Now the streets were dark. Apart from the Bar Resto’s window, there was no light at all. Black against the dim, silhouettes moved within the parked cars lining the street.
I turned on my heel and ran, and heard opening car doors behind me, then shouts, then running feet, then the sirens and lights I’d been missing broke the night wide open. The noise was incredible and as I cornered and cornered again, I felt the between-the-shoulders itch of an inbound truncheon—or bullet.
I skidded to a halt down one of the tiny alleys that lined the old town, barely wider than my shoulders. I consciously slowed my breathing and peered down the alley to double-check that it wasn’t a dead end, then used the shiny black screen of my phone as a mirror to peek around the corner. Not even a glimmer. I took a few more breaths, then eased out of the alley, listening intently.
Distant shouts and sirens, from the direction of Bar Resto. Nothing from nearby. I formulated a hypothesis: the people in the cars—secret police and a goon squad—hadn’t been staking me out, they’d been staking out the Bar Resto; Litvinchuk or someone beneath him had decided that after tonight, they were going to clean house. I reversed my coat to the white side and detached the hood before walking purposefully back toward the Bar Resto, looking as much as possible like someone going somewhere.
The sounds grew louder—shouts and breaking glass. I stopped at the final corner, tucked my phone into my coat’s breast pocket with the lens peeking out and recording, then stepped out onto the sidewalk and glanced quickly down the street, letting the camera get a good look, taking a good look myself.
Chaos, people struggling under cops, the window of the Bar Resto shattered and in shards. I kept my pace even as I crossed to the opposite corner, someone going somewhere, someone, somewhere, my shield of invisibility and respectability. I didn’t recognize anyone at this distance, at this speed, in this light. But statistically, I knew some of those people being dragged into the yawning maw of those white cargo vans, lined with steel benches and shackles.
I was almost to the other side when the blast hit. Before I knew it, I was on my belly with my hands over my head, feeling the deep-frozen street through the legs of my jeans and in my cheek. The night was white, then orange, then I felt and heard the sound, a whump that never gets easier, no matter how often you’ve felt it. It winded me, made me feel like a huge hand was squeezing me from every side, like the blood was being crushed out of my torso and up into my head, like the worst sinus headache ever. I think I blacked out, possibly more than once. The moment seemed to go on a lot longer than it had any business doing.
I came to my knees and barfed, trying to get it all up and out as quickly as I could, looking around, checking whether anyone was coming for me, ready to run from another explosion. The Bar Resto and the apartments over it were mostly rubble, except for a cross section that rose three and a half stories, like an architectural rendering: bathtub, stairwell, kitchen. It was so dark I couldn’t tell if anyone was up there, or under the mounded rubble at its base.
I rose and my head spun and I just managed to turn my face before I barfed again, getting it on my boots instead of down my front. I took two steps toward the blast, then heard the sirens over the ringing in my ears, understood that the bouncing emergency lights on the fog were getting closer, and so I made myself walk—walk, dammit, Masha, not like a fucking drunk, come on—toward the hotel. I didn’t think anyone was after me, personally, at this point. Ilsa wouldn’t tell Litvinchuk that I was fired, because to do that she’d have to tell him why. It would all be very quiet. That’s how Xoth did things. Discretion was their brand.
Emergencies are weird. Three blocks from the blast, it was as if none of it had happened. I tasted blood and realized I had a nosebleed, which I wiped at with my glove. Was I staggering? I was. Something not quite right with my inner ear just yet. Give it time.
Two more blocks and I saw the entrance of the Sofitel. The guards were there and they remembered me.
“Ma’am—”
“I am staying here.”
“Yes, but—”
“I am a guest here.”
“Ma’am.”
“Get out of my way.”
He looked at me.
“Please. I’m hurt and need to go to my room to clean up.”
No one does stony-faced like a Boris.
“I’m checking out.” I said this loud enough to attract the attention of the woman behind the counter. She didn’t bother with stony, went straight to scowl. But she said something into the mic pinned to her lapel and the guard listened to his earpiece and let me through.
I didn’t glance her way as I crossed the lobby but felt her eyeballs boring into my back the whole way.
The elevator mirror lied to me. No one could look that terrible. I unzipped the Faraday pocket in my coat and withdrew my room-key, touched in, zipped it back in as I opened the door.
Showering, I nearly fell in the tub, but caught myself. My legs and armpits needed a shave and I didn’t have a razor. Fuck it. I got good at fast showers when I was doing my time in Central America with Zyz, but I’d had shorter hair then. I’d get it chopped as soon as I found a place to settle.
* * *
The Sofitel wasn’t the only hotel in Blzt, but it was the nicest by far. Everything else was either a glorified youth hostel or a crumbling, ex-Soviet pile with an angry Boris sitting at a desk outside of each floor’s elevator lobby, ostentatiously marking down the comings and goings of everyone who got in or out of the elevators.
I checked into the least-worst of these, the Kharkiv, and when the check-in clerk demanded my passport, I beckoned her close and slid her a hundred-dollar bill. It was faster than arguing. She gave me a long, considering look, then plucked a key off a board behind her and passed it over.
The eighth floor was nearly entirely derelict, with plywood permanently wedged into the doorways of nearly every room. The “concierge” behind the desk in the elevator lobby smirked at me as I wheeled my bag past him, waving my key at him. Room 809 was between two boarded-up rooms, which was fine with me—more privacy was always preferable.
In the room, I stripped the stained coverlet off the bed and dug my silk sleep-sack out of my bag before sitting down at the scratched desk to unpack my laptop and phones and collection of SIMs. I plugged in a prepaid SIM from a company that sold cheap data roaming to business travelers and checked that I could tether my laptop to it and fire up a VPN.
It was 7 a.m. and I was simultaneously exhausted and frantic, unable to stop replaying the night’s events, unable to stop racing around a mental hamster wheel that made stops at my total savings (absurdly fat), and Kriztina’s chances (terribly thin). I climbed into my sleep-sack and listened to the footsteps from the floor above me and the traffic noises from the street below leaking through the drafty window and the grimy drapes. I put my laptop and phone in my backpack and went down to the hotel’s breakfast room and ate some stodgy porridge with pickled vegetables and salted meat, then went back to the room and lay back down again, trying to pay attention to the sound of my stomach gurgling while I put Kriztina and her friends into a purpose-built compartment.
I finally drifted off, waking up just after noon, feeling bloated and fraught, the sense of a powerful sorrow and danger just over my shoulder. I got into my VPN and did some careful work to verify that Xoth had indeed terminated my official access, including the backdoors I’d left for myself. Someone farther up the chain had been watching me. The undigested breakfast in my gut curdled a little more.