16. Veronica
VERONICA
There’s a moment before sunrise, if you’re awake for it, when everything in Novarra’s east corridor feels like it’s been dipped in gunpowder.
That’s the hour we crawl into the back-lot petrol station and kill the engine, and for a minute it’s just the tick of the BMW’s cooling block and the rain pinpricking the roof.
The only light is a single, buzzing fluorescent stuttering above the pump island—its ballast so old it swings with every gust of wind and throws shadows across the forecourt.
Someone has scrawled “NO CCTV” across the station’s front window in black marker, but the sign is peeling at the corners.
I’m in the back seat, knees pulled up under the olive canvas jacket Mikhail found for me at a roadside surplus store.
The jacket’s too big and the sleeves swallow my hands.
The edge of my ballet flats are stained with a color I recognize as dried blood, but refuse to look at it closely.
I haven’t washed my hair since Orlov’s house, and the ringlets hang limp around my face.
Mikhail’s at the wheel, his left shoulder packed with a field dressing that is soaked at the edges.
He pretends it doesn’t hurt, but he won't let me or Sergey touch it to make sure he doesn’t have a bullet still in it.
He watches the forecourt the way a cop watches a suspect.
When he shifts in his seat, he does it with the slow, deliberate economy of a man who has calculated exactly how much pain he can spend on the gesture before his wound screams at him to stop.
Sergey’s in the station, buying fuel and, allegedly, coffee.
I watch him through the grit-smudged passenger window: shaved head, battered leather jacket.
He moves around the store with the posture of someone looking for a fight, but the only threat here is a wall of expired chips and a rack of counterfeit phone chargers.
Still, he can’t seem to stop his hand from hovering near the inside of his jacket where he’s hidden his pistol.
I try to press myself farther into the corner of the seat, away from the memory of the blood covered hardwood floors. I force myself to breathe through my mouth and focus on something else—anything else. But it’s not working.
Sergey freezes at the counter. He’s halfway through paying for the coffee when his head jerks up, and he stares at something over the cashier’s shoulder. I can’t see what it is from this angle, but I know. I know the shape of bad news when I see it in his face.
The cashier doesn’t react. Sergey recovers quickly. He just lets his hands fall to the counter and stands there.
Sergey takes the coffee, pays with cash, and leaves without waiting for change.
He slides into the front seat, tosses the paper bag onto the dash, and sits without moving. The silence is a living thing. Mikhail doesn’t turn to look at him, just watches the station through the side mirror. I watch both of them.
“You’re on the news,” Sergey says softly. “Your father’s crying for the cameras.”
I swallow. “What did the segment say?”
He glances back at me. “Kidnapping. Armed suspects. Police are mobilizing. They named us both. Your father’s name is in every sentence.”
I want to laugh, or maybe scream, but my throat has been closed for days. I stare at my hands. My nails are broken and dirty, and there’s a healing burn on my right wrist from when the safehouse caught fire.
I can’t remember the last time I had a manicure. Maybe I’d never have one again.
Maybe I don’t care.
Mikhail finally speaks, and his voice is brittle with fatigue. “We don’t have long before every street cop, bounty hunter, and syndicate scrub in Novarra is looking for us.”
I force myself to look at the petrol station—at the flicker of the fluorescent bulb, the way it turns Sergey’s face to raw bone and shadow. This is the first time I’ve seen him rattled.
Mikhail starts the BMW. He doesn’t turn on the headlights until we’re clear of the lot and back on the slip road, heading north into country that gets less civilized with every mile.
I turn to look out the rear window. The petrol station recedes into the dark, a last little island of civilization, and I feel the weight of everything we’ve left behind.
“He’s protecting the alliance,” I say, almost to myself. “Do you think he knows Orlov is dead?”
Sergey snorts. No one answers me.
The highway is empty. Mikhail drives like a man who doesn’t just expect a tail, but invites one. His eyes flick between the mirrors, but his mouth is set and emotionless.
In the mirror, my own reflection looks back at me: pale, bruised, a cut across my jaw from the ambush was healing, but it opened again during the safehouse attack and it stings.
I close my eyes and count the seconds between passing cars. None for a minute, then another, then another.
We are ghosts now.
That thought is somehow comforting. I lean my head against the window and let the vibration of the road rattle the memories out of my skull. Outside, the world is nothing but fields and the promise of another border.
Sergey looks back at me, then at the road. “You hungry?”
It takes me a second to realize he’s talking to me. “No,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like my own.
He shrugs. “Me neither.” He says it like a joke, but the punchline is all gone.
I want to eat, but my throat is tight and my stomach couldn’t bear food right now. I know I’m hungry. I know I should eat. But I can’t bring myself to do it.
Mikhail takes an exit and cuts off the main road onto a rutted lane hemmed in by leafless trees and old irrigation pipes.
The sky is turning the color of old steel as we hit the edge of the next town—a name I can’t pronounce and will never remember. We coast into a deserted industrial park and kill the lights.
For a long time, none of us speak. The only sound is the slow tick of the engine and the breath of three people who know they’ve just changed the world, but not for the better.
I look out at the empty warehouses, the wide flat horizon, the way the darkness clings to the edges of everything. My chest feels empty and enormous.
“My father isn’t protecting me,” I say, and this time the words come out clear. “He never was. If they find us, they’ll just drag me back so he can sell me again?—”
Sergey nods, the motion quick and resigned. “We’re protecting you now.”
I believe him.
We sit like that, in the dark, until the sky gets a little lighter. The brothers settle back in their seats to sleep, and I try to do the same, eventually it works.
When I wake up, we’re back on the highway.
The sun is just setting when we roll into Breva.
Nobody who isn’t running from something ever comes to Breva; even the highway skips it, leaving the place to die by degrees along the train tracks.
The only thing still open at this hour is a diner whose sign has been missing its first three letters since the Soviet era, and a string of car breakers whose yards are barricaded by stacks of rusted wheels and plastic bumpers.
Mikhail pulls the BMW around the back where there’s a small loading bay, half hidden from the street, and he slides us in there nose-first with a surgeon’s precision.
He pops the hood. From the outside, it just looks like a car with an engine problem.
From the inside, it looks like the last place on earth anyone would think to check.
For twenty minutes, nothing happens. Sergey leans against the bumper, face turned to the sunset, eyes squinting at the slice of sky above the loading dock. He’s cleaned most of the blood from his hands, but two of the knuckles are scabbing in neat, angry lines.
“What are we doing here?” I ask.
“Meeting someone,” Mikhail replies.
Footsteps crunch down the alleyway, and I shrink back against the car door.
The man is in his late fifties, hair cut down to the skin, a face like an old wallet that’s been run through a washing machine.
He walks with his shoulders up and his hands in the pockets of a windbreaker older than me.
In his right hand is a duffel bag made of green canvas, the kind you could use to haul either bricks or body parts. Maybe both.
He doesn’t greet us. He just stands at the lip of the loading dock, looks at the car, then at the three of us, then spits into the weeds.
“You’re leaking,” he says. His voice is pure gravel, but the accent is softer than expected.
“Just a scratch.” Mikhail’s voice is tight.
The man shrugs and tosses the bag to Sergey, who opens it and flips through the contents with his thumb: stacks of bills, each banded with electrical tape; three thick passport folders; a pair of phones in shrinkwrap, and a piece of notebook paper folded twice.
Sergey takes out the paper, glances at the address, and slides it into his jacket.
The rest he hands to Mikhail, who checks the photograph on the first ID before passing it to me.
The face is mine, but it’s not the one from the campaign materials.
My hair is darker, straight, a little uneven at the ends.
The eyes look bored. The name is Marta Leopold, thirty-one, born in a city I’ve never visited.
The date of birth is wrong by two years, but the weight of the document is perfect: heavy, laminated, the edges rounded by use.
I wonder if the real Marta Leopold is dead or just forgotten.
The stranger clears his throat and looks at the empty windows behind us. “You got ten hours before anyone notices you’re not on the grid. By then, maybe three hours more before the checkpoint update.”
Sergey grunts. “Is the border even safe?”
The man spits again, this time a spray of yellow from his lip. Tobacco. I try not to flinch. “The border’s never safe. But it’s better than here.” He looks at Mikhail, then at me, then at Mikhail again. “You know Tolya isn’t looking for you. Officially.”
The word “officially” hangs in the air, a razor suspended by thread.