My hands stop moving over the suture kit I’ve been pretending to organize.
“Any unit with eyes on Lev Morozov, confirm position,” Boris requests again.
The radio stays quiet.
Katya’s hand closes around my arm, and I feel the pressure of it somewhere distant, like a sound through a wall. My brain starts doing what it does when a patient crashes without warning, running through the variables in sequence, working the problem from every available angle.
Did Lev switch sides the moment he stepped back inside his father’s walls? He knew that building better than anyone in Boris’s team. A man who wanted to run a long play would have had a dozen opportunities in the last twelve hours alone to feed bad intelligence without anyone being the wiser. If that was his plan, then I handed my entire family to a man who built the trap himself, and the woman who saved his life in that ER would be the last piece of useful stupidity he ever needed from anyone.
Or the intelligence was good, and the plan worked, and somewhere inside that building, Lev is on a concrete floor with no radio and no one coming for him.
One scenario makes me a fool. The other makes me someone who may be about to lose everything she didn’t plan to want.
“Polina.” Katya’s voice is quiet and even as she pulls me from my panic. “Look at me. The radio goes dark in a firefight. You know that.”
I do know that. I know it the same way I know how to suture a femoral laceration without looking at my hands, and it doesn’t help at all right now.
“Boris is asking because he wants to confirm, not because he’s certain something’s wrong,” she continues.
“But he wouldn’t ask twice unless he’s not getting an answer.”
She holds eye contact and doesn’t tell me I’m wrong, because I’m not wrong, and she knows it. The radio stays quiet, and I stay where I am while the space between Boris’s last transmission and whatever comes next stretches out in front of me like a corridor with no visible end.
He said he’d come back, but a promise made in a dark room doesn’t negotiate with what happens inside a building three kilometers away.
The radio fires to life, and everyone in the triage station goes rigid.
Boris’s voice fills the room one more time.
“Any unit. Anyone with eyes on Lev Morozov. Confirm now.”
Silence.
