Page 56 of Captured By the Pakhan

"And who did it for you?"

I don't answer that.

And Ilya doesn't push it — he lets it sit there in the corridor between us. After a while he reaches over and takes my hand off my own knee and holds it, badly, like a man handling something he's never been given before, and we sit on the floor until nearly four in the morning without saying one more word.

The drawing arrives on a Tuesday.

Sergei hands it to me at breakfast, his ears going red, face down, then leaves the room entirely, which is not something he does.

It's the beach. Rendered with the exhaustive accuracy of a boy who reads about things — the actual shape of our cove, the rocks at the north end in the right place, the steps.

Four figures.

He's labeled them, because of course he has, in careful block capitals under each one.

PAPA. ANDREI, who is holding what appears to be a rifle at the beach and is drawn considerably larger than everybody else. SERGEI.

And on the end, with her hair going sideways in a wind, he's drawn as four grey lines:

RAVEN.

I stand in the kitchen and look at it for a long time.

And what I think — the thought that arrives complete, before I can put anything else in front of it — isn't that I shouldn't be in this picture.

I've been here for a month.

A month. Thirty-one days out of ninety, and I have not touched a fence line in two weeks; I have not run a route since Kansas, and I know two gaps at the south corner of a property two thousand miles away that I never wrote down and never told anybody about.

You're not waiting out ninety days, I think, standing in a kitchen holding a child's drawing with my hands not entirely steady. You stopped counting them.

Chapter 15

Raven

Los Angeles, 7:10 AM

"Again." Andrei Dudin barks.

"I'm bleeding."

"You are bleeding a small amount from a place that does not matter." He rolls his shoulder. "Again."

He has put me on the mat four times in eleven minutes and never makes it look easy, which is the only thing that keeps me from hating him.

The pool house has a floor and enough space, and neither of us said anything about starting this — it just began on the third morning, when he came down at seven, found me working through forms alone, stood in the doorway for a while, and then took his boots off.

We've done it every day since.

I go in low, and he lets me get further than last time, which is worse, because it means he's giving me the first two seconds to see what I do with them. I do something clever. He takes the clever thing away from me with one hand, uses my own commitment against my hip, and I'm on the mat looking at a ceiling.

"Your left is a lie," Andrei says, above me.

"My left is fine."

"Your left is a lie you tell before you go right, and you have told it eleven times, and after the third one I stopped believing you." He puts a hand down. I take it. "Whoever taught you was very good and very small. You have been fighting people your own weight for nine years. I'm not your weight."

"No kidding."