Yakob
The lamp is out, the house has gone over to its night sounds, and I am lying on a bedroll three feet from a sleeping woman, holding three words in my chest like a live round.
There was, once.
I said them hours ago, out on the terrace, into the dark where I thought they'd be safe. They weren't. Words don't disperse the way I was taught they do. They stay in the room and wait.
I try to ignore their presence and run the inventory instead.
Door, barred. Shutters, latched, one slat angled so I can see the track.
The knife where my hand will find it. My side aches in the deep, itching way that means it’s knitting back together, and my pulse is a slow, obedient fifty-two.
My body is recovering on schedule. The bullet wound is the only part of me behaving normally.
Iris took the cot under protest, which is the only way she takes anything that benefits her.
The protest lasted eleven minutes and involved the phrase management decision used against me twice.
She's on her side now, facing me, one hand tucked under her cheek and the other resting at the edge of the mattress, open, the way it hangs open every time she sleeps near me, like some part of her stays on call.
Her breathing went long and even forty minutes ago. I've timed it. Six seconds in, seven out, the tide of a person who is genuinely under.
And I'm lying here in the dark, in the one place on earth where nothing is supposed to reach me, learning that something already has.
Twenty years of interrogation resistance. Men have worked on me with tools and pharmaceuticals and patience, and never got anything out of me. She asked one question, softly, looking at the sea instead of at me, and the vault opened a crack.
I should be going over the exit plan. Ferry schedules. My pilot’s whereabouts. Instead I'm lying here with my eyes on her, watching, and the past is standing at the foot of the bedroll like a debt collector. For the first time in twenty years I don't have the strength to send it away.
Maybe it's the blood loss. Maybe it's the fever's residue, some door it burned open on its way through. Maybe it's her, asleep three feet away, the first person since I was a boy who has touched me without wanting something in return.
I start talking.
Quietly. Barely a sound at all, pitched under her breathing, the volume a man uses at a graveside when there are other mourners nearby. I tell myself I'm speaking to the dark. The dark has held everything else I've ever given it. She just happens to be in it.
"It was cold," I say.
The words come out in English, which surprises me. The memory lives in Russian.
"The town doesn't exist anymore. It barely existed then.
It was built around a mill, and when the mill died the town stayed on out of habit, the way a body keeps warm for a while after the heart stops.
Winter was nine months long. The other three months, we called summer, and the mud came up to your ankles. "
The house creaks. Her breathing doesn't change.
"We had two rooms and a stove. The stove was the center of everything. My mother could make it burn on nothing. Wet birch, green pine, once an entire winter on railroad scrap that my—” I stop.
Reroute. Even now, even here, I'm redacting.
“That we brought home on a sled. She'd stand at that stove with her sleeves pushed up and her hands red from the cold water, and she'd make bread out of flour that was half sawdust, and she'd sing while she did it.
Badly. She sang so badly. The neighbors complained through the walls and she sang louder, because she said a person who's singing can't be poor, they can only be interrupted. "
A warm ache spreads through my chest. The memory is so vivid, despite being locked away for so long.
"I haven't heard singing in a kitchen since I was sixteen years old," I tell the dark. "Then you. The fever. I thought I'd died and gotten a different afterlife than the one I've earned."
Iris shifts. A small sound, half a breath. I go still and count. Six in. Seven out. Under.
I shouldn't be doing this. There's no operational value in it. There's active operational harm in it, sound discipline broken, attention divided, and I've run that assessment three times and I keep talking anyway, because it turns out twenty years of silence doesn't drain a well. It pressurizes it.
"I had a sister."
There it is. The center of the vault. My voice doesn't break, because my voice doesn't do that anymore, but it drops until it's barely there.
"Olya. She was six years younger. She was born small and she stayed small, and the town was killing her slowly.
It killed everything slowly. She followed me everywhere.
Everywhere. I'd walk to the depot and she'd be ten steps behind me in boots that had already had several owners, and I'd tell her to go home, and she'd stand with her little fists on her hips and say I’m a free person, Yasha. "
The name sits in the room. Olya. I haven't said it aloud in twenty years.
I've thought it, the way you think of a wound without touching it, and apparently, I said it during the fever, in front of her, because my throat was hoarse with a night's worth of words I don't remember and there's only one face I ever dream of.
"She wanted to be a seamstress. Not a famous one.
She had no interest in being famous. She wanted a shop with a window, a chair by the window, and enough light to work by.
That was the whole dream." I breathe. The wound in my side pulls.
I let it. "She'd have liked you. She'd have followed you around that kitchen you talk about and learned how everyone takes their coffee, and the two of you would have been unbearable together. "
The wind blows again. The olive trees sigh and shiver, that dry rustling sound Iris says is the trees having opinions.
"I was sixteen," I say. "I'd gone to the depot. Two hours there and back through the snow, for kerosene, because the town had run out completely and we’d been cut off for two days already.
I saw the smoke from the last hill. Everybody in that town burned wood, smoke was normal to us, but I knew.
I've spent twenty years trying to explain to myself how I knew from one column of smoke, and I can't, and it doesn't matter.
I dropped the kerosene and I ran, but running wasn't enough. "
I don't tell the dark what I found.
"There were men. It wasn't random. Someone owed something to someone, and the tiny ghost town that was my home was the collateral damage.
That's all the sense it will ever make. Debts travel downhill in that world and they land on whoever's smallest." My hand has found the scar at my collarbone without my permission, the small silvered one.
"I got this that day. A rifle stock, when I tried to get to the house.
The man who gave it to me was being efficient, not cruel.
I understand that now. I've been that man since. "
Silence, then. A long one. I lie there and listen to the sea working at the island below the terraces, patient, the way it's worked at it for ten thousand years.
"There was nothing left to stay for and nothing left to be.
The Bratva found me that winter. A boy with no family, no town, no name anyone would come looking for.
To them that's not a tragedy. It's a specification.
" I exhale slowly, the way I've trained.
"They didn't make me into this.” I want to be honest, even to the dark.
“They just gave me a job. I made me into this.
It was the only way to make sure that nothing could ever be taken from me again.
You can't lose what you refuse to have. For twenty years that held. "
I turn my head and look at her. The moon has come around the shutter slat and spreads one pale line across the cot, across the blanket, across the open hand at the edge of the mattress.
"It held," I say, "until a woman in a cell looked at me, and wasn't afraid. Who followed me without question."
And that's all of it. That's more of it than anyone alive has ever had. The dark can keep it. It’s kept everything else.
The stone that's been sitting in my chest since the night I lost my mother and sister hasn't gone. But it's been set down differently, everything’s the same weight, but easier to carry.
I listen to her breathing one last time, a discipline, a goodnight.
Six seconds in. Four out.
Four.
Everything in me goes very still. I run it back. Six in, four out, a held edge at the top of the breath, controlled.
She's awake.
Twenty years of protocol fire at once. Assess the breach. Contain. The words are already lining up, it was the fever, forget it, none of it matters, the walls rising on schedule the way they've risen my whole life.
They get halfway up and stop.
A shuffle-swish sound briefly fills the room as she sits up.
Then she is lying beside me on the edge of the old bedroll, tucking herself into my side and staying there.
Her head rests on my shoulder, my arm naturally winding itself around her as though it was always meant to do just that.
Every synapse in my brain fires at once with questions and heat.
Her hand comes to my chest, fingertips stroking over the scar on my collar bone once before settling into position over my heart which isn’t beating at a steady fifty-two anymore.
“I’ll keep you, Yakob.” she says, and I want to pretend the sentence doesn’t make sense, but I can’t. Because I know her well enough to know that she means everything that comes out of her mouth.
She has absorbed me into the fabric of her life, whether I want to be there or not. I’m now part of Iris Orlova’s galaxy. Some distant star or cold, dry planet…whatever I am, I know there’s no way out. I’ll never be able to resist the gravity of her.