At four thirty in the morning, the compound has the exhausted stillness of a place finally standing down from crisis.
Marcus meets us at the gate. He studies Nadia for four seconds, then looks at Lucien.
“Clean?” he asks.
“Clean,” Lucien says.
Marcus nods once. To Nadia: You drove them back.
Yes.
Good.
That is his version of welcome.
My mother is in the operations room with tea already prepared and the monitoring screens still active. She looks at Nadia carefully.
“You have Dmitri’s jaw,” she says.
“So I’ve been told,” Nadia answers.
“Tea?”
Please.
And that is how Nadia Sorel enters the compound: at four thirty in the morning, accepted through tea and observation by the woman who built survival systems here for twenty nine years.
I sit beside Lucien at the operations table wh
