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“Goodbye, Elizabeth. I’m sorry. I am. I—”
She hung up.
Ethan laced their fingers together and turned Jack away from the wind.
* * *
Washington DC
Elizabeth coveredher face with her hands after she hung up, trying to hold back a sob. It burst free, a single, choking gasp and a shuddering cry.
Across from her, in her study in the Residence, Levi looked down. He reached across the desk, laying his hand flat and holding it open for her.
She took it, squeezing tight. “I think I’ve lost all hope of reelection,” she breathed. “You can’t come back from being the president who murdered the crew of the ISS.”
“You didn’t murder them.”
“I didn’t save them, either.”
“You did the best you could.”
“But it’s not enough. It never is.” She squeezed his hand again, turning their joined palms over. “Any word on Scott?”
“He’s left the country.”
She nodded slowly. “Four months until the election,” she said. “Maybe… maybe it’s okay if I lose.”
Levi kissed her knuckles gently. “Whatever happens,” he said, “I’ll still wait for you, no matter how long it takes.”
* * *
48
Siziwang Banner
Inner Mongolia
Days passed.
Sasha and Mark continued to bleed, suspended between life and death. Their heart rates were low, their blood pressures high, but the readings were stable. No cerebral swelling, one of the doctors said in fumbling Russian.
Actually, he saidno brain big, but Sergey got the picture. He nodded his thanks and went back to watching Sasha’s chest rise and fall, the rhythm regulated by his breathing tube.
Song flew back to Beijing, leaving Jack, Ethan, and Lindsey in the compound attached to the facility. Sergey saw it once when Jack dragged him there for a shower and a change of clothes.
The compound was a collection of flat-roofed concrete rooms around a quad of dirt, all sharing a single pan toilet and shower. Other concrete boxes around them were empty, seemingly abandoned, wind whipping through glassless windows and unfurnished rooms.
Lindsey saw Mark in the isolation room once and then stayed in the compound. “He won’t want me to see him like that,” she’d told Sergey. “He’ll be pissed when he wakes up if I’ve done nothing but sit and watch him bleed.”
She seemed to draw on something deep inside herself, some core of strength she and Mark had built together, sustained and nurtured through the years of their marriage. Jack, who spent most of his time with Ethan but came to see Sergey at least once a day, said she spent her days on video calls with their twins, helping them with homework and listening to their stories of elementary school. The twins recorded their school play, and she told them she and Mark would watch it together. She smiled for her children and then sat in silence after the calls, listening to the wind.
At dawn and dusk, she, Jack, and Ethan walked, Jack told him, picking a direction and going for hours. No one stopped them. The lab was as isolated as humanity could get. Even after hours of walking away, the compound stayed on the horizon, the only speck of life as far as the eye could see.
Sergey and Kilaqqi stayed with Sasha in the lab, a cramped underground bunker. Whatever this place was, the Chinese were careful to conceal their work and not draw attention to their activities.
Sergey noticed but didn’t care. He’d passed the point of caring about the hidden machinations of geopolitics, the games of one-upmanship and arms races. He wasn’t a president any longer. What did he care about China’s biological weapons facility, if that was what this was? Song had offered to treat Sasha, try to cure him. That was all Sergey cared about.
He slept on the cold floor outside Sasha and Mark’s isolation room, lying against the glass and watching his love until he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. The first night, someone brought him a blanket while he slept, and the next day a bamboo mat and a square pillow appeared.
