For the first time, the child who had been laughing out loud drew a breath, as if overwhelmed by the glittering lake. Yuri wanted to see those pretty eyes grown wide, but he didn’t have the leisure.

He drove strength into his thighs, leaving the fading music-box tune behind. Never in his life had he crossed this lake so fast, so desperately. The rough wind scraped his throat; his lungs shrank tight.

If only this weren’t an escape. If only he weren’t running with the boy on his back, but spinning in circles, chasing the ring of lights.

Then a small hand yanked his hair at the nape, like tugging a rein.

“...We can’t go. Not there.”

“......!”

The voice was thinner and more controlled than he’d expected; his heart dropped with a thud. At last, in front of him, the child spoke—low and clear.

“...We have to go back.”

“It’s okay. Just a little longer. We can’t go ba—”

“Shh...!”

The child’s sharp hush dug into his shoulder. Even the waves of breath beating at Yuri’s neck went still.

The boy who’d been wriggling with excitement went eerily calm. Instead, thump, thump, thump—through their pressed-together bodies, the little heart pounded like it would burst.

He couldn’t open his eyes wide against the wind, but far off, a shadow flickered.

“――!”

At the end of the frozen lake, smoke rose in the dark.

Some... one...

A lone silhouette with both hands sunk in his coat pockets. Maxim Solzhenitsyn’s icy gaze was fixed squarely on them. The music box ran out, and darkness settled again over the shore.

The moment Yuri scraped to a halt on his blades, Maxim pulled his hands from his coat and sent a signal.

Dozens of headlamps blinked on, stabbing his retinas with glare. Yuri whipped his head away.

Fuck. Surrounded. The curse rolled low in his mouth.

“It’s o-kay.”

The child murmured dully—then squirmed. Unshaking soles stepped up onto Yuri’s shoulder.

Crouched like a cat, nerves strung taut, he looked ready to spring in any direction. In an instant he erased his presence—even his breathing stopped.

No—. Instinctively, Yuri pinned him down and shot backward across the ice. His heartbeat crashed so hard his ears rang.

He heard nothing—the shouts, the child’s voice—nothing. Only the skates carving the ice, tangled with his wrecked breathing.

Thunk, thunk—! Arrow-like points slammed into the ice, a line of shots disrupting his path. Yuri wove past them by a hair, when suddenly a dead weight sagged against his nape.

“――!”

The smooth rhythm of his body faltered. A cold jolt ran through him; he glanced down—his forearms and the backs of his hands were scored with cuts, as if the child had batted away every tranquilizer dart that had flown at them.

“What the—fuck...!”

A fist-sized scrap like this—who’s protecting who...! His eyes burned; he couldn’t breathe right.

That instant, a rope from a launcher gun shot across the lake and hooked Yuri, yanking his legs out.

He smashed his head on the ice and tumbled, but he kept the child locked tight in his arms.

“Ugh...!”

For the first time, he felt grateful for the damned mask. At least the kid’s head wouldn’t split open.

The carousel lights still spun on, and their circling glow skimmed across Yuri’s face, scraped raw on the ice.

As footsteps closed in from all sides, he clutched what he held even tighter, stubbornly.

No. I won’t let you take him. I won’t go back to Winter Castle.

But contrary to the boy’s wish, his consciousness snapped cleanly there.

***

“Ah, my grandson’s gone missing.”

His eyelids were slabs of iron; they wouldn’t budge. A sense sunk deep in sleep surfaced by mistake, then slid back under the swamp. He felt packed into a narrow space, limbs bound.

“I turned the house upside down as a test and sure enough, word had already reached the Kremlin. How many bugs are crawling in my own home?”

Hearing returned before sight. It was his grandfather’s voice, tinged with amusement, but as if through a thick membrane, it only droned. He missed half the words; his mind stayed dull.

“As you see, any emergency in this mansion flows straight to the Kremlin. Do you understand now? Whatever you try, there’ll be a blockade at every turn.”

“P-Prime Minister...”

A stranger’s voice. Thin, crawling—thick with fear.

Whatever they’d dosed him with, waves kept knocking him headfirst into ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) darkness. Each time, his mind scattered to pieces and struggled back.

Grinding down a curse, Yuri slipped under again. Maxim glanced sidelong toward the room where his bound grandson was confined, then spoke.

“One question. Do you truly think a man who knows Russia’s secrets can leave this country? With Russian assets siphoned off, at that?”

“......!”

“And you dare stir up my wife?”

The man they’d dragged in shook his narrow shoulders.

Maxim knew him well. An ethnic Korean he’d often seen with Ivan since their Moscow University days.

The Sakhalin cult leader’s biological son; a chief researcher whose talents pushed Russia’s intelligence tradecraft a step forward—and a worm who had approached Dariya.

“If it were up to me, I’d never release the Sakhalin children. They’re damned exceptional. We raised them—why would the Russian government let them go?”

“Th-that’s...”

Powerless righteousness is just whining. Contempt swelled in Maxim’s eyes.

“The world never comes to help the weak. The reason’s simple: they’d be putting themselves at risk.”

“......!”

“Fights like that yield nothing. In the end you die like dogs, like Ivan and Yani.”

Maxim pressed his throbbing temples. He had even tried arranging an early exile for Dariya, but the key players were purged in a hundred ways.

Especially Dariya—wife of the Russian Prime Minister, patron of Chechnya—beyond important, dangerous. The problem was that she was the ‘Prime Minister’s’ wife.

If she defected, it would breed unrest and suspicion. Russia would throw everything into blocking her escape and multiply the eyes on her.

Better to lock her in Winter Castle. And so it had been, six years.

Thankfully, she stayed quiet. She’d often go vacant, ignored her husband like he was invisible, and said her tongue went stiff just looking at his face; but at least she did nothing to draw the government’s ire.

Only, in truth, she’d been preparing to leave him.

“Dariya has a history.”

“......”

“If she turns against Russia again, she will die. Do you think only Dariya Solzhenitsyn will die? My grandson—do you think the Kremlin will spare my grandson...!”

She would be executed without a sound. The tendons stood out in Maxim’s jaw. The man who’d lived like a brat, leaning on his family name, only to have his pride broken—by the one woman everyone had shunned back then.

“P-please, I beg you—just pretend you don’t know. Just this once!”

Rigai dropped to his knees and knocked his forehead on the floor. The sight conjured last night, when Dariya had taken back the gun she’d fired at her daughter-in-law and, in tears, begged him to kill her instead.

Maxim clenched his teeth again. If you won’t kill me. Help me. Help me. If you won’t pull the trigger, then help me... Let me go, now...! Her wail rang in his ears like a hallucination.

“Prime Minister, just this once, please—just this once...!”

“......”

“M-my ch-child is here. I don’t even know the name, or the face. I—I’m a cruel father who abandoned his own, and nothing I do can be forgiven, but...”

“Because of scum like you, my wife is in danger...!”

“Madam Dariya’s help—we need it! Please, this once, I beg you. I’ll give my life to repay—”

“You think that plea will reach me?”

Maxim sneered. Dariya had knelt and begged like that too. Better you kill me...! If you truly love me, pull the trigger...! End this pain...! He laughed, cold and scornful.

He had taught his grandson never to be deceived by the word choice, but the one frozen in place was him.

Only a voice aimed at him—so welcome, so splitting, so despairing. Dariya... little Darya...

“No. I cannot condone this.”

Defeat shaded Rigai’s eyes.

“Whether I close my eyes or not doesn’t matter. The moment you spirit the Sakhalin children out of Russia, you all die. The very best will hunt you.”

“......”

“Unless God himself helps you, you will neither escape nor survive.”

Maxim cut him off, voice like ice. Rigai squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head, crushed.

Cowards, every one. Maxim looked at the photo of Ivan and Yani on his desk. Damn them. What are those Sakhalin rats to you? What hurts so much, what gnaws at your eyes, that you’d throw away your lives?

Even the pharaoh of Egypt tossed every child under three into the Nile. Jammed them ruthlessly into the jaws of crocodiles, they say. Maxim closed his bloodshot eyes.

But one child who survived there parted the Red Sea and drowned the pharaoh’s army.

Wheels popped off chariots for no reason, a pillar of cloud blocked their sight. The children’s feet never blistered no matter how far they walked, and by night a fire led their way. The hand of God.

“And yet you came to me, not to God.”

Maxim lit a cigar.

“...Dariya called me a devil-spawn the day I killed our child’s spouse.”

Against Russia, there would be no pillar of cloud.

Then something bigger. Stronger.

Smoke curled up from the cigar.

“Could you live where sunlight never reaches, bearing the stigma of ‘terrorist’ for life?”

“......!”

Rigai, pale as chalk, jerked his head up.

It was Maxim Solzhenitsyn’s final scenario.