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We were drawn together immediately because I could see how smart he was, and he could see that I could see it. I brought him into my circle. Some of the others gave him shit at first—especially Vlad. Chief has that vulnerable quality that draws the attention of a bully like Vlad, a wounded chick stumbling around the biggest rooster in the yard.
Defending him would only make it worse. I give him chances to shine, to show what he’s best at. He makes himself useful around the house to make up for the fact that if we’re ever rolling out strapped, he prefers to stay in the driver’s seat while the rest of us handle business.
His real job is the books. He’s a wizard with numbers, which I really fucking need at the moment since we’re operating on a razor-fine margin. I only have my own bankroll—I haven’t taken a dime from my father or Ivan.
Sabrina wheels her bike in so she can show it off to Chief. He looks it over, all smiles and compliments, like he wasn’t with me when I bought it.
He took to Sabrina at once. He’s always ready to like what I like, and she’s the prettiest girl who’s spoken more than five sentences to him. Actually, Sabrina is more than cordial. She’s warm and open, especially to anyone she sees as an underdog. Her sense of justice compels her to celebrate the unappreciated, while puncturing the inflated egos of those at the top of the heap like Jasper or Vlad, or sometimes yours truly.
Bubbling over with excitement, she’s hitting Chief with a full blast of charm. He looks dazed, like he’s taken a couple shots to the head. It’s good for him—Sabrina is so overpowering that he forgets to be nervous, and he talks more like his real self.
Once she’s borrowed his tools to open up the crankcase and they’ve both pored over the engine, she nods to Jasper’s KMT, saying, “You working on the rattle?”
“Yeah—I dunno what’s causing the issue, though. I took the whole engine apart and cleaned it and put it back together again, no fucking dice.”
“Hm,” Sabrina says, her sharp eyes flicking over Jasper’s bike.
I’m sure she could fix it if she wanted to, but that’s the spiteful side of her. Jasper hasn’t exactly been friendly, and Sabrina has too much pride to extend the first olive branch.
It doesn’t matter—she’s finding her way in the house faster than I could have hoped. She’s been gaming with Hakim and Andrei, and she cooked her first dinner with only a moderate level of misery. She dropped the platter of chicken and veggie skewers triumphantly in the middle of the table, her hair piled in a frazzled mess on top of her head, a streak of charcoal across her forehead from where she’d swiped away sweat with the back of her arm. She looked like she’d been through several world wars, but she was grinning.
“So? What do you think?”
Andrei was brave enough to take the first bite of the singed and strangely solid chicken breast.
“Hm,” he said, chewing carefully. “It’s…edible.”
Vlad gave his chicken a pained look, but since he wasn’t about to miss a meal for the first time in his life, he doused his skewers in hot sauce and shoveled it down.
Only Jasper refused to eat. He didn’t say anything out loud, and neither did Sabrina, though I saw the color in her cheeks when she scraped his full plate in the trash. It pissed me off, but I stayed out of it ’cause I know that’s what Sabrina wants.
I finished all my chicken. Nothing bad happened after, which I counted as a victory.
Once Sabrina is finished showing off her bike and Hakim has stumbled out of bed—late as usual—we ride down to the old brewery.
Sabrina’s already getting used to the vagaries of Moscow traffic. She zips neatly between the lines of cars, leading the way to Nekrasovka, only having to drop behind me once we pass out of the neighborhoods she recognizes.
Her ability to learn Cyrillic street signs reminds me of Sherlock Holmes when he bragged that he was the only person ever to memorize the immensely convoluted train schedule of Victorian England. Sabrina’s brain is like that—she sees something once and downloads it into her head.
She’s riding faster than she needs to right now, excited to see her new workspace. Hakim can hardly keep up. He’s probably still half asleep.
When we reach the brewery, Sabrina barely pauses to put the kickstand down on her bike before running inside.
The interior of the brewery smells strongly of hops and mold. Inches of thick gray dust that have settled on the old tables and windowsills like the fallout from Chernobyl.
All the windows are high up on the walls, so tiny and beveled that the light leaks through in scattered shafts.
Weeds grow through the cracks in the moldering floorboards. Some are covered in prickled spikes, others in fragile, papery blooms.
Sabrina dashes around the brewery, her boots splashing through puddles of muddy water, her hair swirling as she spins around in the vast, open space.
“It’s perfect!” she cries. “Fucking perfect!”
Hakim examines the space calmly but with no less interest. He’s mostly checking the outlets, the water supply, and the drainage pipes.
“We’ve got full power?”
“Try the switch.”
