Page 44 of Ascendent
“I need to go,Seryozha.” He tried to stand. He’d start walking tonight.
“Rest. We’ll talk about this later.” Sergey’s hands gently eased him back onto the pillows.
“Don’t try and stop me!” Sasha growled, swatting at Sergey’s hold. “I have to go back!”
Sergey pulled his hands free. “Why do you need to?”
Sasha couldn’t rise. The blankets, the pillows, were warmed by Sergey, smelled like him. Like bonds, they held him down, cradled him in the confining serenity of lassitude and ease. He tried to hold his breath, not take in Sergey’s essence. Humidity seemed to rise around him, thickened the air. He was melting away. “I need to find Kilaqqi.”
“The tribesman who saved your life?”
He nodded. Kilaqqi had found him in the snow on the run from Madigan and Moroshkin’s crack Spetznatz team, hunted to the brink, to the edge of his life. He’d collapsed, was about to die, but he’d woken up in Kilaqqi’s yurt instead.
Was that when the ice had infected him? Or was it before, at the 473rd? Or earlier?
Something fundamental was broken inside of him, something that was missing and had frozen over and was slowly killing him from the inside. He’d just had every scan known to man done on his body, but who could scan his soul? What if the defect wasn’t from his organs? What if his soul had turned to frost?
You cut out your soul, tried to throw it away.
Why had he been born? What assemblage of atoms and molecules had come together to create his existence? Why had his life sparked into being? Why him, why here? Why was he this way and not that way? What made him want,crave, the things he craved?
He’d once heard an old phonograph play an ancient record, something old before even Stalin’s purges, before the Iron Curtain fell. The wail of a single violin, the notes that seemed to quiver into infinity, the scream of sorrow that a single string could call forth. He’d stood in the snow beneath his apartment block in Kayerkan and had listened to old Vladimir Veliksonveliky play his classical records until his lips turned blue and his ears bright red.
He’d thought, at the age of sixteen, that he’d heard the sound of his own soul. It was almost a decade later, after the 473rd, after Syria, when he’d finally been assigned to Andreapol, that he’d been able to look up classical music and listen to the violin again. Paganini's Caprice Number 3 in e minor, opus 1, had made him weep, sitting on his toilet with earbuds mashed in his ears so his roommates wouldn’t hear him. Number 4 in c minor made him want to rip out his heart.
How had he sliced himself apart through the years, hiding this and that, carving off the notes of his being, the pitch of his soul, until there was nothing left but a frozen scream?
Could he ever recover? Could he ever repair what had been broken? Could he find those parts he’d cut away?
Could he ever be around Sergey and not want to melt? Could he ever be warm again?
Dr. Voronov, for all his medical tests, his surgeries, his scans, couldn’t give him any answers.
But, somewhere in Siberia, there was a man who’d picked Sasha up out of the snow and had seen through him, all the way through, into that blackest pit in the center of his soul. He’d dived in, had tried to save Sasha’s life, rescue him from the darkness. Kilaqqi hadn’t known Sasha wanted to live there, or had built his home in the blackness of space, in the center of the hole in his heart.
How could he ever be hurt again if he never felt a thing?
Oh, but tofeelagain! To find Sergey, and to—inexplicably—be shown kindness, fondness, affection.
To fall inlove.
The burn was like coming out of frostbite. Out of the Siberian winter, out of the black nights when the sun never rose, and you didn’t know how cold you truly were until dawn came once again and you broke the ice off your face, your hair. Some men in the mines would stand too close to the fires burning in the oil drums. Their frozen hands wouldn’t feel it when their skin caught fire, when they turned black with disfigurement. It was only after, much later, when the pain began.
When had he frozen? When had he started burning alive?
Sergey. It was all connected to Sergey.
Run. Fire is dangerous. Deadly. Fire will destroy you.
Snegurochkaonce loved a boy who lived in a village. She’d watched him from afar, as the fairy tale went, and lost her frozen heart to the fair-haired lad. Somehow, the boy found her, and fell for her in return. A warm, virile man, a man with fire in his blood, a Russian man. And she, made of snow, made of ice, made of everything cold and lonely in the world. One night, as they danced in the village, the boys and girls began jumping over their bonfire. An old Russian tradition, to dance in flames. To flirt with danger and death.
To prove her love to the boy, she’d leaped.
And had burst apart in a puff of steam.
She, and their love, died.
This was Russia. Happy endings belonged someplace else.
