NOVYYE SAINTS (ONC 2021 WINNER) ✓

07: BLACK

"I am able."

"Stop with the heroics, Mysh." His paranoia takes over and his voice softens, although Anatoly and Leva are over six meters away. "His fucking life is at stake."

"As is mine."

"Then step down. Your knee is going to unravel the entire plan."

"Who is there to take my place? You?"

"I just think it'd be better to send someone who isn't sleeping with him."

Mysh resists the urge to slap him. "That's your real concern, isn't it? You're afraid my emotions will interfere with logic."

"His too." Smoke from the last of Volya's cigarettes swirls out of Dima's nose like zmei steam. "The agreement I made with him nearly killed us in the rail yard."

"So? You would have left me if without it. Survival instincts always win over soldiers like you."

"You're wrong about that," he says, body unwavering like marble.

"If you think he loves me then you are too."

"Would you bet your life on that claim?"

"Sure."

"What about his?"

Dima points to Leva as he rips off of his ushanka to push back fiery cinnamon curls.

Mysh only knew two people with hair that color. One was a lying traitor. The other was her brother.

But Leva was no Stepan.

She couldn't imagine a thief protesting in Petrograd alongside mining cadets with a budenovka on his head, a rifle on his shoulder, and party slogans backed by every fiber of his being.

Leva was just a man trying to move up in the world.

"No," she says, scoffing at her own stupidity. "Anything that involves Volya will always be ambiguous."

"That's what kills you."

"Why'd you have to say it like that?" Mysh asks, half-laughing, half-grimacing. "A little compassion would be a fucking courtesy."

"I know, I know. Come here."

For the first and last time in her life, Dmitriy Medvedev embraces her. With both arms. Their hearts come the closest they'll ever be if only for a single beat.

"You're going to be alright, Mysh," he says. "Just know when you're gone, I'll be here trying to locate another 1900 Grand Champagne Cognac. But, you need to bring him back to me first so this whole effort will be worth it."

"I will."

"Take these with." Dima passes her a set of lock picks from the desk. "Volya would want you to have them. He'd also tell you not to trust the man in the hallway. Remember: nadeisya tolko na sebya."

"Always."

♰ ♰ ♰

Gorod Krestov's wharf was little more than a tangle of rotting planks stabbed into cement cylinders. A curled peninsula sheltered its brick herring cannery, wheat storehouses, and six piers—the last of which serviced the prison barge.

Nikolai Ushakovo made it clear that the boat was their only way in and out of the Crosses. Unless, of course, they wanted to brave the River Rusalka. But that was a death wish, so he quizzed them until Mysh and Leva could each recite when it departed and returned: after the midnight count and by six a.m..

Because of the watch towers, they have to descend a rusty ladder and crawl through the lattice of black wood beneath the pier.

River algae slathers the bottom of the cross beams, slicking their boot soles and tiring their muscles as they perch on its end.