Chapter 48

“Pasha bear? Have you been awake all night?”

“If I say yes, will you stay in bed longer and snuggle with me, my beautiful E with the prettiest lips I’ve ever seen?”

“Don’t try that bear charm on me. I’m immu—Pasha! Stop that! I mean it! I have a meeting with Grandmother!”

“Take it back first, moy luchik. Say, ‘Pasha bear, you are the most charming bear to ever charm his way into this world.’ ”

“Or maybe I’ll just get revenge. Never forget my stabby ancestor.”

“Did I ever tell you I read her poems to get inside intel on the Mercants when you were turning me down for dates to oil your cuticles and rearrange your spoon drawer?”

“Don’t forget the time I had to walk my fish.”

“That smart ass of yours needs to be spanked. Instead, I’m going to whisper ‘Fragments of a Torn-up Letter’ in your ear.”

“My excitement knows no bounds. Such romance you give me, such passion.”

“Oh, you’ll be surprised, my delicious little E who I have trapped in my lair. It features the line ‘Your thighs thrusting betw—’ ”

“You win. Kiss me right now, sexy Mr. Charming.”

—Conversation between Pavel Stepyrev and Arwen Mercant (5 September 2083)

THEO WOKE TO the sound of a phone alert.

A stir from the big body holding her, one arm reaching over her head to the bedstand to retrieve a phone. “Pasha, what is it?” was the question asked in a gruff morning voice that made her skin tighten and her toes curl into the sheets.

Whatever Pavel said had Yakov going still. “You’re sure?” he asked at last.

Another silence.

Then: “Send me the address. Good work, bro.”

After hanging up, he wrapped his arm around her again and said, “I know you’re awake, pchelka.” A nuzzle against her throat. “Sadly, we can’t cuddle. My brother decided to be an insomniac after he had a great idea, and he’s found us a lead. I’ll tell you about it in the car. Ten minutes to get ready. We’ll grab breakfast from the bakery.”

Somehow it was easier to do this, face him again, when they were on a deadline. But once they’d picked up the food, she couldn’t make herself touch the donut holes she’d previously eaten with gusto. She stuck instead to liquid nutrients. “What did your brother discover?”

Yakov finished off a breakfast roll as he drove. “You know how you looped him into the discussion with your brother regarding the pills we found?”

“Yes.” It had been an easy decision, both because StoneWater was already in deep on this—and because Pavel was Yakov’s twin.

Yes, she had her biases, but she would’ve never trusted Pavel so much without first learning to trust Yakov.

“Your brother messaged back while we were asleep, and Pasha being Pasha, he’d set up an alert for when the data came in. Once he had it, he decided to stay up all night writing a program cross-referencing any prescriptions of those drugs against people living in Moscow.”

Theo frowned. “How could he get access to such sensitive databases?”

Coughing into his hand, Yakov said, “I can neither confirm nor deny that my twin has . . . a way with computronic security. As in, it doesn’t seem to exist for him. Pasha walks through walls.”

His pride in his twin was obvious. But Theo read between the lines. “He found a match.” Her mouth went dry. “But Yasha, a number of those medications are used therapeutically.”

“Yes, but that’s not the match he found.” Then he told her the combination of five drugs prescribed to a single address by two different doctors. “Two different people’s names on the prescriptions, but chances are high that it’s for one person. But no doctor would issue them together.”

“So a partner or a friend faked symptoms to get the other part of the necessary regimen?” Theo inhaled shakily. “This would mean a patient is alive.” That didn’t make sense, not with what Theo knew of the people who’d run the facility. “How is that possible?”

“We’ll find out soon—but that’ll push our investigation of the possible burial sites off by hours, maybe even a day. You still don’t want me to send a team out?”

Theo considered his question, shook her head. “The dead have waited for years. The living must have priority—especially if they could be a witness to what went on at the facility.”

The idea of a survivor . . . Theo wanted to grip on to that hope, hold on tight, but a cold snake of uncertainty uncurled in her gut. “If they’re still on the drugs,” she said slowly, “they can’t be free.”

Yakov’s arm muscles stiffened, the veins on his forearms taut. “If it’s a staff member from that torture chamber holding them prisoner, then their time is up. No more hiding.”

BLOOD dark and hot with the awareness that they might be about to come face-to-face with evil, Yakov brought the vehicle to a stop in front of a three-story apartment building in the suburbs of Moscow.

It wasn’t one of those sleek but soulless structures that existed in certain Psy-heavy areas of the city; this was an older building, constructed of golden brick and with flourishes over the doorways and around the windows. Vines crawled up its sides, and it boasted two neat garden beds, one on each side of the pathway that led to the front entrance.

One bed held flower bushes that had been tidied up for their winter rest, with the odd tough bloomer still going in amongst them, while the other flourished with cold-weather vegetables. Yakov’s father would be delighted to arrive at a property and see such thriving plants. From what Yakov could see from the street, both beds were in pristine condition, free of weeds and dead leaves.

The small but not negligible areas of lawn between the garden beds and the sidewalk provided further evidence of a gardener’s care. There were no bare patches, no knots of weeds, and the area around the path had been clipped neatly.

“It feels too . . . nice?” Theo’s voice lilted up at the end, as if she was searching for the right term to describe the place.

“Too homey,” Yakov said. “No sense of the clinical.”

“Exactly. Look there.”

Following her pointed finger, he spotted the balcony that held the bright colors of a child’s plas toys. “Families live here.” He frowned. “No way this is a covert research facility—not unless the patient has been kept locked inside their room the entire time.”

“It says a lot about my grandfather and the people he trusted that I can see that as a viable possibility.” Theo’s tone was taut, her eyes locked on the building.

But when he would’ve taken her hand, she wrenched it away.

“Theo.” He knew this was about the previous night, about the rage that had screamed out of her in a wave of violence.

Swallowing hard, she wrapped her arms around herself. “Did your brother uncover anything about our target residents?”

Yakov was more patient than many a bear, but he was no panda. Except that today, he had to be; this was no place to have the conversation he and Theo needed to have. “Their trail in Moscow—in Russia overall—only begins almost exactly three years ago.”

“Not long after my grandfather died.” The same grating flatness to her tone.

“And,” he added, “while one has more of a personal history in Italy, another in New Zealand, both those histories—and attendant records—come to an abrupt halt twenty-eight years ago.” He showed her the latest ID photos of their two targets. “It’s as if they vanished for a chunk of time, only to reappear in Russia.”

Theo stared straight ahead now, and he wondered what she was seeing, because it surely wasn’t this regular suburban street lined with trees, a passel of kids laughing in the playground only three lots down. “So,” she said, her voice yet distant, “they could very well have been at the facility.”

She opened the car door without waiting for him to reply, and he followed suit. When they met on the sidewalk, she said, “How should we approach this? There’s no chance they’ll recognize me as a Marshall, of that I’m certain. Almost no one in the world knows who I am.”

“Their loss,” Yakov muttered, wishing he could rip her fucking grandfather limb from limb. “I say we play it by ear.” He crossed the street with Theo by his side, and it took all his years of training to keep from hauling her over and cuddling her until she melted. “Keep it friendly, see what we pick up. Most Moscow residents are happy to chat with bears, so we can use that.”

The front door to the building opened right then, and a man who was maybe in his sixties shuffled out. And though he was barely middle-aged by 2083 standards, his back was slightly bowed, his brown hair thick with strands of gray.

Lines marked the tanned hue of his face, and his facial skin was lax.

He wore tough brown corduroy pants, along with a dark blue pullover that he’d zipped up to the neck. His hands were clad in gardening gloves, and he carried a pair of clippers in his right one.

“We found the gardener,” Yakov murmured, something about the man’s scent nagging at him. “And our first target.”