TEN YEARS AGO

Olesya was alone.

She was lying on a hospital bed, wearing pajamas that weren’t hers. The room was bare and on the other side there was a closed door and a long window with dark glass she couldn’t see through. There were no bunks, no Firebird Squad, no hospital corners. She climbed from her bed. She remembered being inside a van. And then nothing. The grazes on her hands from climbing the concrete wall—they were completely healed. She remembered Xiu’s face.

How long had she been here? And where was here? Was she committed to some sort of mental asylum in Siberia? The room was heated through a fat, vertical pipe in the corner. She walked over to the door and reached for the handle. It turned freely. She wasn’t locked inside.

The corridor was long. She walked down it, her feet freezing on the tiled floor. There were more glass windows along the right-hand wall. The rooms beyond them were dark. She could hear noise at the end of the corridor, behind another door. Footsteps, talking, keyboard typing. She reached the end and stepped into an open space buzzing with people and activity. There were desks, monitors, a whole bunch of people standing and sitting, wearing jackets and hoods, carrying papers or pointing at screens. The area smelled of instant coffee and cigarette smoke. She looked from one face to another, recognizing none of them. And one by one, they looked back at her.

Something was very, very wrong. She had to get out. Next to her, an external door opened and someone stepped in with a gust of cold air. It smelled of the forest, but not of the night.

Olesya ran.

Past the figure. Barefoot, into the snow. She heard them calling her name. They knew her, but she didn’t want them to. She kept running, down a hill. She plunged through snow, tripped and rolled. Recovering at the bottom, she got back to her feet and kept going.

But Firebird Squad wasn’t out here. It was just white.

Smeared across her face, the snow numbed everything. She could see the forest ahead. Fog lifted from the treetops. She stopped. Her memories came back, falling inside her like icicles.

Firebird drawing their Glock 19s.

Xiu leaning over her breakfast tray and raising an eyebrow.

Gripping her pistol at the range, her palms sweating.

Clinging to the concrete wall, pushing air from her lungs.

‘Keep going.’ Xiu looked up at her. ‘You’re family now.’

The van rolling. Glass shattering.

Olesya felt her eyes warm with tears.

She dropped to her knees. Her nose dripped into the snow. There was no point in wiping it. It was all white around her. It was all nothing. She pressed her hands into the white and let them sink deeper. The cold burned and she focused on it. Her body shivered.

‘Olesya?’

The voice was deep, but not unwelcoming.

She wanted to ignore the man, but he called her name again. She didn’t say anything, and instead slowed her breathing so she didn’t look so pathetic by the time he circled around her. Failing, she slumped into a cross-legged position, ignoring her bare feet.

He didn’t seem to mind. He took a knee before her. She didn’t want to look at him but she could see from the edge of her vision that he wore a fur jacket and held a spare over one arm. He handed it to her.

‘Your feet must be cold,’ he said in Russian.

She looked down at her feet, pale and covered in snow. She didn’t care.

‘My name is Illarion,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’

She looked up. Illarion had closely cropped hair and whiskers, a mix of silver and coal. His nose pointed like an arrow toward a scarred chin.

Olesya took the fur jacket from him.

‘You can put the jacket on,’ Illarion said.

‘No.’ She put the jacket on.

‘How about you come inside and I tell you everything?’ he asked.

She pulled the hood over her head and wiggled her hands back inside each cuff. She could feel his gaze, patient and calm. ‘No.’ She would stick to English.

He frowned. ‘You’ll get frostbite if you stay here.’

‘Fine, I’ll get frostbite until you tell me.’

‘The project you were in wasn’t a scholarship.’

She looked into his eyes. They were a pale, frosted blue.

‘Project GATE,’ she said. ‘I know what it was.’

‘You don’t know everything.’

Her hands clenched into fists. ‘So what … what was it for?’

Illarion looked at her. He was a bit older than her father, and the cold didn’t seem to bother him at all. ‘They were training you to become operatives.’

‘Not anymore, I guess,’ Olesya said.

He cleared his throat and looked around. ‘Do you want to know where we are?’

‘I don’t care,’ she said.

‘We’re thirty kilometers north of St Petersburg,’ he said.

‘I said I don’t care.’

He smiled. ‘And I don’t care that you don’t care.’

‘And I don’t care that you don’t care that …’ She looked away. ‘Shut up.’

Through the corner of her vision, she watched him shift from crouching to a sitting position.

‘I have a question for you,’ he said.

‘You already asked me a question.’

‘Two questions. What’s the last thing you remember?’

She looked away and sighed. ‘I don’t like that question.’

‘No, you don’t like the answer.’

She glared. ‘Fine. Being taken away. By your people.’

Illarion unlaced his boots and peeled off his thick woolen socks, one after the other.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

He handed his socks to her. ‘Put those on. I didn’t rescue you from halfway around the world so you could get frostbite.’

She dusted off her feet and pulled on the socks. Her toes began to thaw.

‘The van was hit,’ she said. ‘I guess you did that.’

‘No.’ He inhaled slowly and paused for a moment. ‘That was the Blue Berets. The Fifth Column’s soldiers, they’re drawn from special forces units around—’

‘I know who they are, they helped train us,’ she said. ‘But why did they want to hurt us?’

‘Because we’re not on their side anymore,’ Illarion said.

Barefoot, he placed his boots neatly in front of her.

‘China had a South Blade unit from Guangzhou on location,’ he said. ‘They were able to extract everyone under threat, including you. We were lucky.’

‘I don’t feel lucky.’ She snatched one of Illarion’s boots. Her foot slipped inside with room to spare. She put the other boot on and hugged her legs. ‘I can’t go back, can I?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, you can never go back.’