He dressed in the dark with economical movements. The jeans Reznov had provided, the black t-shirt. He tied his sneakers in a double knot and pulled them tight until they cut off the circulation because he couldn’t afford a loose lace if he had to run. He pulled his hair back with a hair tie he’d found in the bathroom two days earlier and kept out of instinct.
He took stock of the room. There was nothing useful as a weapon except the legs of the chair he had thrown at the window without success. He took the chair, tipped it over, and pressed one of the side legs against the floor with his foot while pulling the backrest upward. The wood cracked and gave. He was left with a fifty-centimeter length of wood with one end splintered to an irregular point.
He weighed it in his hand. Light. Fragile. Ridiculous against a firearm.
But not against a throat.
He went back to the window and looked at the sign. It was still there.
Coming.
Ren sat on the edge of the bed with the piece of wood across his knees and his eyes fixed on the door.
He waited.
The crash came from below.
Not a single noise but a chain: something heavy toppling, glass shattering into a thousand fragments against a marble floor, muffled shouts cutting off mid-sentence. Then the unmistakable dry crack of gunshots—two, three, five—and more glass, more furniture being dragged or falling, more voices barking orders in a language Ren couldn’t quite make out.
He got off the bed with the length of wood gripped in his right fist. His heart was hammering his ribs so hard his jaw vibrated. He positioned himself beside the door, back against the wall, and waited.
But the door didn’t open.
The sounds were moving upward. They were no longer coming only from the ground floor but from the hallway too: quick, heavy footsteps, military boots against tile. Someone shouted in Russian and the shout was cut short by a dull, wet blow that Ren felt at the back of his neck.
Sergei.
Ren hit the door with his fist.
“Sergei!”
Nothing. He hit it again, harder.
“Sergei, open up!”
The bolt turned. The door opened and the Russian’s face appeared in the gap, flushed, eyes wide, a gun in his hand that Ren had never seen before. His body was turned toward the hallway, ready to fire at whatever came.
Ren spoke before he could.
“They’re coming for me.”
Sergei looked at him. Tense. His square jaw clenched like a vice.
“Don’t go after them. Hide, or you’ll end up dead, and I don’t want that for you.”
He said it in English and had no idea whether the Russian understood any of it, but it didn’t matter. He said it with his eyes, with his whole body leaning toward him as though he could push him away from danger through sheer will. Sergei had struck him. Sergei had locked him in every night. But he had also looked at him with something close to respect after the fight, and Ren didn’t forget things like that.
The Russian didn’t move for three heartbeats.
Then he nodded. A single, sharp dip of his head, definitive. He lowered the gun. He took a step back and with his left hand pushed the door inward until it stood fully open for Ren.
And disappeared. The darkness of the hallway swallowed him as though he had never been there.
Ren stepped out.
The corridor was lit only by the emergency light blinking in a sickly orange. It smelled of gunpowder and something chemical, acrid, that scratched at his throat. To his right, the main staircase. To his left, the hallway stretched away toward the rooms at the far end. The sounds were coming from the right,from below, but there was movement above too, somewhere over his head.
He pressed himself against the wall and moved left, away from the staircase. If anyone was coming up, he didn’t want to be the first thing they found. The piece of wood was sweating in his palm. He switched hands, dried his fingers on his thigh, gripped it again.
