Chapter 14 - Mikhail
Zara does not sleep on the plane.
Everything about her has been wide awake for the past eighteen hours, restless and nearly jittery.
She sits across from me in the private cabin with her notebook open across her knee and her legs folded beneath her. Her eyes move rapidly between the page and the window.
The Dubai coastline has not appeared yet. We are still hours above the dark Atlantic, the plane running its course through a sky that is neither night nor morning, occupying the suspended hour between those two.
My eyes cannot be torn away from her form.
She has reread the same page of her notebook three times. The pace her eyes move when she is receiving new information is different from when she returns to something already known.
In this condition, it’s the latter.
She has the letter’s coordinates memorized since before she showed them to me, last night before sleep took us.
Dubai receives us at mid-morning.
The heat is immediate—the same I remember from the last time. The city from the runway is all glass and ambition.
We move fast. The footprint I have arranged is minimal—two personnel, reliable and tight-mouthed. A car, a route, no additional contact with the broader network until I understand what we are walking toward.
Zara is in the passenger seat with the coordinates on her phone, eyes alive and one hand resting on the door panel, barely managing anticipation.
The coordinates take us away from the towers, away from the glass and ambition and commercial certainty of the city’s curated face, through narrower roads that belong to an older version of this place, through streets that remember what existed here before.
The water arrives gradually, sheltered from the main channel by a long curve of land that makes it visible only once you are already upon it, unlike a marina.
The boat sits low in the water against a crumbling wooden dock.
The hull is weathered to a gray that was once white, visible in the places where the paint has held longest, at the joints and protected curves, the ghost of what it used to be still present in the places the sun has not quite finished erasing.
The deck is clear, everything stripped down to the barest form, no detritus, no evidence of habitation.
An abandoned boat on a quiet stretch of water.
Or a dead end wearing a different costume.
Zara steps onto the dock and the boards take her weight with a slow, waterlogged creak. I follow after her; the rope that tethers the boat to the dock is old enough that it has partially fused with the post it is tied to, the fibers collapsing inward on themselves.
She boards.
I watch the narrow set of her shoulders as she moves onto the deck. The hope she has been carrying has been managed carefully and has not been spoken out loud, but I know it intimately. Her shoulders sag in a controlled exhale she releases while standing on a weathered deck.
I step on board beside her and say nothing. Anything else I can offer would be a form of unkindness that I don’t want to give her.
Instead I begin to search methodically, moving through the boat’s small interior thoroughly.
The cabin below deck is stripped—not abandoned, but stripped. Abandonment means objects, debris, or something of the sort would be left behind. This has been cleared with intention, which means someone was here after the boat’s active life ended, came for something specific, and removed it.
Manufactured. A room after the furniture has been taken out.
I move through the forward berth, the storage compartment beneath the bench seating, the narrow galley that holds nothing but the ghost of a smell—something faintly chemical, cleaning product over something older underneath it.
Zara is behind me, working through the space methodically, a journalist who has done this before, who has searched abandoned buildings and sealed rooms.
Her hand disappears beneath the lip of a fixed shelf mounted at eye height in the aft section of the cabin. It’s a shallow shelf, the kind built for navigation instruments or small personal objects, with a forward edge that extends past its visible base to create a narrow hollow underneath.
She pauses, drawing her hand back slowly.
In her palm, two small earrings catch what remains of the light—delicate, gold, with an intricate and geometric design.
Zara’s hand trembles, her breathing becoming frantic. She turns them over in her palm once.
“They’re hers,” she whispers to herself.
Her mother was here, standing in this cabin and wearing these earrings and left them, either deliberately or desperately, in a hollow beneath a shelf that only a person who knew the boat would know to look in.
She left them for someone specific, or she left them because she could not take them and could not make herself leave them for no one.
This is probably what Zara infers from this.
I arrive at a different conclusion.
Samira Khan was here, undoubtedly, but she also left something behind after the network was dismantled. The past I had given up to history is sitting in Zara’s hand in the form of two small gold earrings, worn and entirely, undeniably real.
If Samira Khan was on this boat, then she was alive after the operation. Arman Khan was also likely alive after the operation, which means the story of what happened to them is not the story I have told myself.
The story I have been carrying is the one Zara has been building her entire search against.
The boat shifts beneath us slowly, the water adjusting to maybe a distant vessel’s wake, the tide changing its mind. Zara’s fist closes around the earrings completely.
Her eyes find mine across the dim cabin, alight from the inside.
“They’re alive,” she says with wonder, the words carrying the weight of fifteen years behind them.
And she is right.
She does not yet know how right she is.
But she will.
And for the first time, I know this is not something I am going to be able to control.
Not anymore.