by Vivian Wood
Then the truck explodes. There’s no sound on the dashboard cameras, so it’s totally silent, orange blooming out, the truck bursting, flames turning to thick black smoke.
I’m frozen. There’s a layer of surreality over everything, like I’m watching an action movie and not real life, but then something heavy hits the windshield in front of the camera and a spider web splinters across it from one corner, and that’s what shakes me back.
Niko’s already shouting into the radio in Russian. Someone’s shouting back, and I grab the camera toggle and switch views, but there’s nothing that shows what’s happening behind the trucks.
Where’s Kostya, I think. Where the fuck is Kostya?
Arkady starts yelling, and then another older man comes in, takes one look, and starts yelling. It’s all in Russian, and it’s all directed at Niko, who turns his back with one hand over an ear.
I toggle the cameras again. One of them is shaking, like the truck it’s in is being rocked from side to side. I toggle. When I come back, that camera is suddenly moving backwards and then it sweeps across a long vista of gray slabs and buildings.
No Kostya.
Please, I think. My heart’s in a vice. Please. Please.
“Niko,” I say, leaning forward and touching his shoulder. Arkady keeps shouting. The other man keeps shouting. I can’t fucking believe them, and I don’t know if Kostya’s okay, and I think I’m about to tear something apart.
Niko holds up one finger. Arkady switches to shouting in English, the other man still shouting in Russian.
“—Come here and ruin everything—”
“SHUT UP!” I shout.
No one shuts up.
“How dare you—”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP OR GET THE FUCK OUT!”
They both stop for a second. A voice on Niko’s radio says something. I hope it says Kostya’s fine as I slam both hands on the table.
“You can stay here and fucking help or you can get the fuck out of here, because I swear to Christ if I see any more of your goddamn dick-waving right now I will fucking lose my shit,” I shout.
They both stare at me. Sweat rolls down the back of my neck. I’m shaking, and I already regret my outburst because I don’t have shit to back it up besides fury and sheer terror.
A voice in Russian comes through the radio. I try to listen for Kostya’s name but I don’t catch it. The camera is still moving, the car going somewhere, and I touch Niko’s shoulder again and point at it.
I want to shake Niko until he tells me that Kostya’s okay, but I don’t. He knows what he’s doing.
Arkady sits, slowly. The other man turns on his heel and leaves.
“Da, Hazel,” Niko says into the radio, then looks at me. “Pavel was badly hurt. That truck is taking him to the hospital and bringing Yelena here. Kostya’s going to have a nasty bruise but he’s fine.”
I exhale and sit again. My t-shirt sticks to my back. All the cameras show is a burning truck in the middle of a concrete slab.
Just leave, I think at the camera. My insides feels like lead.
Leave, just fucking leave.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Kostya
I lean against the back of the Humvee. I’m breathing hard, adrenaline is surging through my veins, and my side hurts like hell where the explosion threw me into the truck about thirty seconds ago, but I’m okay. Bruised, but fine.
I’m better than Pavel. I watch the other truck drive away, thumping over concrete and then dirt. He’s in the back, a piece of steel the size of my hand sticking out of his leg. His blood is still pooled and dripped across the concrete in front of me, but if they drive fast enough, he might make it.
And Yelena’s fine. She’ll be at the palace in an hour. At least one good thing happened.
Everything goes still. The truck in the center is still burning, but since it’s in the middle of a concrete slab, I’m not particularly worried that anything else will catch fire.
Everyone’s still talking through my earpiece, and everything from the palace is coming through a blur of shouting, but it’s all status updates. They’re checking in that they’re okay, that by some miracle they all got behind cover in time.
Then I hear a woman’s voice over the radio. It’s in the background, but it shouts SHUT UP over the yelling.
I look over my shoulder and around the side of the vehicle, but I can’t help but smile at Hazel, even as the shouting continues.
Then I hear her again. We all hear her again, a long, curse-and-threat-filled tirade that would probably make my mother feel faint if she heard it, because in Sveloria, women do not curse.
It’s followed by silence. Crouched behind the vehicles, no one says anything.
“Was that Hazel?” Dmitri asks Niko through his radio.
“Yeah, that was Hazel,” Niko says. Everyone looks at me, and I start to shrug, but then I hear the rattle again.
Everyone freezes. I feel another jolt of adrenaline race through me, and my brain kicks over into instinct mode, the fight part of fight-or-flight.
“Down!” Captain Ovechkin shouts as another truck rolls into the square.
I brace for an explosion, but there isn’t one. I wait and wait, forcing myself not to look around the truck, because I know the moment I do my face could get blown off.
Just explode, I think. Just fucking explode.
The only thing worse than a bomb is an unexploded bomb, because once an explosive fails it could go off at any time.
“Niko,” the captain says into his radio. “Eyes?”
“It’s a truck, the same kind of Soviet truck,” Niko says.
Silence.
“Bullet holes through the driver’s side window,” Niko finally says.
Shit, I think. We don’t know how the last bomber set off the bomb. We don’t know if the person inside this one is dead or alive. We’ve got no idea whether this bomb will go off or not, whether jostling the truck will hit a trigger.
We wait. I hold my breath until I can’t any more, and then let it out in a long sigh. Captain Ovechkin and I look at each other.
“There might be people on the other side,” I say. “I’m going to go check.”
“No,” he barks, and signals to two other men.
They nod, stand into a crouch, and begin making their way around the big concrete slab.
“Let someone else do something for once,” the captain growls at me.
I hear a faraway noise, and for a moment my gut tightens.
How many fucking times is this going to happen? I think.
Then I see a helicopter fly into view over a faraway gray cube.
I relax a little. The cavalry’s here.
Ovechkin stands.
“Get in,” he says, gesturing at the Humvee. “We’re heading out.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Hazel
One by one, the cameras in the Humvees swing around, showing the full vista of the gray district, then drive away. For a long, long time I’m still convinced that the truck behind them is going to explode, that somehow the explosion is going to obliterate everyone even when they’re half a mile away.
It doesn’t. They just drive, and my terror slowly eases.
I put my head in my arms, on the table, and take a long, deep breath. I’m still shaking, still roiling inside, on edge, like the unexploded bomb is behind me and I don’t know it.
Niko’s still talking in Russian. Always talking in Russian, and this whole time he’s somehow managed to do it without sweating or getting a single hair out of place.
This probably isn’t the most stressful thing he’s ever done, but still.
He stands. I look up. Arkady’s gone, God knows where. Niko puts his hand on my shoulder.
“I’m going to field command,” he says.
I stand.
“No,” he says. “You’re not trained and I don’t need American fighter jets up my ass.”
I close my mouth, because as much as I hate t
he thought of sitting in the palace doing goddamn nothing, I know he’s right.
“But you could run our tracking software,” he goes on. “I don’t think any of these old men even know how to turn a computer on.”
“Yes,” I say. “Please, God, give me something to do.”
Thirty minutes later I’m in a different room with an array of screens and two twenty-year-old Svelorian aides who seem equal parts annoyed with and afraid of me. There’s a map on every monitor: radar, infrared, GPS, even a few satellite. Every military vehicle is marked, and I can watch them all move around.
There’s no way I should be in here. There’s no way that the movements of the entire Svelorian military isn’t the highest level of classified information, and yet, here I am. Not even a citizen, just some girl who doesn’t even speak the language.
My earpiece fuzzes to life, and I turn it down a little, making a face. I feel official as hell wearing it, but it’s weird, like there’s constantly someone standing just behind me who I can hear and not see.
“Sung,” says a man’s voice I don’t recognize.
“Yes,” I say.
“We’ve got two teams, eastern quadrant, Velchek and Orsiny. Outside a sealed factory. Anything?”
I pause for a long time, trying to find what he’s talking about. The aides are whispering to each other and not fucking helping at all.
“Sung?” the man asks.
“I’m here,” I say, and finally find what he’s talking about on the infrared map. “Looks like... one large heat signature inside. Maybe one smaller. Neither movi—no, one’s moving, a little. I don’t know what it is.”
Shit, I’m bad at this, I think.
“Thank you,” he says.
I do that for an hour. The questions back up sometimes, and the aides get more helpful, but it becomes quickly apparent that they don’t know what they’re doing either.
We all turn when the door opens, and a woman pokes her head in. I recognize her as one of the palace kitchen workers.
“Yelena Pavlovna is here,” she says softly, her voice thickly accented.
“Thank you,” I say.
“She wants to know if she can help.”
I look at the screens, all of them festooned with Cyrillic characters. As much effort as I’ve been putting into learning Russian lately, I’m still sounding out words like a three-year-old learning to read.
“Yes,” I say. “Send her here, please.”
Ten minutes later Yelena comes in. She’s wearing clean clothes, and she’s washed her face and pulled her hair back, but I don’t think she’s showered. Her eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed, but she looks pissed.
I’ve never seen her look anything but sweet, happy, or slightly confused before, and I force myself not to smile.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She holds out her hands. Her wrists and forearms are bruised and purpled, and I suck a breath in through my teeth.
“They tied me, but that’s all,” she says, her voice soft. “The volki didn’t have me long before they traded me like a bargaining chip.”
She looks at me, and for the first time, there’s something fierce in her eyes.
“One tires of being used to bargain with,” she says.
Her voice has a bitter edge to it that I’ve never heard before. Both the aides are looking at us. I shoot them a glare and they turn around, acting like it was their own idea.
I hand Yelena a headset.
“We’re tracking the remnants of the volki through the gray quarter,” I say, and quickly explain what everything is. She slides her headset on over her head and tells me what everything says, and we quickly slide back into the rhythm that we developed together in the palace.
It’s slow, methodical, almost tedious work as the military works its way through the gray district, following up on all the leads. They arrest people one by one, and though I keep thinking that soon they’ll find the headquarters, the big hideout, they never do.
The volki are hiding in holes simply and by pairs. The end isn’t glamorous or exciting, it’s mundane, as angry-looking men and a few women are driven off in military police cars.
Yelena and I sit in the room and tell people what’s around the next corner. We tell one unit where another unit is, where the helicopters are, whether backup is coming. She knows the language and the city and I’m good at taking in three maps at once and describing the composite to someone on the other end of the line.
At some point, the aides leave. The room doesn’t have any windows, so I’m surprised when I look at the clock and it’s almost nine. Most of the motion on the maps has stopped. Not all the volki have been rounded up, and there are problems besides them, but it’s not a bad day’s work.
We sit in silence and watch. I feel wrung out from the day, from the heart-stopping terror that started it to its long, slow descent into tedium. Not with a bang but with a whimper, that kind of thing.
But Kostya’s okay, I think. Everything could have gone so much worse.
All day, in the back of my mind, I’ve been replaying the morning. The meeting, the vodka, Kostya running. The explosion, horrifyingly silent on the screen, flames expanding and then blackening into a column of greasy smoke.
A few blips on the monitors move, but nothing noteworthy.
I think of Kostya saying I just wanted to tell you.
I swallow hard and fight tears.
He knew he might die, I think. The thought makes me nauseous, even though right now he’s at the hospital, visiting Pavel. It looks like Pavel’s going to pull through, so that’s good.
“What’s that?” Yelena asks, pointing at the screen.
There’s one blue dot, an official car, making its way along the seaside road and toward the palace.
“Sung here,” I say into my headset. “Who’s driving toward the palace in a government vehicle?”
There’s a second of silence, then Kostya’s voice.
“Niko and I,” he says.
My toes tingle. Yelena looks over at me. I try not to smile and fail miserably.
“You mind if we come in?” he asks.
“You’ve got some explaining to do,” I say.
“How many more times do I get to use because I’m the King?” he asks.
“Zero, and it was a bullshit reason in the first place,” I say, but I’m smiling.
Yelena’s looking at me. I clear my throat.
“Drive safe,” I say to Kostya, and my headset goes quiet.
Yelena looks forward and bites her lip.
Say something. Just say something.
I take off my headset, then reach over and switch hers off. She looks at me.
“I’m sorry about Kostya,” I say.
I’m not exactly sure what I’m sorry for. All they did was attend official events together. They weren’t dating. Kostya never even asked her out himself, it was always his father.
All I did was start sleeping with someone who had been in the company of another woman. I don’t think he and Yelena ever kissed.
But I still feel like I’ve done something cruel, because I think Yelena might have had higher hopes for her and Kostya.
She looks down.
“Thank you,” she says. She taps her finger on the console. “In hindsight, I don’t think it was going to work even if you hadn’t come along.”
No, I think.
“It was my father’s idea to begin with, and Kostya can be very stubborn,” she says. “He was nice to me, and I confused that with liking me.”
“I’ve made that mistake before,” I say. “God, have I made that mistake.”
“It’s an easy mistake,” she says, and I just nod. She looks at the screen, where Kostya’s car is getting close.
“I’ll stay here in case something happens,” she says. “Go say hello.”
“You’re sure?”
“Go,” Yelena says.
I don’t ask again.
Chapter Forty
Kostya
I hit the button on the SUV’s console and the gate slides open, my headlights shining through to the dark shrubbery behind. Niko and I are silent. I think we’ve said everything we have to say to each other, and now we’re just out of words.
The palace is up ahead, and in front of it, a roundabout with a fountain in the middle. There’s a person sitting on the edge of the fountain, and as we approach, she stands, squinting into the headlights, her arms folded across her chest.
I smile like a moron. Niko glances at me and then almost smiles.
“She’s good for you, you know,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
I stop the car in front of Hazel. She shades her eyes against the headlights so I cut them and we both get out.
“I’ll walk,” Niko calls.
He nods at Hazel.
“Good work today,” he says.
“You too,” she says, nodding back.
He disappears behind the fountain and then it’s just me and Hazel, standing in the driveway. She takes a deep breath.
“Are you fucking crazy?” she whispers.
“Maybe,” I say.
Then she’s in my arms, squeezing me as hard as she can. I’m holding her against me, her head right under my chin. I kiss her hair. She squeezes harder.
“What the hell,” she says.
I smile into her hair and don’t answer. It’s not a real question, anyway.
“And you wouldn’t even tell me,” she mutters.
“You would have tried to stop me,” I say into her hair.
“Well, yeah,” she says. “I was afraid someone would try to kill you. Which they fucking did.”
“I’m harder to kill than that,” I say. I stroke her hair, and she snuggles into me harder. “Even Pavel is harder to kill than that.”