Page 76 of Ascendent
“Da.”
“Is everyone dead?”
Yuri stayed quiet.
There was an almost memory in Sasha’s mind, something between a dream and an illusion. Something he didn’t know if he’d seen or just imagined. Bodies rising from a field of ash, corpses with blood flowing from their eyes and mouths. Faces he thought he knew.
“Good,” Sasha said.
Yuri slid into the SUV’s backseat with Sasha. He mumbled something in Mikhail’s ear, squeezed his shoulder, and leaned back. He grabbed Sasha’s arm, pulled his wrist, and tugged his hands free of his jacket pockets. “Let me see.”
Sasha watched as Yuri inspected his crimson palms, the dried blood under his fingernails. He’d waited too long. Soap and water would take forever now, and he didn’t see a sink in the SUV.
Yuri reached into his jacket and pulled out a tub of petroleum jelly. He scooped some out and dumped it over Sasha’s palm, slathering it over his fingers, working it into his skin. The dried blood lifted, flakes disappearing into the jelly and off his skin. Yuri kept scrubbing, rubbing the evidence of Grisha’s death away.
Mikhail tossed a duffel into the backseat. Yuri pulled out a pair of Sasha’s jeans, a long sleeve pullover. “You need to change.”
He stripped quickly as Mikhail drove them across Novosibirsk to the airport. He rubbed his hands clean of the jelly on his shirt, shimmied out of his mud-and-blood-stained trousers in the backseat. Yuri frowned at the leather wrap around his hips, but said nothing. He collected Sasha’s bloody clothes and shoved them in the duffel as Sasha redressed.
At the airport, Mikhail drove to a waiting private jet, already humming on the apron adjacent to the runway. “FSB plane,” Yuri shouted as they jogged over. “We flew on priority government business. Dr. Biryukov took a chopper to Krasnoyarsk.” They hurried up the stairs and into the slim cabin. Mikhail tossed the SUV’s keys to someone on the ground.
“Is he testing Grisha for infection?”
Yuri nodded as Mikhail ducked into the cockpit and spoke to the pilot. He came out and collapsed next to Yuri in one of the plane’s executive seats, facing Sasha across a plush carpet.
Sasha slumped against the window, closing his eyes while the jet’s engines whined, spinning up for the taxi to the main runway.
“We’re cleared for immediate takeoff,” Mikhail said to Yuri.
“We’re not waiting for Dr. Biryukov?” Sasha frowned at both men.
“The priority is bringingyouhome, Mr. Andreyev,” Mikhail said. “Dr. Biryukov will return tomorrow if the tests are negative. If they’re positive…”
“But we are sure it will be negative,” Yuri said. “After what you told President Puchkov.”
“How do you know––” Sasha shook his head. He glared out the window. Were they eavesdropping on his calls with Sergey? Why? What possible innocent reason could they have for that?
Were they even on their way back to Moscow? Or were they heading back into Siberia, back to Moroshkin’s men, his followers’ new shadowy camp?
“Why are you here?” he snapped. “Why did you come for me?”
The plane turned, the Novosibirsk airport slipping by the windows. Runway lights made trails in the darkness, paths that seemed to bleed into the night like points on a compass. Which way were they headed? He squinted, trying to read the runway signs. Too late. They were lined up for takeoff. As Mikhail had said, they were at the front of the line.
Yuri stared. Mikhail looked away, looked down at the carpet. The toe of his boot scuffed Yuri’s giant, mud-covered combat boots.
“You think you are the only man who believes in Sergey Puchkov? Who thinks he is the right politician who can bring real change to Russia? You think you’re the only man who wants the future he can create?Hmm?” Yuri frowned, almost scowling at him. “You think you are the only gay Russian in the entire country?”
Sasha’s lungs seized. His head whipped up, and he stared at Yuri.
“We watched our friends be murdered. They were lined up and shot in Red Square. Policemen. FSB. Firefighters. Medics. Do you know what they all had in common?”
He didn’t want to hear the answer. He didn’t. He tried to shake his head.
“They were gay,” Mikhail said. “Like us.”
Sasha’s gaze crashed to the carpet as the plane’s engines roared, racing them down the runway. Power thrummed, the cabin trembling until they lifted from the ground. Pressure pushed Sasha into his seat, the exhilaration of escaping Earth’s gravity, of freeing himself, for the moment, from the binds of reality that held him in place on the ground and in his life.
“You?”
