Page 22 of Captured By the Pakhan

And on this end of it there's a kid I have known for six days.

It's not even close, I tell myself. Professionally, it's not even close.

And it isn't. That's the thing. If you put this scenario in front of any instructor I ever had, any one of them, they'd tell you the same: the operational objective is exfiltration. The asset is not your issue, the child is not in danger, and a bodyguard who blows a two-day window on a panic attack has confused her job with her feelings. I could write the review myself. In fact, I have written that review, about other people.

He isn't dying. Nobody's going to let him get hurt. Somebody will reach him.

They'll do nothing.

I have been in that room multiple times now, and what I actually saw was not a boy having an attack. It was a boy having an attack in a house where years ago the person who came when he screamed stopped coming, and everyone else has never made it past the door.

He's out there in the dark yelling for me by name.

Six days, and he has a name to yell, and it's mine, and I know exactly what a kid like that has to go through to pick someone.

The screaming climbs again, thin and getting thinner. I stand there for about four seconds and I use every one of them to hate this situation. Then I turn around and I run back down the hill.

Downhill is faster and I don't crouch, because there's no point now — I take the open lawn flat out with the coat flapping and my lungs burning and I come around the corner of the east wing at a dead sprint.

He's on the terrace with bare feet.

Andrei's about six feet from him with both hands half-raised as if contemplating how to stop him, and it's the single most useless posture I have ever seen a competent man adopt. And there’s Sergei, backed against the stone balustrade with his eyes fixed on nothing.

"Turn the light off," I instruct. "Andrei, back up."

Andrei looks at me, his eyes narrowing.

"Back up."

He backs up.

I go down onto my knees on the freezing stone about three feet in front of the boy, which puts my head below his, but I don't touch him.

"Sergei. It's Raven. Two hands." I hold them up in front of him. "Count them."

Nothing. His breathing is a disaster — high, fast, all chest.

"Sergei. Two hands." I repeat.

"—two."

"Two. Good. Now five things you can see. Out loud."

It takes him a long time. The light, which is off. The stone. The door. My coat.

"That's four."

"...You."

"That's five." I sit back on my heels. "Four things you can hear."

He gets to four. He's shaking so hard his teeth are going and his feet must be blue on that stone but you don't move them until they're back, you never move them until they're back, and by the third round of it his shoulders have come down out of his ears and he's making noise on the intake instead of nothing at all.

"You're ok," I tell him.

"I couldn't find you." It comes out wrecked. "I went in your room and the bed was⁠—"

"I know."