“The incision site is inflamed. There is minor dehiscence at the superior edge. The drainage is purulent.”
He is watching me. His pale eyes are focused on my hands as they move across his skin.
“You learned well,” he says, his voice a low vibration.
“I had a good teacher. And I had three weeks of watching you map my own body like a crime scene. Some of it stuck.” I press a fresh pad of gauze against the wound, applying pressure. I feel him flinch, his breath catching in his throat.
“The student becomes the instructor,” he murmurs.
“Something like that.” I secure the tape, wrapping it around his torso to provide more support. My hand lingers on the curve of his ribs, feeling the heat of his skin through the wool. “You’re mine now, Alexei. That means I take care of the equipment. Not negotiable.”
His eyes meet mine. There is a shift in them—recognition, a stripping away of the operative.
“Understood,” he says.
We sit there in the open door of the Lada, the cold Russian wind biting at us, but I don't move to close it. The silence of the woods is a sanctuary.
Then, the sound.
It’s a high-pitched, persistent whine. It’s too steady to be the wind, too mechanical to be a bird. It’s coming from the gray void of the sky.
I lean out, looking up through the birch branches.
There. A dark, predatory shape against the clouds. Small. Stationary. Then it begins to move in a grid pattern, scanning the road we just left.
“Drone,” I say, the word feeling like ash in my mouth.
Alexei is moving before I can even finish the word. Pain is ignored; the Machine is back online. He grabs the edge of the door and hauls himself more upright.
“The cellular ping from your phone,” he says, his voice regaining its sharp edge. “Ivan has a liaison with the regional telcos. Any unknown IMSI hitting these rural towers triggers an automated alert. They didn't track the data; they tracked the handshake. The drone is a confirmation unit. Ground assets will be ten minutes behind it.”
“I was only on for two minutes.”
“In our world, two minutes is an eternity.” He looks at me, his eyes hard. “How far to the next turn?”
I slam the door and sprint to the driver's side. The Niva roars to life.
“The border route is dead,” I say, pulling back onto the road, the tires spinning on the frozen mud. “They’ll have teams at every crossing. Every bridge will be a checkpoint.”
“Alternative options are... limited. Katya’s facility is likely already compromised if they’re this deep.”
I accelerate, the Lada rattling as if it’s going to shake itself to pieces. “We need somewhere they won’t look. Somewhere that doesn’t exist on a modern map.”
“We have no such resources, Nikolai.”
“I do.”
Alexei turns his head, his focus shifting to me. I see him calculating, weighing my words against his knowledge of my history.
“Explain.”
“My father is a man of secrets, Alexei. He has safe houses that even Boris didn't know about. Personal contingencies. Places he built thirty years ago when he was just a mid-level enforcer. He never put them on the digital registry. He never told his lieutenants.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Because I’m a Petrenko,” I say, taking a hard, sliding left onto a track that looks like a goat path. “I was trained from the nursery to be paranoid. To assume every room was bugged. I spent my childhood looking for the cracks in his armor. I found the documents for a cabin in the Carpathians. Near the Slovakian border. He bought it through a shell company that hasn't existed since the nineties.”
“It could be a trap. Viktor may have anticipated your knowledge.”
