I don't know whether to be angry or something more complicated than angry.
The complicated answer is: both, probably. The structure is still what it is — the contract, the blood oath, the barcode on the lapel. I am still here by compulsion. I haven't forgotten that. But compulsion and intention aren't the same thing, and what I've been understanding slowly over three months is that whatever he intended when he built this — whatever wordminemeant in the margin note at 1 AM — it isn't the word it looked like from outside.
I'm not forgiving anything. I'm not even close to forgiving anything. But I'm starting to understand that this situation has more layers than the one I arrived to, and the layer underneath is doing something that I don't have clean vocabulary for yet.
Not yet,he said.
I lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling in the dark.
Three days until the Hamptons.
The deadline I set is real. I said it to see what he'd do with it — a small experiment, the kind I've been running since October. He didn't dismiss it. He started to argue the premise and then stopped. The stop is data.
Not yet,I think.
Okay.
But I'm setting the clock.
22
SOFIA
I've been learning Russian since August.
Not formally — there are no Russian classes in the Orphan curriculum, which teaches the vocabulary of power in every language except apparently the one spoken in the building where I live. I've been learning the way I learned most things before St. Gabriel: alone, with resources I found myself, during the hours I had that nobody was directing.
The app gives me vocabulary. The grammar workbook I ordered through the intranet — routed through the library acquisition system, listed asEastern European Political Linguistics: A Practitioner's Referenceso nobody would ask — gives me structure. The conversations I overhear give me context. Aleksei takes calls in Russian, always, when the content is private. He speaks to the Moscow team in Russian. He speaks English when he wants me to understand, and Russian when he doesn't, and I have been noting the distinction since October.
By November I understand approximately sixty percent of what I overhear.
The sixty percent is more than enough.
The grammar workbook's current chapter is the accusative case.
I've been sitting with it for forty minutes. The kitchen table has become my primary study space in the evenings — the light is better than my room, the couch is too comfortable for anything that requires concentration, and Aleksei is usually in the study by nine, which means the kitchen is quiet and mine. I've been using it for weeks. He knows I study here. He's never asked what I'm studying.
That particular omission is about to resolve.
The accusative case,the workbook says.Object of a direct action.
The accusative case in Russian is why the sentence "I see the woman" requires a different ending onwomanthan "the woman is here." The language marks what is acted upon. The object changes form based on what's being done to it. I find this clarifying. It is, in fact, a useful framework for thinking about most of what has happened to me since October — the ways in which being acted upon has been steadily transforming the object.
I am not the same noun I was at the processing room.
The workbook gives me a set of practice sentences. I write the endings carefully, checking my work twice.
He comes in at 9:17.
He goes to the coffee machine. He begins the process — press, grind, the specific routine of a man who makes his own coffee at this hour because he's learned that staff interrupting after nine costs him more in reset time than the coffee takes. He doesn't look at the workbook when he enters. He has his back to me.
I keep my eyes on the page.
I am cataloguing the moment with the specific care of someone who understands that their next forty seconds are going to be significant.
He comes to the table with his coffee.
He looks at the workbook.
