Page 171 of Golden Eagle

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The wind shifted, blowing his hair off his forehead, revealing his face fully.

Yes, it was Kolya. That was his nose, his cheekbones; that dark, too-long hair, downy-soft, was his, too. And the width of his shoulders, the way he held himself; the lightness coiled up in his legs, ready to send him leaping and spinning. Once upon a time, Nikita had known the members of his squad better than he knew himself: every breath, every step, every tiny hint at a facial expression. He’d watched Kolya die almost a century ago: a gout of flame, a fallen, blackened husk of a corpse…

Detachment. It reared up at the most useful of moments. To protect soldiers, and hired killers, and sufferers of trauma. It had saved his life on more than one occasion. Had enabled him to exact Stalin’s violence on the country he’d been born to.

Detachment came now. His heart stopped, and the immediate, screeching wave of panic was cut ruthlessly off, so that he floated, his awareness narrowed down to tiny details, committed to cataloguing and proving.

He was looking at Kolya, just as he’d appeared in the moments before his death, still a handsome, surprisingly elegant, thoughtful man in his late twenties.

But then he noticed the scars. The ones on the backs of his hands were pink, still-healing, an uneven zig and zag without a pattern. Like the stitching on a patchwork quilt. He had them on his face, too, silver in the moonlight. Across the bridge of his nose, over one eye, and under the other, a long one down the length of his jaw.

His eyes were big, dark, his mouth a flat line. No expression.

Nikita became aware of something on his shoulders – around them. Awareness returned, like the blood rushing back to a limb that had been asleep, filling him with prickles – and nausea. The weight across his shoulders was Val’s arm.

It was Val’s voice in his ear, low, attempting-at-soothing, but urgent with worry. “Nik. Nikita. Darling. Listen to me. I know what you’re seeing seems impossible. I’m going to explain it to you. I’m going–”

“Is it real?” Nik wasn’t aware of having spoken until he heard his own voice – hoarse and raw – echoing across the rooftop.

A pause. “Yes. He’s real.” Val stressed the pronoun. “It’s him. It’s your friend. Only, he’s–”

He cut off when Kolya stepped forward. One step, and then another.

Nikita watched him come, closer and closer, close enough to smell the sharp notes of ash, and the earthier tones of graveyard on his skin. Close enough to see that, though his face was slack, his eyes glimmered with riotous emotion. He watched him come, and he knewhorror. Thisthing, whatever it was – how could it be his friend? The Kolya he’d known was a charred ruin, buried beneath the snow – beneath decades of snow. Sasha hadn’t fedhimRasputin’s heart; hadn’t put the killing, saving, immortalizing blood inhismouth. Kolya wasdead.

But this thing that looked like Kolya kept coming, and coming, and stood right in front of Nikita, close enough to reveal another scar, not the pink-and-silver patchwork that was new, but one that was old, so old, one right at his hairline, a mark where he’d fallen as a dancer, and cracked his head open on the edge of a makeshift stage. A mark that he’d touched, sometimes, on the coldest of days, massaging at it as he mulled over a particularly thorny problem.

Hadn’t all their problems been thorny?

Nikita’s mouth opened again, of its own volition. “Kolya?” he croaked. “It’s not – you can’t be –how?” Then: “I’ve gone mad, this isn’t, I’m seeing this, this can’t…”

Val’s arm squeezed. “Iwillexplain. But it’s real. He’s real. Nikita, please–”

And then Kolya spoke. Impossibly. His voice flat, his eyesgleaming. “I remember.”

Nikita couldn’t breathe.

Slowly, as if testing out the words, like unearthing something hidden in the bottom of an old trunk, Kolya said, “You should eat.”

Silence. Traffic passing on the street, the wind playing with an old bottle, rolling it across the tar paper and gravel of the roof. But between the living things standing there, not a sound.

Kolya’s jaw worked a moment. “You – you never ate. And I – we–” His eyes widened suddenly, impossibly bigger. Panicked. Tension in his face; a shudder that wracked his frame. “The train. On the way to – to Siberia. And Ivan’s pirozhkis…” He sucked in a deep, deep breath, with a sound like a drowning man who’d been underwater. Harsh, frantic: “Iremember.”

“Kolya,” Nikita said again, and the word hurt, broke open all the old wounds, some he hadn’t even known he carried.

Kolya shuddered again – and then he fled.

Everything went blurry, then.

He heard the scramble of feet, muffled curses. Sound of bodies colliding. Two arms went around his waist, held tight as a vise: Val was holding him – he was trying to run, feet scrabbling over the roof. Val lifted him, held him close, all that good pressure around his ribs, flooding his body with endorphins.

“Nik. Nik, listen.” A chant in his ear, low and sweet, almost crooning. “It’s alright, listen, listen. They have him; Fulk and Anna have him. We’ll go see him, okay? You can talk to him. You can touch him. Okay?”

Val carried him over, like he was a child, and Nikita stopped struggling. It was easier to breathe when he didn’t struggle.

“Here we go, here we go.”

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