Author's Note: Well this chapter is super late, overly long, overly angsty, badly dramatic and I'm probably on some kind of FBI watchlist for all the research into nuclear accidents and the like I've done. I feel like I owe all of you a refund even though fanfic is free. But the only way out is through, so with continued thanks for your support, I present to you the latest chapter in this strange love story set against the backdrop of Russian folklore, post-Soviet paranoia and Cold War nuclear tech.
(Also yes for those wondering, The Soldier And Death is both a real folktale and a real painting. Many paintings, actually, but the one that eerily looks like a detonated nuke went off in it that was painted in 1908 was bought by various nobles, ended up in the hands of Lenin, and then was sold off and lost to history at some point. The less creepy explanation for the background being so post-nuclear looking is that mere months before Russia experienced a meteor impact of sorts called the Tunguska Event. This doesn't explain the mushroom cloud, however, and if you go looking, there's all kinds of conspiracy theories about that. Personally the folktale is more interesting to me than the painting, but both worked well as an eerie real life thing to shove into the fic.)
Linka waited for an opportunity to snag Wheeler and take him aside, but she was a little busy at breakfast frantically reading everything that mentioned her name, thoughts of her father running through her head.
He was a good man, but it had been hard to support a family in their situation, where there was so much distrust on the part of their in-laws and no better support came from former friends. Russia was a complicated and sprawling country he was never fully able to assimilate into, so he had turned to those he thought could help for the money to get Linka into a more open minded school, a better place, at Moscow. It was not a secret the money came from somewhere dubious, yet no one in their family said a word about it to him. He had proved his willingness to take care of his family, although Misha had an argument with him in private about morality that had been one of many contributing factors to his hair going gray far earlier than it should have. Once or twice he'd been gone all night and come back with no explanations, the unspoken knowledge he was out repaying his debts through actions keeping his wife and mother in-law up at night. Then one night he'd left and they'd gotten a call from the police to come identify the body, and that was that.
She loved her father. He had been caught in a position that had forced him into crime, but the papers weren't going to see it that way. Linka remembered being young and hearing people murmur about him as if he wasn't fluent in Russian. That's the Serb, isn't it? Babushkas would whisper back and forth to each other. Look at how pale he is! Like snow. Sickly thing, they shouldn't live in cities like this. Those were the kinder words. Fathers with their families had harsher ones. Hold the children close – you know how Serbs get when they're angry. I don't see a wife. He probably beats her. Is that little one his? I don't think she is. Call the police? Maybe. We'll see if she speaks Serbian first… She learned when she was young how her father could square his shoulders against the confrontational voices, turn his eyes away from the whispers he could clearly hear, and she recalled when a particular insult pierced the veneer of calm indifference he tried so hard to put up. She remembered him talking to her grandmother once, smelling of vodka but sober, fragments of broken glass in his hair from when a fellow bar patron had broken a bottle over his head. He'd been out with a few Jewish friends commemorating the birth of a friend's child, and they'd gotten a little too loud. The 'real' Russians had thrown them out, but not without a fight.
The papers gave her usual bio with no mention of her parents beyond that they were dead. She breathed a shaky sigh of relief. Then she leaned her head against Wheeler's shoulder and wished she'd had a restful night's sleep. All she'd managed was a few hours of a fitful nightmare about Zlatan, as if she needed that right now with everything else going on. It had been a tragic mistake on her father's part to assume that she would be safer with a Serbian man, though she understood his logic. The only Russian who had ever shown him real kindness was the one he had married; the rest were uncertainties he hadn't known how to protect her from. He simply hadn't known that Zlatan was so given to bursts of anger and the first time it happened Linka had honestly thought it was the fault of the vodka Zlatan had drunk. The second time, he had been sober but horrified and did everything to try to make it up to her. The third time had made her bolt for Anatoly, who had convinced her to drop Zlatan while she still could, before things got worse. Anatoly had suggested she date Shostakov, given the Ukrainian was both interested in her and remarkably sensitive. It would have made sense to do so given he was Jewish. That was when Linka had kissed Anatoly for the first time, surprising him with the suddenness of it before his arms had wrapped protectively around her. She didn't want safe and secure, she wanted respected and loved.
Linka never did go with the smart thing to do when it came to love. Neither had her father. Given that Mikhail was dating a Catholic girl with Chukchi heritage, it was apparently genetic. Their poor grandmother was exhausted with them by the time Linka started dating Wheeler; all she'd said was to make sure he made her happy. Time had taught her grandmother the bitter lesson that she could embrace the decisions her daughter and then her grandchildren made or she could refute them and lose out on precious, irreplaceable moments with them.
Anatoly was bitterly well versed in the fact his father would not put aside his prejudices like Linka's family would, but that was another train of thought for another day, preferably one where they weren't in the middle of a crisis.
"Zarm can't be involved," Ma-Ti decided, the conversation about who it could be having devolved into 'who can we cross off the list'. "I would have sensed him even at a distance. It was hard to sense the man on stage, but it's hard not to get sensory overload from Zarm."
Gi gave him a look, curious. "That man was hard to sense? Did you try to use your Ring?"
He fidgeted, uncomfortable. "I wanted to see what his intentions were. All I could get from him was that he was present and thinking, but everything else was foggy. It is hard to describe. I felt like he was miles away when he was right there. After a few seconds trying to read him I became weak, tired. I could not continue."
"Don't try that again," Wheeler advised, worried. "We need you, little buddy. And if these guys are going after Rings, then all of us are targets now." He paused. "Is there a way to go up against your Ring on purpose?"
"No." Ma-Ti shook his head, pushing away his plate as if the memory had made him lose his appetite. "Most of the eco-villains are only a little harder to read than a normal person, and I know they are trying. I do not think that man even knew I was looking at him. He was not trying to keep me out. It is just in his nature. Normally I only have such problems around severe pollution."
Linka drummed her fingers on the table, thoughtfully. "So he is… polluted?" That hardly made any sense even under the circumstances. "Perhaps that is why Gaia cannot track down Gi's Ring, but what could cause such a thing?"
"Perhaps the very thing we came here to discuss in the first place," Kwame stated solemnly, holding up a paper that had pictures of the site of the Kyshtym disaster in its' black and white, old-timey state, before and after the accident. "Radiation weakens Captain Planet. Perhaps it can weaken us when we use our powers too close to it."
The Russian reached out to take the paper from him. "Well, he is too young to be a survivor of Kyshtym, but he could be a Pripyat – pardon me, Chernobyl, survivor. Evacuations were not as swift for outlying areas, after all. His accent was not Ukrainian like most from those area would have, but he seemed to be making a threat at those who caused the disasters, if people truly did cause them and they were not accidents." She studied the pictures, remembering the picture in Zinoviy Yurasov's journal. "Hold on, I have something I want the rest of you to see." Taking the journal out of her bag, where she had kept it safe from Nazar's greedy hands, she passed the photograph around. "This is Anatoly's grandfather. He was a nuclear physicist with experience in nuclear engineering who died at Kyshtym."
Unnerved silence descended upon the room. Beside Zinoviy in the picture was the man from last night, with somewhat darker eyes, dressed like a fellow scientist. They were huddled over some schematic blocked by their notebooks and scratch papers full of calculations, situated in a room full of other such tables and people. Zinoviy was listening intently while his colleague had a smirk on his face and a glint in his eyes, clearly lecturing him on something. But while the man in the picture had more of a human look without the orange tint to his eyes, the black and white photograph did not show a different man, not entirely or fully, just a very slightly younger one.
Wheeler looked over at the journal in her hands and tried to use his admittedly awful skills at Russian to parse the name together. "And that's his journal? What's it say?"
"Mostly, not much," she admitted, shrugging and opening it. "I read some of it last night. Zinoviy was very naïve about the implications of nuclear power. He thought it would help bring Russia out of the poverty so many parts of the country struggled with and allow for a better overall quality of life. He was very OCD, as an American might put it. At least, he was about making sure everything was safe and there were failsafes for each failsafe, to keep his era's nuclear expansion program going and to protect the people he worked with. He made checklists of checklists and worked hard for a dream of a better future. In his mind Russia would be saved, poverty wiped out and world peace achieved through nuclear power and its' myriad uses."
"And his son is that much of a jerk?" the American asked, raising his eyebrows. "What, does altruism skip generations?" She flipped a page, and his brow furrowed. "Is that a design for something?"
"There are many designs in here. Miniature nuclear generators, nuclear batteries, nuclear heating systems that utilize the waste and runoff for energy gathering – he loses me every time he writes about such things, and Russian is my mother tongue," Linka confessed, passing the journal to an interested Gi, who was by far the most technical minded among them. "He was a genius who was looking to better the world, so, not unreasonably, the government seemed to fear for his life. There were many guards on the site he worked at, every phone call in the area was monitored, and he could not inform anyone he was leaving when he visited home. Very typical Cold War era secrecy."
Gi thumbed through the designs, studying each with an eye for detail. "A lot of this looks like it would work. Why aren't these all in use? I don't agree with using nuclear power for so many things, but these are incredible scientific breakthroughs. We should know about these already."
"I don't know. Nazar has had the journal in his possession for a long time, which is just more confusing. Someone who loves money that much should have tried to capitalize on all this much earlier," the blonde noted thoughtfully, though she did give a moment's thought to how he'd said he had more important matters to attend to last night.
No doubt if the nuclear initiative went through he would bring his father's journal to the attention of the government and make some profit off the labor of others. Until then, though, he had kept it close like any son would the only possession of his father's he had from that time. Much of the journal was about Zinoviy missing his children and his wife, about how he loved each of them, about little things he had managed to get and send home to them despite the watchful eyes of the guards. Nazar was heartless now, of course, but he hadn't always been. He drank away his guilt because he did in fact feel some for the things he'd done to stay rich and powerful. At some point, she realized, even villains were little boys with fathers who loved them dearly. Even he had once been a four year old who had to be told there was an accident and his father was never coming home, with the added baggage of being unable to talk about it to anyone because it was a classified assignment. She picked at her food, mind teetering on the edge of an important breakthrough. Something was wrong here. The whole assignment was classified from start to finish and Ozyorsk, the city where the Kyshtym disaster had taken place, was a closed city so secret it hadn't been on the maps at the time of the accident.
How had Nazar gotten his father's journal?
When Gaia appeared in Anatoly's office, he jumped, but given he hadn't yelped like the first time she appeared, he was going to count this as a victory.
She'd come to him once before to convince him to allow the Planeteers to have influence on the nuclear initiate proposal. If he'd realized she meant she would be sending his ex-girlfriend directly to him, he wouldn't have agreed. Gaia had made it sound as if they'd just be giving their input from afar. He wasn't angry with her; she was right, they really did need to be here. He was more annoyed with himself that he hadn't managed to see it coming despite having come from a long line of manipulative, lying, play-on-words, silver-tongued people. Anatoly's only comfort was that, given that she was as ancient as the world itself, she'd had more experience talking people into things than he possibly could. At least she used her powers for good. Straightening his tie, he sat up, folded his hand on his desk and tried to look less tired than he felt.
"I am so, so sorry for last night," he said immediately, sincerely disappointed in himself. "I take full responsibility for the events at the Bolshoi."
She made a 'mm' sound Anatoly remembered his mother making when he was a child. It informed him he'd answered wrongly but for the right reasons. "I know you do. You always have been too willing to be everyone's scapegoat. Maybe if you weren't, I would've made you a Planeteer."
The young official tried to envision the responsibility. "That would have been a horrible mistake, honestly. Too politically loaded. So, what can I do for you?"
"You know," Gaia answered at her own pace, the same as the first time she'd astral projected into his office, turning to the painting behind her and tapping at the air near the frame. "They got this story all wrong in the end."
"History's written by the victors," he noted, wondering where she was going with this and what bearing it had on the situation at hand. "The state eventually got the oldest version removed from circulation. Too many religious overtones in the now non-religious USSR, I suppose. I'm not sure what shape the story will take now, in this new Russia. It's too early to even guess."
She studied the painting of the oldest version, the one of The Soldier And Death where Death backed away from the Soldier, scared of this mortal who had the guile to outwit her, to capture her, to command her. She would not draw near enough to him to take his life and risk falling for another plan. It was a grim sight, the air and background thick with the smoke, ashes and battles he had incited by inflicting an ageless, eternal life upon the population without thinking through capturing Death, for without her no one could age. Bodies on the ground blurred together to form the shadows of the lower part of the painting, where the Devil's arm was seen directing demons to shut the door to Hell tight. Up above, the clouds blurred together in a similar fashion to form a glimpse into a door to Heaven guarded by two angels wielding swords. And yet the only person the soldier had eyes for was Death, who he gazed at with horror and regret that was a bit late, all things considered.
"It's sad," she said at length, as Anatoly finished his sixth cup of coffee for the morning, "I really think Russia took the wrong moral from that whole incident."
He would've asked if it seriously had happened, but then he remembered the spirit of the Earth was in his office and checked himself. For all he knew now, any number of myths could be true, and it would save a headache to just take her word for it. "My praded is in love with it. The story of man's hubris on a grand scale – the kind of epic failure to check our arrogance that he feels defines Russian history. He likes the religious overtones he sees there. I've always been told it's about the inherent flaws within human egos." But she was shaking her head, so Anatoly asked, "What moral were we supposed to have gotten from it, then?"
"It's not about being arrogant or tampering in God's domain. That's never how I saw it, anyway," her voice dropped a little, features growing mournful. "He caught Death because he wanted to save the Czar. He wanted to save Russia and keep people from having to experience the loss of their loved ones so constantly. He thought it would stop wars from even happening if people knew there was no dying. They always leave that out, in both versions."
"Good intentions have consequences," he muttered darkly, not liking where this was going. "You're saying the people supporting the nuclear initiative are good people. You don't want me to do anything to send the metaphorical or very real creatures of the night that is the government police after them."
"I'm saying the people who attacked the Bolshoi are probably good people who think their cause is good as well." When he looked at her as if she'd lapsed into a language not spoken by humans, she explained. "The Rings can't be used by someone truly evil. There has to be a part of them that wants to help someone, that loves someone, that is even just the smallest bit selfless. I felt Gi's Ring this morning. These people aren't evil. There's a chance you could talk to them and reason this out, Anatoly, with the Planeteers backing you, with their experience. But…" she tapped at the air by the painting again, by the pile of bodies.
"Understood," he replied grimly, and when he blinked, she was gone.
Few people had access to the Yurasov family's personal phone, so when Linka was handed the phone by Evgeniy, she put it to her ear, ignored the pang of panic that coursed through her, and gave short, prompt answers. "Yes. Yes, it's me. No, he's- calm down, calm down. I can come get you. Where are you? Don't leave the block. I'll bring back up. I know. It's okay. Stay safe."
Wheeler voiced what the rest of them were thinking. "Who was that?"
"Shostakov," she stated simply, getting up, grabbing his hand and hauling him to his feet. "An old friend, who has information about alleged 'accidents' at a nuclear power plant. His apartment has been broken into; apparently some people are suddenly very interested in him after last night. We need to get him into the ZATO quickly. He could help us figure out a number of things."
Kwame and Gi exchanged looks, still pouring over the designs in Zinoviy Yurasov's journal. It was Gi who spoke up first. "Do you think all of us going into Moscow right now is a good idea?"
"Nyet. That's why I'm only taking Wheeler." She turned to him and added, "Come. I need you with me." She looped an arm through his and made her way towards the entryway of the mammoth house, leaving him blinking at the rapid turn of events. The blonde threw her dark blue coat on and wrapped a scarf around her neck in a uniquely Russian way that Wheeler tried, and failed, to imitate. She clucked her tongue, turning and adjusting it for him, smoothing his coat down as she did so. Alone in the entryway, the world suddenly seemed very small and intimate, and she let her hands linger for a moment.
"Babe…" Wheeler started, reaching up and grabbing her hands where they still rested on his chest. "I – you know what Anatoly said about Americans being mixed? My ma had Jewish heritage. Her maiden name was Cohen and everything."
She smiled sadly. "It isn't the same thing as being Jewish here." But she knew what he was trying to say, and slipped her hand into his. When she looked into his eyes, they were warm and sincere, seeking only to comfort. Her Yankee, her sweet Yankee with his vulnerable heart under that fiery and tough façade. Linka leaned up and kissed him on the cheek for his efforts. "Come, we need to hurry."
Being driven around would draw too much attention, so she successfully negotiated with Evgeniy for use of one of the family's cars. Given that Russians drove on the opposite side of the road than Americans, she took the driver's seat before Wheeler could protest, grateful to have to watch the road and not his face. Any second now, he was going to tell her all this was far too much to ask one man to deal with. She felt acutely the fear of the end of their relationship, already missed conversations late at night watching TV and bickering about the merits of American sitcoms, knew she would have difficulty cooking without him there to mispronounce and adore Russian food, would be unable to go anywhere with a beach without recalling the day they'd met. Linka had brought him into this maelstrom where the media, the people and the very culture around them were circling like vultures, leaving him unguarded and unprepared for multiple slaps to the face of information she'd been too afraid to tell him beforehand. She had lost one man to a prejudiced, vicious family. She hadn't been willing to risk Wheeler to the same thing.
He'd asked her if she was Russian when they first met and her blood had run cold, fear of her Serbian accent somehow being evident to even the ears of untrained Americans, and so she'd said Soviet because that was true without being a real answer. Would they be in this situation if she'd said Serbian? She doubted he would have known where the region was or what it was. Maybe he could have understood, as a lower-class kid from Brooklyn, what it was like to be assumed to be violent and uneducated everywhere she went, what feelings came from people asking if she had the money to pay for whatever she was holding in line at a store. They could have started on more equal footing, more honest from the start, spent less time dancing around their mutual attraction.
Linka drove in tense silence for several minutes before she blurted out, "I have ruined everything, haven't I? I have lied to you."
"Babe, things aren't – I mean yeah, you totally did lie, but it's okay. I think." He watched as she bit at her lower lip. Her pale skin caught the cool light of the cloudy morning sky and the bags under her eyes seemed bigger than they should have been. She's been crying, he realized suddenly, feeling his stomach twist at the thought. "You're not the only one with exes. I ever tell you about the first girl I dated? 'Cause that was a doozy. I don't think you'd be dating me if you knew how badly that one went."
"…why?" she took the bait, reluctant as she was to hear about his exes at all, eyes still glued to the road. Moscow traffic wasn't terrible at this hour, but it was still thick enough to slow their progress.
"Her name was Ace, or, that's what we all called her. In a neighborhood with a bunch of kids, everybody gets nicknames. She had a little brother that these guys at our school picked on for being in a wheelchair. Ace never put up with that, so she got into a lot of fights. All the guys she hung with said if she hadn't had long hair we'd forget she was a girl, she was so good at it. That, and basketball, skateboarding, climbing buildings – man, we used to explore all these abandoned places when we were that age. I'm amazed we never got arrested. So one day before school, she's in a fight with six guys and I rush over to help." He looked over at Linka, whose lips quirked at the mental image. "We managed to get 'em roughed up before the teachers came. We totally told our friends we won and that there were eight of them. You know how New York is. Anyway, we're outside the principal's office, scuffed up, waiting to get our turn, and she turns to me and says we should date. That's what passed for romance in my world back then.
And we're in sixth grade so what does dating even mean, you know? It means I put my arm around her shoulders, we went to the movies together, we smuggled a dog into my apartment together. That kinda thing. Nothing to write novels about. Just us trying to make happiness out of all that loneliness. I cared about her, though. She was the first person I ever talked to about my dad's drinking, about my mom, about a lot of stuff. Ace was this strong person I could freak out in front of and it was always okay. She made it okay. But I was so busy having my own freak outs and dealing with my own stuff I never asked her about her life. Or if I did, it was the wrong questions. I never asked her why she was always out so late or why she was never home, and when her parents divorced I didn't get why she was angry about staying with her dad. He lived near me, and wasn't I enough? I thought I knew everything that was going on."
"Jason," Linka interrupted, or tried to, twisting her head to take in his profile against the greys of the buildings they passed by. He cut her off.
"Turned out Ace's dad hit her. Bruises the size of fists, scars from this time he'd thrown her through a glass table… and when she came over this one night, these cuts that seemed too big to be on someone so tough. He got drunk, went crazy on her, so she came to my place. Just for the night, she said, and then we'd call the cops in the morning when he was sleeping it off. I woke up and she'd taken off, filled up my old backpack with some food and stuff and left with a note saying she was going to miss me." He swallowed, taking in a deep breath. "They never found her. I don't even know if she's alive. And I'm probably never gonna know for sure, 'cause when everything came crashin' down I wasn't there for her. Not like I needed to be, anyway."
She exhaled, pursing her lips. Linka tried very hard not to think of what might have happened to a lone twelve year old in New York. They had worked with the homeless before in more than one country. The stories of those who managed to survive tended to be horrific at best. "It wasn't your fault. She made her own decision, Wheeler."
He shook his head. "It was. I should have talked to her, should've known what was going on, should have been somebody she could talk to about all that. After that I was all come-ons and no payoff. I didn't want to fail somebody else. I'm trash at this. And I know that. So whatever made you feel like you couldn't talk to me, I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry."
"But that's not it at all!" Linka half-shouted, unable to take the sight of Wheeler blinking back tears. "Don't you see, I never deserved you! Or Anatoly! Or anyone! All my life I've been so caught up in words like 'serbskiy' and 'yevrey' and 'toskarebenok' and I tried so, so hard to be better than any name they could throw at me, to not get into fights, to take everything in stride. I wanted to be perfect so no one could hurt me – but I couldn't be. I couldn't be any of the things I was trying to be without disappointing someone in my family and when Anatoly proposed to me, I thought it was my ticket to finally being really Russian enough for the world. I was never Serbian enough or Jewish enough but to him I was enough no matter what…"
"That's because you are good enough, Linka," he quietly agreed, watching her shake her head with a growing sense of sadness. "Is that why you bailed on him? Because his family didn't get that?"
The blonde chuckled, a mirthless sound, still navigating the Moscow traffic with remarkable dexterity. "Nyet. I 'bailed' on him because the Yurasovs were right. I am not good enough for anyone. I am selfish, and a hothead, and I freeze people out, and I always leave when things get too intense. I cannot deal with things, so I leave them behind. The people that love me, Jason, I leave. Sometimes I move north or east or to islands, but I always… I always leave. You deserve something permanent, my ogonka. Someone permanent."
He placed his hand on her knee. She stiffened at the touch as if startled. "You haven't left me, babe, not once. You've never abandoned the Planeteers either, for anything. You've always been there when I needed you. And I don't want anyone else, so whatever I deserve, whatever you deserve, you're stuck with me, okay? No matter what."
She was silent for a long moment before curling her hand over his, driving one-handed. "Okay."
Petruso Shostakov opened the side door of Linka's car – technically Nazar's but on loan, probably – and threw himself into the backseat, sopping wet and borderline hysterical. Slamming the door shut, he yelled to Linka, "Go! Fast, out of here, now, they have a Ring – go!"
The car hadn't even come to a halt before he'd gotten into it, so making a U-turn and going back was easy enough. Chest heaving, he coughed up water and wiped fruitlessly at his bleeding nose before digging through his pockets for his spare glasses. Only then did he blink and realize the redhead in the car wasn't Anatoly. As far as introductions to superheroes went, this was likely not the single worst one, but it wasn't good, either. His suit was soaked, his chestnut brown hair a mess from having taken the impact of multiple blasts of water, and his Ukrainian had likely insured that even if Wheeler had known a word of Russian, he hadn't gotten the gist of that. Wondering if his shoulder was broken or just fractured, he pushed himself into a proper sitting position and winced.
"English, Petrushka, use English," Linka coaxed him gently, eyes darting to glance behind them in the rearview mirror. "What happened?"
"Someone with a Planeteer Ring just spent some time trying to drown the answers to the Pripyat meltdown's mysteries out of me. They asked about the demon core. I tried to tell them, that was my mother's work, that's still classified, I have no files. I'm just a student, I tell them, but they wouldn't hear it, wouldn't let up… They broke open the pipes. Everything got flooded. The one with the orange eyes picks something up from my mother's vault, one of the rocks, and gets sick. The blonde woman with him, the American, she forgets I exist for a few moments. Kneels over him, holds him close. I run. Here we are." Out of breath and energy, he eased himself back into the seat, holding his bad shoulder with his opposite hand. It was bleeding where a piece of metal from a burst pipe had gone through him like a gunshot. "I need a hospital. Now. Please."
While his old schoolmate gripped the steering wheel hard enough her knuckles went white, his own vision was dotted with black. The American redhead turned to look at him, concerned. "Stay with us. Talk to me, don't pass out." Basic First Aid there, but Petruso nodded weakly, appreciative of the attempt. "You said the woman who attacked you was blonde?"
"Dah. She was the one who could work the Ring. The other made me feel – I don't know. Sick and cold and hot and I saw things where there were none. Something is wrong with him, very wrong. But they work well together." He refrained from shrugging, in too much pain to do so. "I didn't get their names, I'm sorry, I…" His vision blurred, and Wheeler reached back to put a hand on his shoulder.
"It's okay. It's alright, buddy. You did great. Just hang in there. We've got you. They're not gonna mess with you now. Just stay awake, talk about anything. The weather, Linka, the break in, anything. We're gonna get you through this," he said with enough conviction to get an exasperated and fond smile out of Petruso.
He blinked behind his glasses. "My mother. My mother is in Sverdlovsk right now, but she's the one who knows what they want to know. She's worked in nuclear physics for thirty years. Classified projects, ones people think are urban legends. Get to her… keep her safe. I… I told them she's in St. Petersburg. Officially, she is."
Linka's voice was sharp with worry and alarm. "What is she doing out in Siberia, Petruso? The Siberian Wildlife Protection Act-"
"You will have to ask her," he muttered, shutting his eyes. "I don't know what she's doing out there. She wouldn't tell me. She was scared to. But it's important. It produced that thing in the vault that repelled the orange-eyed man. I was to keep it and several coded files just in case… in case she didn't return."
"The files?" the blonde asked, her militant tone rousing him from the tugging hands of sleep.
He sighed, blinking the world into blurry off-focus. "Nazar bought them out from my mother a while back. Bought all she would let him. Wasn't much, just that and what Yurasov relics we had… and a painting, some painting with Death in the Ural Mountains…"
A wave of tiredness hit him and his hand slipped from trying to hold his shoulder in place. For just a moment, he let the rhythm of the rolling car fill his ears.
Petruso was out cold before they'd made the next stop light.