I don’t have time to grieve him. That’s the last cruelty of the night, that I have to step over the boy I grew up with, become the pakhan again in the same breath, because somewhere out past the city Cynthia is in the hands of the men who put Crystal in the desert in pieces. I have one half-trustworthy name and no idea if she’s even still alive to be reached.
I rise. I wipe my hands. I walk out of that study, I start giving orders, and my voice is the war voice, the one that moves a hundred armed men, because grief is a thing I will handle later, in private, in the dark, if I survive to do it.
Every man we have. Every gun. The property Vadim named, hit from three sides before dawn. I tell them I’m not certain it’s the right place. I tell them I don’t care, that we go anyway, that we go hard, that we tear it open and we pray, because the alternative is to stand here weighing odds while the only thing I’ve ever been afraid to lose runs out of time. Kir is first into the trucks. The boy she beat at cards has his vest on backward, fixes it, looksat no one. Tonight nobody jokes. Tonight the whole garrison remembers a plate handed over without being asked.
I put on a dead man’s information like a coat, and I take the war to the door she’s behind, or the door I pray she’s behind.
Hold on, Cynthia. I told you I’d end it. I’m coming to end it.
Just be alive when I get there. That’s all I ask. Be alive, and I’ll burn the rest of the world down to keep you that way.
30
CINDY
They put me in a concrete room with a cot, a bucket, a single caged bulb, and the first thing I do is not cry. The second thing I do is start working the problem, because crying is a thing for later, for when I’m safe, for when there’s someone to hold me, and right now the only person who’s going to get me out of here is me.
The room smells of salt and old diesel. Cold comes up through the floor like the building died years ago and never warmed back over. When the wind moves outside, the whole structure ticks, metal on metal, a dead factory talking in its sleep.
I know two things, and I make myself hold onto both of them like handrails. Panic wants the wheel. Panic can wait in the car.
The first is where I am. They weren’t careful with their mouths around me, the men who walk the halls, because what’s a pregnant woman in a locked room going to do with anything she overhears. So I listen. I hear it twice through the steel door, aname, said the offhand way men say the name of a place they work, the Calder Salt Works.
And when they walked me in from the car, half-blind with fear, some watchful part of me still read the faded letters on the side of the building in the security lights. CALDER SALT, the rest peeled away to rust. An old industrial place, dead for years, all cold concrete and corrugated steel out on the white nothing of a dry lakebed.
I know the name of my own grave. That’s the first handrail, and it matters more than it should, because a woman who knows where she is can tell someone how to come get her.
The second thing I know is the only reason I’m still breathing. They are being careful with me. Not kind, careful, the way you’re careful with a thing that’s worth money. They bring vitamins with the food, prenatal ones, drugstore brand, still in the box. Somebody drove to a pharmacy for the hostage. I take them, because the baby doesn’t care whose money bought them.
Turns out neither do I. Nobody’s hit me. Nobody’s done to me what they did to Crystal, and they had no such hesitation with Crystal. The difference is the thing in my belly. A dead witness is nothing to these people, they proved that in the desert. But a pregnant witness, carrying the pakhan’s heir, that’s the richest piece of leverage in the whole war, and you don’t damage your leverage.
Timur said it in the headlights. Morozov wants her whole. So as long as the baby is alive, they need me alive and unharmed, which means the one thing keeping me breathing is also the one thing I can use.
I lie on the cot in the dark and I work out exactly how. I do some of it in Crystal’s voice, which is the secret I’ll keep even from Sevastian. She stays with me in that cell, bossy, bright, telling me which guard has a kind face, which one to work on, the way she’d have known inside an hour.Get up, babe. Hair up. We’re not dying in a salt factory.
It takes me most of a day to get my nerve up, a day of listening, of learning the rhythm of the door, how many of them there are, when the one who seems to be in charge steps out. Three regulars, plus the boss with the radio voice. The young one slides my food in without looking, ashamed, which is information.
The big one looks too long, which is worse information. The third whistles pop songs in the corridor, flat, endless, the same four bars. There’s a doctor somewhere in the building, I’ve gathered that much, some bought wreck of a man they keep on hand for the sole reason that a pregnant hostage is no good to anybody if she loses the baby in a concrete room. Good. I’m counting on him.
In the dark of that long day, I think hard about what waiting actually gets me. I do lunges. Quiet ones, by the wall, because cold muscle is slow muscle and I might get one chance at fast. The knee holds. Seven years of babying it, and the night I need it most, it holds like it’s been waiting to be asked.
If I wait, the best case is that someone comes for me before Morozov decides I’m more useful as a message than a hostage, the way Crystal turned from a hostage into a message in the space of an afternoon. Crystal waited. Crystal trusted that being valuable would keep her alive. They took her apart anyway, the second her value ran out, left her in the sand for the news.
I am not going to bet my baby’s life on the mercy of men who did that to my best friend. Waiting is a thing you do when someone trustworthy is in charge of your fate. Nobody in this building is trustworthy. So I will not wait. Crystal waited one afternoon. I heard how that ended on the news with the rest of Nevada. I will make my own window, and I will use the one card these men have left in my hand without knowing they did it.
The card is the baby. The thing they need kept alive is the thing that lets me blow this place open from the inside. Six weeks old, the size of nothing, already pulling its weight. That’s my kid.
When I’m ready, I make it real.
I’m a dancer. I have performed through a stress fracture with a smile sewn on my face. I know how to sell my body doing something it isn’t doing, and I know, from a worse education, exactly what a woman losing a pregnancy looks like, because I’ve held a friend through it on a bathroom floor.
So I give them all of it. I wait until I hear two of them near the door. I start low, a moan, building, and then I’m on the floor curled around myself making the sounds, real sounds, the kind that come from somewhere true even when you’re faking the cause. I get my hand into my own mouth and bite down until I taste blood, real blood.
I smear it where it needs to be, on my thighs, on the concrete, a smear of red that doesn’t lie even though I am. My hands shake doing it. Good. Shaking reads true. I let the body do its honest panicking in service of the con, every tremor on payroll now. Then I scream like the worst thing in the world is happening, because for these men, it is.
The door bangs open.
It works exactly the way I bet my life it would. The first man takes one look at the blood and goes white, because he is not afraid of me, he’s afraid of what his boss does to the man who let the heir die on his shift. He shouts, and it isn’t a threat, it’s a name, the doctor’s, bellowed down the corridor in panic.
