Page 36 of Ascendent
“I know,” Sasha said. He frowned and smiled, all at once. “It’s where I am from.”
Sergey’s jaw dropped.
“Kayerkan is the village twenty kilometers away from Norilsk. Where the people who are too poor to live in Norilsk live. It was a gulag a hundred years ago. Soviet builders put block apartments on top of the old camp tents. My mother and I lived there when I was growing up. After my father died.”
“How did he die?”
“In the war. In Chechnya. I was born while he was serving his compulsory enlistment.”
Sergey did the math quickly. He was likely the same age––if not older––than Sasha’s father. His stomach twisted.
Sasha kept speaking. “He came home, but he didn’t want to work in the mines. His father had died while he was gone, and most of his friends’ fathers were dying, too. He decided to rejoin the Russian military as a contract soldier. He was killed when I was four. I barely knew him.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sasha shrugged. “Didn’t affect me. I didn’t miss him. How could I?”
Sergey stayed quiet. Sasha had always been brutally efficient with himself, cutting out anything that he didn’t need. Or want.
“Growing up at the end of the world… I didn’t know how strange it was until I left. Things I thought were normal, like the pollution that surrounded the city like a dome, a curtain of yellow soup. When I was a kid, I tried to catch the pollution in my hands, eat it like a snow cone out of the sky. I thought it would taste like pictures of fruit from TV. If the sky and the haze and the snow were orange and red, then they should taste like candy, right? I’d never seen a white cloud. It was the only thing I’d known. Food came in cans. I didn’t know things grew out of the ground. The land around our home was endless. Flat and dead, and the only colors were the runoff from the pollution on the ice and the tundra. I was fourteen, sneaking down the Norilskaya River to try and see a polar bear come down from the glaciers into the bay when I saw the stars for the first time. I thought the world turned upside down. I thought the moon was going to fall into the Earth.
“I’m… not educated like you.” He shifted. “School was geared toward creating the next generation of miners. I can tell you how to identify nickel ore. Palladium. Platinum. How to calculate the weight of a rock to see what ore might be within. How to calculate explosives for detonation. We learned the properties of the only elements that mattered by the color of the snow that fell. Red snow meant iron had been burning the smelters in the city. Sulfur yellow for nickel. Chalkboard gray for palladium.”
Suddenly, it seemed Sasha couldn’t stop talking. Once he’d begun, the words tripped over themselves to escape, sometimes making Sasha stutter, stop and restart what he was saying.
“Three of the boys in my school blew their hands off before they were ten. Everyone coughed like we smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Most everyone drank. Every week, someone would crash their car, driving completely drunk. Everyone works in the mines. My mother worked a kilometer underground after my father died, every day. I was supposed to work in the mines, too, like everyone else. We all were.”
“But, when you were seventeen, you got your conscription notice?”
Sasha nodded. “We were fighting ISIS in Syria, fighting in Ukraine, fighting in the Caucasus. Even though conscription was only a year long, I was called up, along with all the boys in Norilsk. Most tried to get out of the enlistment. You could get a deferment if you were at university or in jail. There was no university. Not for us. Most of the boys picked jail. Some robbed stores. Others beat up old men, or joined the drug trade. They got high and stupid and ended up dead. Lots of drugs came to Norilsk. We could hide it in the shipments over the North Pole. Half my classmates were addicted in school. They’d have lived longer if they joined up.”
“But you escaped.” Sergey beamed. Of course his Sasha would have seized every opportunity, would have worked the system to find new roads for his life. Sasha wasn’t meant for the mines. Starlight couldn’t fall to Earth, couldn’t be buried underground. Did anyone in Norilsk understand how special Sasha was? Who had been in their midst? “Of course, everyone there saw your potential.”
Sasha stared. “You are from the city. From St. Petersburg, the heart of Russia. Opportunities just happen to people like you. That’s not how it was for us. No one expected anything from us. No one wanted anything for us. Our families had been miners, and we were going to be miners. There was no imagining a future, no dreams that took you anywhere but down to the mines. The military was the only way out.”
“But… in training, then, they had to see you were something special. They sent you to flight school right away, yes?”
All at once, Sasha froze. The words that had so easily tumbled from his lips crashed to a halt, traffic-jamming on his tongue, in his mouth. Sergey could practically see them piling up inside of Sasha. “Zvezda moya?”
Sasha’s gaze shifted, tilted to the wall over Sergey’s shoulder. “Not right away. I went through recruit training first. During recruit training—” His voice went brittle. Fractured.
Sergey waited. There was something there, something in between the words. He could feel the weight of it, the gravity well inside his lover’s past. Something dark hovered just out of reach, felt but not seen. A black hole in Sasha’s life.
Sasha cleared his throat. “During recruit training, they test conscripts. See if there is potential in anyone. I scored high enough to be offered a spot at flight school.”
“An incredibly high honor.” Sergey followed where Sasha led. Sasha was giving him this, opening doors and windows to Sergey he’d never had before. He felt like he was drawing a map of Sasha’s soul, charting the edges of the unknown. There would be time to go back and fight the darkness together. He’d lay the edges down now, though: something had happened to Sasha during his recruit training.
He didn’t know much about Russia’s military training. Enough to know it was generally awful. That more men tried to flee mandatory service than entered. Sergey cupped his face, held his cheek. “You have so much to be proud of,zvezda moya. You’re amazing.”
A flush stained Sasha’s face, stretched from his cheekbones to his ears. “I’m not. I’m a Siberianambal.” He used the slang for a muscled brute, an unintelligent bore who was all brawn and no brain.
“Don’t say that. You’re brilliant.”
“I’m not educated. Not like you.”
“You think flight school is not education? Five years of constant training, principles of flight, aerodynamics, physics? How to fly many different aircraft? Sasha, you are far smarter than I am.”
“I’m not––”
