That’s Caiden’s fault.
I’ve spent years getting very good at not building my life around other people, but he has managed to become an exception to that rule in ways I find both inconvenient and also impossible to regret.
So Sergei gets one more chance than he usually would, and the others get corrected without me making an example of anybody.
They should all be grateful Caiden got to me first.
By the end of the morning, the drills improve, not because they’ve suddenly become smarter, but because I have removed the idea that I might let anything else slide. Men are easier to manage once they understand where the line is and how much it will cost them to cross it.
Sergei avoids looking at me after lunch, which is wise. I don’t pursue it because there’s no pleasure in chasing something once it’s already broken.
By the end of the first week, the exercise has settled into the usual rhythm. Drills, corrections, rinse and repeat. Menare getting tired enough to stop arguing with reality. Access to the outside tightens, as it always does once the routine beds in. Calls get cut unless they matter. Messages slow down. Personal mail turns up in lumps whenever somebody remembers it exists.
I notice the lack of Caiden in stupid little ways.
Something one of the men says that would have made him laugh. A look I would have thrown at him across a room if he were here. A private comment with nowhere useful to put it. It’s not tragic. I’m not wandering around in the snow yearning like an idiot or anything. I work, I sleep, and I keep the exercise moving. But I miss him enough to find it annoying, which is new and therefore unhelpful.
Amsterdam keeps coming back as well, though not the city itself. I don’t care about canals or narrow streets or any of that. What stays with me is him, half asleep and impossible to move once he has decided I belong where I am. The warmth of his skin, the smug little look he gets when he thinks he’s worked me out, and the way he talks about the future as if it is already sitting there waiting for us and all we have to do is turn up and take it.
I’ve never thought that way.
The future, as far as I have ever been concerned, is usually just the next thing that needs doing. The next job. The next movement. The next place. Caiden looks at it like it can be built, and worse, somewhere between Russia and Amsterdam, I started letting him infect me with that.
I think about the trip we’re meant to take later in the year — maybe France at Christmas this time — and feel something dangerously close to contentment.
That feeling alone should probably worry me more than it does.
When I get back to my tent at the end of the seventh day, there’s a pile of forwarded mail on the folding table inside. Official envelopes, mainly supply notices and the usual stale administrative rubbish. A few personal letters have been dropped on top in a batch, held back until somebody decided they could no longer be ignored.
I don’t expect anything for me, but then I see my name. I know the handwriting instantly before I pick it up.
Niko.
I don’t open it straight away. Instead, I hang my coat and put the kettle on. There’s no point in lunging at bad news, which I know it is. He wouldn’t have written otherwise. The water heats, and I pour it. Then I open the envelope and read the letter standing up.
The letter is short.
Cassie is dead.
For a second, my brain refuses to accept the sentence in front of me, as if I have misread it or Niko has written the wrong words in the wrong order, and another scan will sort them into something that makes sense.
It doesn’t.
Cassie is dead.
I read the rest, which doesn’t take long. There’s almost nothing there. There’s no long explanation or attempt to soften the blow. No words that might make this easier to swallow. Just the fact of it and a few bare details around it. That, more than anything, tells me how bad it is. Niko has stripped it down to the basics because he couldn’t stand to write more.
I go over the page again anyway, looking for something useful. A date. A place. Some practical details I can act on from here.
But there’s nothing.
I think about the last time I saw her. Cassie with Vladimir on one hip and an opinion already half out of her mouth before anyone had asked for it. Her laughing too loudly in a room too small for that much noise. And then her looking at me as if she knew exactly when I was being an asshole and had decided, generously, not to say it aloud.
Dead.
I fold the letter once. Then again.
I put the letter back in the envelope and sit on the edge of the cot because there is nowhere else to go. The tea sits on the table untouched. Outside, the camp goes on as if nothing has happened, which of course it would. The world remains offensively willing to keep moving.
