Page 53 of Captured By the Pakhan

Here's what happens. Nothing happens. That's the whole of it — for six days, absolutely nothing happens, and it turns out that's the most dangerous thing that has occurred to me since the corridor.

Sergei goes into the ocean.

Not the first day. The first day he stands at the top of the steps in swimming shorts with a towel around his shoulders like a man contemplating a tax bill, and tells me at length about rip currents, which he has read about, obviously.

The second day, he goes on his knees.

The fourth day I get about eleven feet out with him, and he goes under a wave he didn't see and comes up screaming — and for a full second my heart stops, and then I realize he's laughing, screaming and laughing at the same time, coughing and shouting about salt, and he does it four more times on purpose.

He is a boy who has been in a locked house since he was six, and he is standing in the Pacific Ocean being knocked over by water, and I have to go and stand in the shallows with my back to the beach for a second, and if anybody asks I'll tell them it was the sun.

We train on the terrace in the mornings. Falling, still, and then the beginnings of a straight punch that he loathes with his whole soul.

"Why do I have to?"

"Because I said."

"That's not a reason."

"It's the reason you're getting." I put the pad up. "Again."

"I don't like it, Raven."

"I know."

"It's — " he's going pink, and struggling for it, and when it comes out it's the truest thing he's said in a week " — it's for hurting people. That's what it's for. That's what it's for, and you're teaching it to me, and I don't want to know how."

And I put the pad down because that deserves an answer, not a drill.

"Okay. So here's the arithmetic, and I'm going to give you the adult version because you're going to work it out yourself in about two years anyway." I sit down on the step. "You're right. It's for hurting people. There's no version where it isn't. What I'm actually teaching you is the thing that happens in the eleven seconds before — how to see a room, how to get to a door, how not to be where the trouble is. The punch is what's left over when all of that has failed. It's the worst option on a list of options, and you're learning it last, and I hope to God you never use it."

He thinks about that for a long time.

"That's still teaching me to hurt somebody."

"Yes," I say. "It is."

He picks the pad back up, holds it out to me, and doesn't say anything else. We do twenty more, and he does every one because I asked and for no other reason on earth.

That's the thing. That's the thing I should be paying attention to. He does it because I asked him.

Ilya comes home at six on a Wednesday.

Not eleven. Not midnight. Six, with the sun still up, and finds the three of us on the terrace eating badly and doesn't say anything about it, just takes a plate and sits down.

He does it again on Friday.

Andrei catches my eye across the table on Friday, and something happens in his face that on any other man would be an entire paragraph.

There's a night that week where I'm standing at the kitchen island with a glass of wine, and Ilya comes past behind me to get something, and he puts his hand flat on my lower back as he goes — briefly, absently, the way you'd steady someone in a doorway — and keeps walking.

Karina isn't here. It's Andrei, and Sergei at the table with a book.

Neither of them says a word.

And I stand there with my whole spine lit up and understand that we have, at some point in the last week, stopped pretending in front of the household and nobody held a meeting about it.

I stop counting the exits on the ninth day.