“Out,” he said.

“What about my luggage?” said Newcomen. He’d seen enough on the journey from Heathrow to convince him it was only a matter of minutes before someone tried to mug him.

“What about it? You thought you’d be here for less than a few hours: what could you possibly have brought that justifies that size of crate?”

“Well,” said Newcomen, “there’s—”

“Yeah, I know about the Secret Squirrel stuff already. If you lose it, so much the better.” Petrovitch climbed out of the car and used his backside to push the door closed. He started towards the gates, raising one hand and beckoning the agent.

Newcomen caught him up, puffing slightly.

“Out of shape, Newcomen? What would Coach say?”

“Do you have to bring that up?”

“Don’t have to. But it used to be important to you. Sorry if it’s a sore point.”

Newcomen unconsciously rubbed his arm, midway between right elbow and shoulder. He looked around him for the first time.

“We’re in a graveyard.”

“Yeah, that’d account for all the, you know, gravestones.”

Some of them were old, pre-Armageddon, the ones closest to the entrance. Most were not: some dated back to the foundation of the Metrozone, and then as they walked along the cracked tarmac paths deeper into the cemetery, the death dates got more and more recent.

Even the designs of the memorials marked an evolution of sorts: varied and effusive early on, to more uniform, utilitarian later, until almost all variation had been weeded out and a simple narrow rectangular slab became the norm. Name, date of birth, and the day they died. That was all.

They were passing by row upon row marked with May 2024. Petrovitch’s eyelid twitched as he remembered.

Those ended, and after a few more serried ranks, a vast field of November dates, same year.

It took a while to get to walk by those.

Finally, Petrovitch headed down one of the rows, off the path, disturbing the ragged grasses that were growing unchecked between the upright stones. It looked more or less a random choice, but he knew exactly where he was going.

Six graves down, there was a black marker engraved in faded kanji, with the dates in Roman numerals. He stopped in front of it and worried at his lip for a few moments.

Newcomen watched from a respectful distance, hands clasped behind his back.

“You’re probably thinking this is the first normal thing you’ve seen me do,” said Petrovitch.

“I, uh, I wouldn’t want to intrude, sir.”

“Stop calling me sir. I’m not sure you mean it, and I really, really don’t like it.” He knelt down in the wet grass and pulled a long-bladed knife from inside his coat. He gripped a handful of green leaf blades and hacked at their base. “We’re going to have to come to some sort of working relationship, Newcomen. Like I said, I don’t know why they sent you, out of all the people they had available. Personally, I don’t think you were chosen for any other quality but your ignorance. The less you know, the less information I can tear from your still-living flesh. That makes you a victim in someone else’s game, but unfortunately for you, it won’t stop me from ruthlessly exploiting any and every advantage that’s presented to me. I’m going to apologise in advance for that.”

He worked his way across the grave plot, holding and cutting the grass.

“You said he was a friend,” said Newcomen, nodding at the stone.

“She. She was a friend. Body cremated, ashes interred right here, half a world away from where she was born. She was twenty-two when she died.” Petrovitch straightened up, his left hand stained green. “I brought you out here deliberately, to see this almost-anonymous grave, because I wanted to show you what your countrymen are capable of. Sure, we can drive by the site of the Metrozone’s very own Ground Zero, but I can make my point better out here.”

He dug into his pockets again and came up with a steel lighter and a small flat candle in a foil container. He trod down the grass next to the headstone, and placed the candle in his bootprint.

“This is where Sonja Oshicora ended up. I don’t know if they’ve told you about her, or if you’ve bothered to look for yourself. It was a decade and another life ago for me. You were still in high school in Columbus and probably too busy being a jock to pay any attention to what was happening here. Maybe you remember the nuke and Mackensie resigning, but not necessarily the reasons why.”

Petrovitch bent down and flicked the lid of the lighter. He stroked the wheel with his thumb and fire flickered, yellow and trembling. Eventually, the candle wick caught, turned black, and glowed with its own fragile flame. He crouched down and watched the wax melt and turn clear.

“She was my friend. Accidentally so, but my friend all the same. She ran the Freezone – the first one, here – and this is where she died.”

“That’s, uh,” said Newcomen.

“Shut up and let me talk. I’m trying to warn you. You’ll probably think I’m the Antichrist by the time I’ve finished with you, the very embodiment of evil. The problem you have is that the worst acts against you have already happened, and I’ve had nothing to do with them whatsoever.” Petrovitch nodded at the gravestone. “I was at the sharp end of a CIA assassination squad, and Sonja tried to save me from them. But the way she chose to do that nearly broke me. She didn’t tell me about it, and she didn’t give me a choice. Her plan fell apart, and she ended up putting a bullet through her own brain. While I was watching.” He’d erased the recording long ago. Yet he could still see it with aching clarity. His name called, his head turned, the gunmetal-grey barrel slipped inside her pretty pink mouth.

Newcomen shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The bottoms of his suit trousers were wet, and were starting to cling. “I don’t understand what you’re saying, sir, Dr Petrovitch.”

“Of course you don’t. I don’t expect you to. You’re not going to believe that your own government, the people you work for, the people you look up to and think protect you, have not just determined that you’re completely expendable, but have deliberately and explicitly marked you for termination. You’re a dead man walking.” Petrovitch shrugged. “Sorry for that, but it wasn’t my choice.”

The candle flickered in the slight breeze, then burned brighter for a moment.

“They told me to expect this. The Assistant Director briefed me. Said you’d try and get inside my head. It won’t work.”

“I don’t give a shit what Buchannan said,” said Petrovitch mildly. “But you’ll remember this conversation. When the time comes and you realise I was right all along, you might suddenly discover that I’m your only hope for staying alive.”

“I’ll wait for you by the car,” said Newcomen. He walked away, a slowly dwindling figure in amongst the gravestones.

Petrovitch scratched at his chin. “I know we’re pretty much the same age, but yobany stos.”

[His upringing was not as cosmopolitan as yours.]

“Yeah.” He looked at Newcomen’s retreating back. “Chyort, I feel yebani ancient compared with vat-boy over there.”

[Not being irradiated in his mother’s womb might account for some of the differences between you. Not being in a womb at all for others. He was raised on an automatic farm, you in post-Armageddon St Petersburg. He was an athlete, whilst you had your failing heart. Apart from his one accident, I doubt he has ever felt pain.]

“What I meant…” Petrovitch rested his hand on top of Sonja’s grave marker. It was cold to the touch, the stone numbing his fingers. “I feel like I’m being dragged in again. Being forced to trace the old patterns that I thought I’d left behind. It didn’t end well the last time.”

[We are ten years wiser, Sasha. We have a whole decade of experience to consult. We are now many.]

“It’s not going to stop us making an utter pizdets of it, though.” He moved to trace the calligraphic strokes of Sonja’s name.