had one. She almost said come back. Instead she looked at the clipboard. 41. 125. Across Ukraine. What did two minutes mean inside such numbers? Everything, if it was your speaker. Nothing, if you were counting from the sky.

"Two minutes," she said. "Then you return, finished or not."

The phone trembled again.

Mara snatched it up too quickly.

-shelter. You?

It was Oksana's message completing itself after crossing whatever darkness messages crossed. Mara typed with one thumb.

Cellar. Working. Stay low. I love you.

The last sentence stalled unsent. Then the screen dimmed to save itself.

Mara stared at the words trapped in the phone, ridiculous and enormous. The relay called for brevity, confirmed information, discipline. The heart, undisciplined organ, kept composing unauthorized traffic.

A boom moved through the distance. Not near enough to give Mara a fact. Near enough to turn every face in the shelter, she imagined, toward the ceiling. Dust sifted from the relay room wall in a pale breath. The radio jumped with voices.

"Say again-"

"Do not repeat unless confirmed-"

"Block Two here, we have-"

"Cellar, can you hear-"

Mara sat forward.

"All stations, hold. One at a time. This is the cellar relay. Hold the channel unless you have immediate shelter information. Block Two, repeat only what you know."

Silence, then a shaken voice she did not recognize and could not name because naming was not knowing.

"People are down. Stairs clear. We need the west stairwell to stop sending everyone the same way."

"Copy," Mara said. "West stairwell, divert to the secondary passage if clear. Petro, can the courtyard speaker take a message?"

Static.

"Petro?"

A crackle, then Sofiya: "He says don't nag while he is saving civilization with tape."

Mara let out the breath she had been holding. "Tell civilization it has thirty seconds."

Then the courtyard speaker came alive.

It began with a howl so ugly Mara flinched. Feedback tore through the building's open throat. Then Petro's bridge held, or pretended to hold, and Mara's own voice came back at her from outside the relay room, larger, metallic, and frayed at the edges.

"This is the neighborhood relay. Use west stairwell for downward movement only if clear. Secondary passage open. Keep to interior walls. Carry water if at hand. Do not run unless directed. Repeat to neighbors without phones."

She said it twice. The second time, voices in the stairwell took it up before she finished. Not as a chant, not as drama. As work. One mouth passing to another what machinery could not be trusted to keep.

The engines continued.

There are sounds a person can grow used to, and sounds that renew their terror with each return. Mara knew the difference now. The refrigerator's click, the pipe knock, Petro swearing at a junction box: these could become background, woven into life. The overhead drone did not settle. It asked to be heard each time as if newly invented. It made the body old and infant at once.

Hours lost their edges. The clipboard filled with small marks: relay checked, battery swapped, passage crowded, passage clear, speaker active, speaker failing, speaker active again. Sofiya ran less as the night deepened, not because she tired, though she did, but because the system around her improved in human ways. People learned which doors to prop, which landing swallowed signal, which neighbor could shout without frightening children, which one should be given a written note because fear had made sound useless to her.

Petro came back with blackened fingertips and a strip of tape stuck to his sleeve. He lowered himself onto a crate and held out his hands to Mara like evidence.

"Do you see? Artist's work."

"You look like you argued with a stove."

"The stove lost."

Sofiya dropped beside the shelves, drank from a bottle, and shut her eyes for exactly three seconds before opening them again in defiance of sleep. Danylo entered later, shoulders wet with sweat though the cellar was cool. He set his bag down, checked the room the way medics check rooms: exits, faces, water, danger, the invisible inventory of who might fall apart next.

"You need to sit," he told Mara.

"I am sitting."

"On the edge of a chair as if it owes you money. Sit like a person."

She did not move. He did not press. That was one of Danylo's gifts, knowing when care became another demand.

The phone, nearly dead, lit once more.

Sent.

Mara looked down. Her message to Oksana had gone through at last: Cellar. Working. Stay low. I love you.

A reply appeared after a long minute.

Love you. Don't be only useful.

Mara read it twice. The room swam for a moment, not with tears exactly, but with the pressure of having remained functional too long. Do not be only useful. It was a sister's instruction and an accusation against the age. Around her, Petro picked tape from his sleeve. Sofiya sharpened a pencil with a small knife, curls of wood falling into her palm. Danylo leaned against the wall, eyes closed, listening rather than resting. Above them, people shifted in corridors. Beyond the building, engines crossed the dark. Across Ukraine, the numbers stood: 41 missiles and 125 attack drones overnight. The fact was vast, but it did not know Petro's tape, Sofiya's honest thirty, Danylo's quiet scan of the room, Oksana's forbidden tenderness arriving late through the blackout.

Mara pressed the heel of her hand to her sternum. Not hard. Just enough to locate herself.

The eastern side of the sky began to pale without promising anything.

Dawn in wartime could be mistaken for mercy by those desperate enough to read light as verdict. Mara had learned not to. Morning did not erase what had crossed the night. It did not declare safety, settle causes, or explain endurance. It merely revealed surfaces again: the damp stairwell walls, the pale dust on Petro's hair, the ink on Mara's fingers, Sofiya asleep now despite herself with her head against a coil of cable, Danylo folding a blanket over her knees.

The courtyard speaker gave a final tired pop and went silent.

No one cheered. There was nothing finished enough for cheering. People emerged slowly, carrying bags, cups, pets if pets had permitted rescue, children with creases on their cheeks from sleeping against sleeves. They looked at one another as if every familiar face required reconfirmation. Here. Here. Here.

Mara removed the headset. The sudden absence of static rang louder than static. Her ear felt tender, reshaped by listening.

Petro stood in the doorway, one hand braced on the frame.

"Relay Keeper," he said, using the nickname she disliked when rested and tolerated when exhausted, "you should see what your kingdom looks like."

"It is not my kingdom."

"Good. Kings are useless with batteries."

She followed him up one flight. The stairwell smelled of candle smoke, wet concrete, unwashed wool, and the sour-sweet breath of many people afraid together. On the landing, a handwritten sheet had been taped to the wall in Sofiya's blocky letters: SECONDARY PASSAGE OPEN. MOVE SLOW. TELL THE NEXT PERSON.

Mara touched the corner of the paper. The tape had been pressed down carefully, all four sides. Petro's doing, perhaps. Or Sofiya's. Or someone she would never identify. That seemed right. The night had not belonged to one hand.

In the first wash of morning, the neighborhood was quieter than it should have been, quieter than any place with so many people awake. Not peaceful. Listening. The collective ear still lifted toward the sky.

Mara thought then that she had misunderstood courage not once but many times. It was not the locked chamber. It was not the clean number, the brave sentence, the single figure standing in light. It was uglier and more durable. It was a relay with failing batteries. A retired electrician lying about fear through jokes. A teenage runner learning the measure of an honest thirty. A medic noticing who had not drunk water. A sister's message arriving late and still arriving. It was the work of being frightened and remaining answerable to someone else's fear.

By dawn, the attack had not resolved the war. Dawn did not possess such authority. The sky, pale and indifferent, held its silence. But in the stairwell and the cellar and the passages between apartment blocks, something had been revised. Not the fact of danger. Not the exhaustion. Those remained, heavy as buckets carried too far.

What changed was smaller and therefore harder to destroy.

People had heard themselves become a system. Not flawless, not fearless, not enough to stop what crossed above them, but enough to pass the warning on. Enough to keep one another moving through the dark. Enough to make a neighborhood out of breath, paper, wire, and the stubborn refusal to let any one room go uninformed.

Mara went back down to the relay room because the batteries needed checking and the clipboard needed a clean page. She wrote the date again. She wrote the ledger fact again because facts mattered, because distortion loved fatigue, because the dead of night was always trying to smudge itself by morning.

July 19, 2026.

41 missiles.

125 attack drones.

Across Ukraine overnight.

Then, after a pause, in smaller letters not meant for transmission, she added: We answered each other.

The pen did not tear the paper. Outside, the first voices of the day began passing along the stairwell, hoarse and ordinary, carrying water, instructions, and names kept alive by being called from door to door. Mara put the headset back on. The relay breathed, thinly. So did she.