The safehouse was a concrete box on the outskirts of Moscow. It was cold enough to see your breath. We’d been there two days, waiting for a signal, a break, anything. Borealis was sitting in the corner, his head in his hands. He’d been quiet since he told us about the white room. The rest of us were quiet too. It gets to you, after a while. The scale of it.
Kenji was at the table, staring at a map. Caiman was cleaning his knife, over and over. The big man from Brazil didn’t talk much, but he had a way of filling a room with his silence.
I was trying to get the stove to work. It was a rusty little thing. The gas smelled bad. “We can’t stay here,” I said, not for the first time.
“We have nowhere to go,” Kenji said, not looking up. “The border is hot. The city is hot. We are hot.”
“We nee
