Page 42 of Ascendent
Sasha’s smile grew, even as his eyes slid closed again. “Wish I could take you with me,” he breathed. “I want to see you in starlight. Want to take you to the moon. I never want to leave you. Never wanted to leave you.”
Sergey’s heart pounded. His fingers slid through Sasha’s hair. “You never have to.”
Sasha’s breathing leveled out. His face relaxed into the pillow as his smile faded. He was out.
Sergey stroked Sasha’s hair for a long time, watching him sleep.
Oleg never called back.
Chapter Nine
Sasha dreamed.
Siberia.
The surreality of the land, the vastness of eternity. Snow and ice in every direction, a frozen landscape that curled around the edges of the world. Blackness above, white below.
Moscow and St. Petersburg had always imagined they were the center of the Russia’s beating heart, the soul of the nation. After all, they’d both held the crown jewel, the capitol, in their hands through the centuries. They’d witnessed history, had shaped the world from the imperial courts and the halls of the Kremlin.
That was merely human history.
The Earth had carved Siberia, had made a place of wilderness as feral and wild as the innermost reaches of a man’s soul. Beyond the Ural Mountains to the east, Russia shifted, changed. The land was savage, the people who lived there survivors. Cities squatted on the permafrost, on the icy land. No one was fooled. Siberia would take those cities back, would destroy and ruin what she willed. History in Siberia was studied in epochs, in glacial terms.
In souls.
Souls moved in her mist, flitted between taiga and forest, from mountain to wind-carved granite and out to the frozen seas of the north. Souls chased reindeer, slid in and out of the herd. Snow turned to ice and then to mist, then swirled a soul into being.
A frosted hand beckoned to Sasha, whispering to him. He stepped closer.
Ice appeared on his skin, frost that hardened and grew, encasing him, wreathing him, wrapping him, sliding up and up and up, until the ice poured into his mouth and down his throat, closed over his eyes. He was stuck, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move—
He blew apart, flying on the wind, a billion particles of frozen ether that danced and reformed and fell apart again. There were no boundaries, not between snow and human, ice and memory.
You cut out the parts of yourself you do not want. Threw them away, like you could get rid of them forever.
I searched for your soul, but the reindeer came and told me there was nothing to find.
I’m here, I’m here, he wanted to scream. The wind blew him again, swirled him into the branches of a pine, blustered him into the frozen fog over the Kara Sea.I’m here.
The wind pulled him south, a cyclone now, a roaring vortex that sucked him away from the reindeer, from the gentle fog and the dances of souls entwined with snow. He tried to fight it, tried to scrape and scratch his way back to the north, to the frozen taiga. He didn’t want to go back to the Urals. Not there.
Never again.
But it was no use. Siberia would have her way.
He materialized at the 473rdTraining Centre in the Western Siberian Plains, at the foothills of the northern Urals. His icy body was a chrysalis, a quivering container for his atomized soul.
The vortex roared. Snow billowed, a billion flakes blinding him, trying to flay him open, shred him down to his bones and beyond, to his molecules.
It was night. The snow was howling. Inside the 473rd, a light was on in his sergeant’s quarters. Within, young Recruit Andreyev was being woken up. A hand over his mouth, a gun to his head. He was marched down the hall.
I know what you are, Recruit. Siberiansuka. I see your eyes slide sideways. To your other recruits. I could kill you right now. I would be a hero.
Drop to your knees,huisos. Pidor.
Snow piled around him, climbing higher, boxing him in, barricading him, until he couldn’t move and his hands were restrained, and it was too much, too close tothat night. He tried to scream, tried to fight, thrash, but he was just as useless as he’d been back then. His mouth opened, and snow poured in, burning, searing snow, the taste filling his mouth likethathad, choking him, pain, so much pain,govno, he was going to die—
Screaming, he bolted upright. Frigid sweat clung to his skin, rolled down his face and his chest in waves. His fingers fought the blankets covering him, threw them away. He had to be free.
