Page 35 of Captured By the Pakhan

They closed it. Every part of it. Within a week, exactly like I knew they would.

I stand at the tree line for a while with my hands on my hips, breathing hard, looking up at four hundred meters of woodland and a fence and two miles of state land beyond it.

I should feel something about this. That was my one clean route out of here, and it's been sealed by people who are good at their jobs, and I should be standing here with my teeth together doing arithmetic on the next one.

I wait for it.

What arrives isn't grief, and it isn't panic, and it isn't the cold professional itch to start again from the beginning.

It's relief.

Oh, I think, standing in the wet with my heart going and my breath in front of my face. Oh, that's not good.

Because if the seam is closed, then leaving isn't a decision I have to make. If the seam is closed, I get to stay, and it isn't my fault, and there is a version of me — one I would not have recognized eleven days ago — who has just been let off a hook she didn't want to climb off by herself.

I make myself walk the whole perimeter anyway. All of it, both flanks, the kennel end, the service gate.

I find two more gaps.

I don't do anything about either of them, and I don't write them down, and that is the most frightening thing that happens to me all day.

Ilya comes home at midnight, and I hear the car, and I don't go down.

I lie in the dark with the connecting door open and listen to a man moving around his own house at an hour when houses should be still, and I catalog it: the boot room, the kitchen, the tap, the stairs. He stops at Sergei's door for about ninety seconds. Then his own door, further down, and then nothing.

He doesn't come to mine.

Which is correct. Which is the professional and sensible and entirely appropriate outcome, and I'm furious about it, lying flat on my back in the dark with my jaw set. If I could see myself from the outside I'd write a report about that too.

At 3:05 in the morning I see the headlights.

I'm awake because I'm always awake now, standing at the window with my arms folded, and they come up the access road from the county end and stop about two hundred meters short of the gate.

They don't turn off.

Nobody gets out. The engine stays running — I can see the exhaust in the cold, catching the light. It sits there in the dark on a private road at three in the morning with its lamps burning, in full view of nineteen exterior cameras, doing nothing at all.

Six minutes. I count them, because counting is a job.

At six minutes and change, the car reverses. Not a three-point turn — it backs the full two hundred meters down that road, slowly, keeping its nose pointed at the house the entire way, and then swings out onto the county road and is gone.

That's not a lost driver.

A lost driver turns around. A lost driver turns off his lights, gets out, or checks his phone. That was a man who wanted to be seen sitting there and leaving, and who didn’t once give a camera the back of his vehicle.

I'm moving before the taillights are gone — through my door, down the corridor, taking the stairs three at a time in bare feet with my heart going hard.

And I stop dead on the landing.

Because Andrei is already at the window on the half-landing.

He's fully dressed at three in the morning. He's got a rifle — not a sidearm, a rifle, the long one from the case in the utility corridor — and it's not slung; it's up and braced against the frame, and he's got the barrel resting on a folded coat so it doesn't knock the glass.

He doesn't look at me.

"How long have you been standing there?" I ask.

"Nineteen minutes," Andrei says.