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  A window shattered, spraying Sasha and the cubicles with glittering shards, then an arm reached through, feeling for the door. Sasha’s heart leapt and he reached for Irina, but the hand through the window grabbed her first. She shrieked, her pink top twisting in the man’s fist. Sasha swung the statue against the man’s hand, and a howl of pain rose through the broken window. Sasha pulled Irina down the stairs, slamming and locking the bunker door.

  “I told you!”

  Irina trembled, eyes wide with fear. She grabbed Sasha’s arm with quivering hands, pulling him back to the bed. Sinking into the mattress, she leaned into his bare torso. He strained for sounds other than his jackhammering heart and their ragged breath. Black motes teemed at the edges of his vision and he shook his head.

  I have to calm down. Some hero I’ll be if I pass out right now.

  He sucked in a breath and squeezed the statue, Irina’s soft hands on his bare arm… her heavenly scent… those green eyes—

  You’re making it worse!

  He blinked the darkness from his sight as Irina pulled a splinter of glass from his hair. “Maybe they left—”

  Heavy footsteps clanged on the stairs, and a thud vibrated through the thick bunker door. Irina jumped, pushing herself against Sasha.

  “They can’t get in. The room is fortified,” he said.

  Thud. Irina jerked again, squeezing his arm. Footsteps rang back up the stairs. Sasha pulled away from Irina’s grip and dropped into the desk chair.

  “What are you doing?”

  He grabbed a joystick from among the snarls of cables, dirty spoons, and papers, then frowned. “If security won’t take care of this, I will.” Sasha pulled one of the survey drones from standby, peering into the screen and racing it toward the complex. He wasn’t supposed to use the guns on the survey drones—not after assassinating Winter—but he didn’t have clearance for the perimeter guns, and hacking into one would take too long. Besides, since the perimeter guns hadn’t already shot these guys, maybe they’d been disabled.

  The drone nosed toward the complex. Irina stood at Sasha’s side, her hand gripping the chair. He sat a little taller, his gaze narrowed at the monitor, and stopped the drone above the surveillance trailer. He pushed a button and gears whirred, guns descending from the drone’s belly. A green circle blinked on the screen, searching for targets.

  “Are you really going to shoot them?” she asked.

  “They would probably do worse to us. I could just fire a warning shot, though.”

  “I’m kind of impressed.”

  He beamed, fingers twitching with adrenaline. They were safe in his bunker, and he was a hero behind the computer screen.

  “I told you I would protect you.” He coasted the drone deftly around the surveillance trailer, searching, but the area was empty. Houses under construction, farm fields, and more trailers passed from view.

  “Where are they?”

  He scanned for open trailer doors or broken windows, then dipped the drone toward the truck lot. Several silhouettes grappled in the grass and Sasha nosed the drone closer. A man in dented armor squirmed and kicked, pinned to the ground by Mikhail’s bulky form. The other men struggled in cuffs, security leading them away.

  Sasha deflated. “Well… maybe there are more. Gotta make sure the area around your trailer is safe too.” He wove the drone around trailers, then pulled back for a higher view.

  “I think they got them all,” she said.

  He sighed in disappointment and retracted the drone’s guns, then sent it back into standby and slumped in the chair. “Do you want a chaperone back to your trailer?”

  “Yeah. That’s a good idea.”

  Sasha nodded and reached for his shoes.

  “Will you ask Mikhail for me? I left my tablet in my room.”

  He hung his head. “Yeah… Sure.” Sasha tapped out a message:

  “Thanks.”

  “So I take it you don’t want me to drive you to Burr?”

  “No. I do. It’s just… no offense, but right now I’d rather have Misha and his guns escort me than you and your nerd statue.”

  “I’m going to go take a shower. Make sure it’s him knocking before you open the door.”

  Irina took Sasha’s place in the desk chair, rocking back. “Alright. See you Thursday. And Sasha, that thing with the drone was pretty cool—smart—even if you didn’t need to shoot it.”

  He gave her a weak smile and left the room.

  2 ~ Irina ~

  Bright morning light assaulted Sasha’s eyes as he emerged from the underground bunker and into the surveillance office. A bed sheet hung from the broken window, affixed with duct tape.

  Stupid Mikhail couldn’t be bothered to keep those highwaymen out of the complex, and now I’ve got a broken window. Just because we aren’t normally in that much danger out here in the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean he gets to sit around on his big ass.

  Men and women sat in front of monitors, piloting drones with joysticks or stitching photos together on computers.

  Sasha wrinkled up his nose. “What stinks in here?”

  A woman nearby—was her name Anna?—set down her joystick and looked at him sullenly. “I don’t think the new guy is going to make it. He got sick everywhere.”

  “What new guy?” His gaze drifted down the blonde waves spilling over Anna’s shoulders and onto her floral-print dress.

  “Sergey. He has really bad side effects from the vaccine.”

  “You just got here from Moskva the other day, right? How many people died this time around?”

  “Eight of us came on the plane. One died. Two if Sergey doesn’t make it.”

  “Better percentage than before. Used to be that the vaccine would fail twenty-five percent of the time.”

  “Really? You’ve been here since the beginning, right? So you took the vaccine knowing that you had that high a risk of dying?”

  “Almost since the beginning. And yeah, I knew the risk.” He cocked an eyebrow. “No big deal for me, baby. I wasn’t scared. And luckily, my side effects are not so bad. I have a weak heart and get vertigo if I stand for too long. Are you doing okay?”

  “I’ve been getting a weird tingling sensation in my hands and feet… Some people’s side-effects are awful.”

  “Yeah…” Horrible things had happened in the medical trailer—people had suffered from aneurysms, strokes, and one guy had gotten so depressed he committed suicide. Thank God Irina’s seizures weren’t that bad.

  He pushed the images from his mind and gave Anna his best smile, leaning against the wall of the cubicle. “Your dress is very lovely. Did I mention I have a weak heart?”

  Anna rolled her eyes. “You’re my boss, Sasha. And people have already warned me to stay away from you.”

  Sasha’s mouth fell open. “I don’t know who told you that, but I’m a nice guy. Really.”

  She picked up the drone joystick and looked at her monitor, lips pursed.

  “Okay, I have to go. I’m a busy man, you know. Can’t stand around shooting the breeze with subordinates all day.”

  He pushed open the metal office door, early summer air enveloping him, and stepped down the trailer’s stairs into the trampled grass. People bustled by, carrying jugs of water, typing on tablets, or hauling lumber for houses. Beyond the immediate shiny white trailers, homes and barns sat in mid-production, some already finished. Although the facility and surrounding area was only manned by around sixty people, everyone had done a great job of keeping the place afloat.

  Dr. Orlov had once told Sasha there were several reasons for the small size of their group. He and Dr. Krupin were choosy—only selecting people with the skills needed for their research, technical programs, or knowledge of living off the land. Also, only crazy or desperate people wanted to leave Russia and risk the vaccine failing or causing them irreparable damage. Sasha was certain h
e fell into both those categories.

  Their facility’s anthropological research and vaccine experimentation was sanctioned by the government, but the doctors weren’t actually here to finalize the vaccine and send it back to Russia as they had promised. Ensuring the safety of America as a place untouched by the greedy fingers of more advanced countries was their main goal. At least, that’s what they had told Sasha. All the research and back-to-nature commune living didn’t matter much to him. He wasn’t here to forward someone else’s goal. Sasha had only wanted an escape from his oppressive country and depressing, filthy apartment haunted with bad memories. As long as the doctors didn’t give Russia the vaccine—allowing the country access to America to colonize—he was happy.

  The green tops of corn fields ran along the horizon in the distance. This place certainly looked more like a town now than a research facility. The quaint and rustic homes mimicked many of the houses in native American towns, but Sasha preferred the isolation of his surveillance bunker. Besides, he’d been here for three years and didn’t plan to stay in Priyut forever.

  He traipsed through the grass, passing people and trailers, headed for the mess hall. A cluster of men in conversation looked up as he neared.

  “Oh, hey, ask Sasha. He’ll know.”

  Sasha stopped, staring into Egor’s chubby, unshaven face. Why the doctors chose Egor to come to America was baffling. He didn’t seem to have any talents to speak of, and spent most of his time playing games on his tablet.

  Egor poked Sasha in the arm. “You’ve gotta help us with something. Me and the guys want to make a video game where you’re a Mainland American fighting Islanders. I keep telling them the Islanders have tan skin, and they say black. You’ve seen them in person, right? So which is it?”

  “You’re making a game where you slaughter Islanders?” Sasha curled his lip and made a noise in his throat.

  “Yeah!”

  “You do know that most Islanders are nice, right? The Soots, no, but all of the ones from the Pearlollans are.”

  Egor looked at his friends, then back at Sasha. “Didn’t one punch you in the face once, though?”

  One of the other men chimed in. “Oh yeah, I heard about that from Irina. You two were driving some albino Islander and his Mainland girlfriend to the beach, or something? And he gave you a black eye and split open your face?”

  “I got drunk. That’s why that happened. Said something to offend him. And it was only a little cut. I don’t drink anymore and I’ve apologized to both of them.”

  Egor brightened. “Oh! An albino Islander would make the perfect boss for the game. Maybe he can only be killed by machine guns.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Egor? They should have saved your vaccine for someone else and just dropped you off here without it.”

  “But then I would bleed out from the virus…”

  “Exactly!”

  Sasha left the group, shaking his head, and eventually reached the mess hall. People sat at the long wooden tables, laughing and eating. As he walked by a group of women, their smiles fell away, eyes locked on him and forks raised halfway to their mouths. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and hurried by, stopping at the counter.

  Are they upset because of something I did, or has my reputation just gotten so bad that it’s every woman’s immediate response to me now?

  Roman picked up a plastic tray and dished a portion of dumplings onto it.

  Sasha glanced back at the women. Their gazes seared through him, and he hoped if he hunched his shoulders a little more he’d become invisible. “Sheesh. Look at them. They lose their appetite just by me walking by.”

  Roman set a roll on the tray and slid it across the counter. “What did you do this time?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  “Well, don’t tell them that. They’ll just be more upset.”

  Sasha sighed and took his tray, leaving the mess hall and returning to the surveillance bunker. He took a bite of dumpling and swivelled out his keyboard, then typed in a few commands, switching the drone footage on the nearest monitor to a software program.

  There weren’t too many kinks left to work out in his drone programming, and after the scare from the night before, he was eager to get it up and running.

  The doctors wouldn’t miss one broken drone. In fact, they might even want to use the program on the others, since piloting them all for aerial photos would be unnecessary once the map was done. A drone that could respond to voice commands and hover next to people would be better protection than that numbskull Mikhail and his cronies. The perimeter guns were obviously too easy to disable, if that’s what had actually allowed the highwaymen to break in the night before. Getting a straight answer from Mikhail had been harder than convincing women in the bars that Sasha’s physique was the ideal level of hotness in Russia.

  A voice-operated drone could be left in stealth mode outside the perimeter and shoot at anything with a simple command. It would be the perfect protection for Sasha as well after leaving Priyut.

  The knowledge that most other countries in the world had much more advanced technology than Russia was infuriating. They would sneeze at his little software program—it likely looked prehistoric compared to what they used on a daily basis. Nanodrones, neural implants, thought transmission, realistic AI… Russia refused to adopt any innovations that might be used against the government or better the citizens in ways they didn’t want. Their little American facility was stuck using fifty-year-old technology.

  Sasha kept a low profile the rest of the day, hoping the doctors wouldn’t find out about his excursion to Burr. He finished his software program and implemented it into his newly fixed drone. It worked perfectly, responding to many commands, including: “aerial,” “shoot,” and “standby.”

  He tried not to think about Irina. Thursday would come soon enough.

  Sasha walked nervously from the surveillance office to Dr. Orlov’s trailer. He opened the door and turned for the wall, reaching for the keys to Truck One. They weren’t there.

  “Driving Irina to Burr?” Dr. Orlov sat at the clear glass table in the middle of the room, eating a breakfast of potato and eggs. He scratched at his mousy brown hair, light from the computer monitor reflecting off his glasses.

  “Uh, yeah. Where are the keys to Truck One?”

  “Irina has them. She’s already waiting for you.” Orlov took a bite of runny egg. “I’m going to miss her around here. Make sure she gets there safe, alright?”

  “Of course.” Sasha walked back outside, rubbing his sweaty palms on his shorts and looking up at the milky suggestions of clouds. He walked along the facility’s chain link perimeter to the trucks, thankfully not running into Egor or his friends. Irina leaned against Truck One with her arms folded, wearing a white tank top and jeans.

  “About time you showed up.” The keys jangled as she held them out to him.

  He took them, half-expecting Mikhail to leap from the bushes. Irina rounded the truck and slid into the passenger’s seat. Sasha climbed in, glancing behind him; a large duffel bag took up the back.

  They bumped down the dirt road at a speed slower than was his habit. There was no need to irritate Irina with his manic driving—especially not today. Who knew how long it would be until he saw her again?

  She gripped the roof’s grab handle as she swayed with the movement of the truck, staring straight ahead. Once they reached the highway, she put in a pair of earbuds and messed with her tablet. Tinny bass beats filled the cab, and she shut her eyes.

  Sasha frowned, tightening his grip on the steering wheel.

  The perfume in the enclosed space was distracting and overwhelmed his senses—not because Irina wore too much, but because it was Irina’s. To the left sat the remains of a train, engines and boxcars mashed together like horrific dominoes. Pale green vegetation covered the configuration, birds wheeling above the twisted hunks of metal.

  They drove in silence for a while, weaving around travelers an
d debris in the road. Sasha breathed shallowly, wanting to say something—anything—just to get Irina to acknowledge him. She eventually pulled off her headphones.

  He said, “You know, I’m thinking of leaving soon too.”

  Irina sighed. “Please don’t tell me you want to move to Burr.”

  Sasha’s mouth twitched and he looked away, trying to sound casual. “No, no. I think I’ll go east. I’d love to get my hands on some of the new technology they have. I wanna see how it works.”

  “Well, that would be good, probably. Give you something new to do too. I mean, working with the doctors for the past few years has been okay, but it’s not real living. To tell you the truth, I’m a little jealous of all the times you snuck out and went exploring.”

  “I thought you said I was immature and selfish for doing that stuff.”

  “You are. Doesn’t mean I’m not jealous.”

  An uncomfortable silence filled the cab. Sasha gripped the steering wheel tighter, his apology list feeling like an angry itch in his pocket. Burr would be in view soon. He had to tell her.

  “Irina…”

  Her green eyes pierced through him. She frowned. “What?”

  Don’t make her mad yet. Ask her what you want to know, first. “Why did you ask me to drive you? You hate me. Why not ask Mikhail, or even Dr. Orlov? He’s sorry to see you go. I’m sure he would have done it.”

  “I’m sure he would have, too.”

  “So, is this like a trick or something? I drop you off and you slash my tires? Make me walk back?”

  A melodic tinkle of a laugh escaped her. “No! It’s not a trick. I wouldn’t do that.”

  The tops of brick buildings appeared above the wavering heat curtain on the road. Sasha slowed, parking the truck in the same stand of trees he’d used two days previous. He sat, hands in his lap, unsure of what else to say.

  Irina sighed. “I don’t hate you, Sasha. I find you utterly irritating most of the time, gross, dirty-minded, impulsive, reckless, and sometimes downright rude.”

  Pile a couple more adjectives on top of me, why don’t you? Just bury me.