Page 70 of Ascendent
He swallowed again, looked down. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t ever enough. Nothing would be. “I’ll come back,” he blurted. “I don’t know when. But I will. I’ll visit—”
“You will always be welcome here, Sasha Alexanderovich Andreyev.” Kilaqqi cupped his face and kissed his forehead. His thin lips were paper soft on his skin. Sasha leaned into the touch, into the tenderness. His mind flashed, the three images he had of his father rising from the depths of his memory. Kisses to the top of his head before his father left for the army. His father putting him in his crib. A kiss to his temple. A father’s love.
He leaned into Kilaqqi’s kiss, letting his lips linger.You are like a father to me.
Kilaqqi pulled back. His thumbs brushed over Sasha’s cheeks. A tender smile carved his wide, lined face. “Ayake gudiayke,” he breathed.
Rotors rumbled overhead, the dull thrum of a helicopter approaching. Children shouted, screaming hellos and cheers to the chopper’s approach.
Kilaqqi dropped his hands. “Time to go, myhutechi.”
* * *
He was bustledonto the helicopter by the tribe, hugged and kissed and waved to. Kilaqqi stayed by his yurt, watching Sasha’s departure from a distance. He raised one hand, a silent goodbye, as the helo lifted off. Sasha waved back, holding Kilaqqi’s stare as long as he could, and then watched the same spot of forest until the helo banked and turned to the north. Back to Tura.
The old supply and mail plane was waiting for him when he landed. Kilaqqi had told the airport to hold the return flight until Sasha was on board, and the Tura air traffic controller had refused to give Denis, the cranky Russian pilot, clearance to take off. Denis was slumped in his cockpit, drinking from his flask, when Sasha clambered off the helo at Tura airport.
The same Evenki man he’d met the day before was waiting for him. This time, he grinned wide and held open his arms. “Congratulations,” he shouted over the roaring helicopter rotors. He wrapped Sasha up in a one-armed hug, running him over to the supply plane. “Welcome back to the world of the living.”
As he boarded, Denis sputtered a string of curses and threw his flask as Sasha’s feet. He cursed the Evenki, the tribal government, the delays, the backwards bullshit of the district, and Sasha’s stench. “And you fucking reek,” he snarled, pushing down the throttle and pulling back on the yoke. “I fly faster to get rid of you.”
Sasha pressed his face to the window, watching the Evenkiysky district shrink beneath him, the towering forest fade, the rolling taiga turn to shades of green and gold and stripes of tumbling blue, rivers snaking through the land. “Do svidaniya,” he whispered.
“Fucking tribal morons,” Denis seethed. “They couldn’t organize a reindeer fuck.”
Sasha tipped Denis’s vodka flask with his feet, emptying the contents over the floorboards.
True to Denis’s word, the flight back to Krasnoyarsk was faster. He went full power, and in only a few hours, they were skidding down the runway and gliding toward the government hangar.
Denis squealed the plane’s brakes early, though. “I let you off here,” he grunted.
Sasha shrugged. The government hangar was far from the terminal, and he’d have to trudge back to book his flight to Moscow. Here was as good a place as any. He hopped out. Denis snorted, gunned the engines. Sasha jogged out of the way before the plane’s wings clipped him, knocked him to the tarmac. Fucker.
He turned. On his left, a giant, dark hangar stood open, the wide bay doors propped just enough for a man to fit through. The hangar looked empty, though. Abandoned. Still. His eyes darted over the darkness.
The hair on the back of his neck rose. He felt something. Some heaviness.
Someone was watching him.
He spun, checking the tarmac, the apron. The runway. The government hangar, more than a kilometer further. Nothing. No one was paying him any attention. No one was looking at him. Why then—
“Hello, Sasha.”
He whipped around.
A man stood behind him, a twisted snarl curling his lips. He chuckled, his lips pulling back in a grimace. Hatred simmered from him, his arrogant stance, his bullish features.
“Grisha!”
Grisha Utkin, once upon a time, was his wing mate. They’d flown on each other’s wings for two years at Andreapol, had logged more flight time together than anyone else in the unit. Grisha had taken him out for beers and bullshit, had befriended Sasha when he was the loner newcomer to the unit. He was a sniveling shithead more than half the time, and a boisterous troublemaker the rest, but he’d been the first, and sometimes the only, one to drag Sasha into the mix. Grisha the shithead, the squad had called him, and his silent shadow, Sasha.
More than anyone, he’d thought Grisha had been his friend.
But Grisha had restrained him, had caught him and thrown him down when he tried to escape the ambush at Andreapol.
Grisha had punched his face, made his skull ricochet off the hard locker room floor. Had kicked his ribs, his stomach. Had grabbed a hockey stick from another pilot and slammed it down over Sasha’s legs, into his crotch.
“Hello,pidor.”
