Page 46 of Ascendent
Slowly, Sergey nodded. He pursed his lips, stared into his whiskey. “I didn’t know what to think yesterday. You were determined to march out of here that moment, it seemed.”
He had been. He stayed quiet.
“Do you know where Kilaqqi and his people have their main settlement? Where they spend the summer?”
His lips thinned. He shook his head.
“I’ll ask the senators from Krasnoyarsk to connect us with the right person in the krai. Someone there should have records for the tribal communities.”
“Kilaqqi said the children of the tribe are taken to boarding school by helicopter in autumn. Brought back home every summer.”
“Excellent. Then there will be a summer camp. Something pastoral. Someplace the chopper goes every year.” Sergey smiled, though the edges seemed strained. “The senators from Krasnoyarsk still take my calls. They should be able to help.”
“Some senators aren’t speaking with you?” Sasha scowled.
Sergey waved it away. “Just politics. Every day, something new.” He peered at Sasha. “Will you also go home? To Kayerkan?”
He hadn’t been home since leaving for recruit training. He’d had no reason to go back.
During his first deployment to Syria, after graduating from flight school, he’d received a postcard from the Army’s personnel division.We regret to inform you your _________ is deceased. If you would like to request leave, please contact __________.Someone had forgotten to fill in the blanks. After four days of calling St. Petersburg, a clerk told him his mother was dead and hung up on him.
His father was gone, and his mother only had one sister, the both of them widowed. His cousins had been animals, so far outside his orbit. Sasha had been a lonely boy growing up in the central courtyard of his crumbling Soviet-era apartment block, tagging along after the neighborhood boys, quiet and forlorn and forever on the edges of their rough play.
He’d first crushed on Andrei, a lanky boy who always had a joke, always made their little group laugh. Andrei had blown off half his face playing with dynamite when he was thirteen. Sasha was nine.
Ivan, the town’s bad boy, caught his eye later. Ivan worked the oil rigs in the Arctic, flew to Novosibirsk to blow his money, and came back home to crash with his mother when his rubles ran dry. He smoked on the street corner, his jeans stained with tar, his thick parka reeking of smoke and male sweat.
He’d wanted Ivan to whisper in his ear, kiss his neck, put his hand on Sasha’s waist, the way he saw Ivan kiss and touch the girls from the high school.
Ivan was shot and killed when he kissed the wrong girl’s neck, touched the hip of a woman who belonged to Borodin, the head of Norilsk’s drug trade.
Sasha found him in the permafrost. When he was a teenager, he used pick a direction and just walk for hours, see if he fell off the edge of the world. The snow didn’t really stretch forever, did it? One day, he’d seen rocks in the distance that hadn’t been there before. When he got closer, he saw the lumps weren’t rocks, they were hands and feet. Arms and legs, sticking up out of the ice and the frozen tundra.
It was next to impossible to bury a body in the Arctic. Someone had emptied almost thirty rounds into the frozen ground to try to break the frost before they’d dug. They hadn’t gotten far. Ivan lay in a heap, half in the shot-up ice and half out, his face shoved into the bog, muck sliding down his lips, his arched cheekbones.
Sasha had lain on his belly on the ice and wiped Ivan’s lips clean with his thumb. Pressed his own mouth to Ivan’s blue, frozen pair.
Only the wind whispered in his ear. Only the snow blew against his hip, caressed his waist and his pale skin. His first kiss, and it was with a corpse. Seemed fitting, in a way.Everything you love will die. There is no future. There is only endless, eternal ice. You are doomed.
“Sasha?” Sergey’s fire-laced fingers touched the back of his hand.
“I think I will go home.” He didn’t know why he said it. He didn’t know why he even thought it. There was less than nothing there. Emptiness and old memories, long gone sour. “Just to see,” he mumbled.
“When will you leave?” Sergey’s wide eyes swirled, the color of a typhoon, the sea rocked from deep beneath the surface.
“When Dr. Voronov says I can travel.”
Sergey nodded. His fingers pulled away.
Ice closed over his skin where Sergey’s touch receded.
* * *
Dr. Voronov triedto talk him out of going. He should stay in Moscow, in the Kremlin. He shouldn’t rush back into the world. He should focus on NASA, on his preparations. Had Sasha read all of the binders? Completed the physical training?
He wouldn’t be swayed. He wouldn’t change his mind. “I’m going. You wanted me to find a way to heal. This is how.”
“By journeying days into the taiga? Into the wastes of the Federation? Immediately after surgery?”
