“No. And how would you know?” I asked.
“Son, I was the first guy to bring heroin here from the ’Stans. Me and Nic. We took a convoy of poppy over the border all the way to a ship in Karachi.” Yuri exhaled, and his throat buzzed with phlegm. “I knew Sergei before you were a gleam in your daddy’s eye. Man is a Class-A shitbag. A real circus master. He’d fuck you with a razor blade for your jacket if he wanted it.”
I glared at him in sullen, offended silence.
“I know what Sergei sees in you. Same thing he sees in all t-the rest of us poor motherfuckers.” Yuri grinned. “Machine parts.”
The undeniable truth of Yuri’s words made me pause. I rubbed my hands on my thighs, leaning away. My fingers were stinging with salt, rubbed raw within the illusory security of their casings.
“Tiny, fragile, cheap… machine parts.” Yuri’s voice dropped to a brittle hiss. “Itty bitty. And there’s lots of you. Lots of Alexis. Lots of Yuris. You’re already a slave. Just like your mother.”
“You don’t know anything about my mother.” That remark snapped the growing hypnotic fugue short. I reached back and pulled the gun free from my waistband. “Shut up.”
“I know more than you do.” Yuri’s soulless eyes burned under the fluorescent lights of the kitchen. “You think your dad was her only man before she capped herself?”
“SHUT UP!” I barked.
A weird, choked sound bubbled up from Yuri’s throat. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing. “She hated him. Hated you. She hated us. The Organization.”
Shaking, I raised the pistol in a teacup grip. My arms, back, and stomach were taut with rage.
“Yeah. Get angry.” Yuri sat back but didn’t otherwise move. He didn’t give two shits about the gun. “Think about it. You get t-to choose what Sergei did with you? Choose what you were born into? How you turned out?”
My nostrils trembled as I drew a deep, furious breath.
“Had your school paid up, car paid up, all sponsored… so you could do this. Pull a gun on the guy tellin’ you how things work. You’re a slave, kid. You joined the system, and they got you good.”
It was true. It was all true. Sergei had put Vassily and me through The Knox School together, bought our cars. After my mother’s funeral, Sergei had bought my first horse. They weren’t gifts—they were investments. We’d both known it and worked hard out of gratitude and obligation and maybe more than a little fear. Our patron had checked us into college and assigned us our subjects. Finance. Business. He wanted white-collar leaders with a taste for comfortable living and big money. I had done everything he wanted—except one thing.
“So you tell me, Alexi. Where’d it get you? Your loyalty?”
I lifted my chin. My instincts screamed at me to disengage, but pride wouldn’t let me. I’d taken so much shit from the other muzhiki in this place. “I’ve got everything I need.”
“You work like a dog, live in a shitty apartment, and half the Organization thinks you should be put down. There ain’t no respect for spooks in this place, kid. I know the guys at work, what they say about you.” Yuri didn’t blink. “Rumor is you’re a faggot.”
“Say that again.” Every muscle in my body trembled. It couldn’t be true. My finger tightened on the trigger. In the ensuing silence, the small click seemed very, very loud.
“Faggot.” He sounded it out long and slow, like I hadn’t heard the first time. “You don’t believe me? Ask Nic. Everyone thinks you make out like you’re a big tough guy after killing your dad to hide it. But it doesn’t have to be that way,” Yuri replied. “You want your soul to walk beside you like it was real, like Carmine? You can do that. Want to learn how to walk on water? It’s possible. Create gold? Skullfuck people from across the room? You can. I can sense it, Lexi. You woke up. You’re one of the big boys now.”
There was one thing that Yuri didn’t know—and it was something that no one besides Sergei, Vassily and I ever discussed. I had opted out of my Economics degree and studied Psychology at college, without telling my Pakhun. He had shot out my knee for disobeying him, but he let me graduate. That choice had been my one act of defiance against him, and against the system so eloquently laid out by the man in front of me. That training allowed me to keep an objective distance from Yuri’s words. His speech tugged half-known feelings and old bitterness, but the rational, affectless part of my mind, the clinical observer I’d cultivated over so many years, ticked over each part of the advertisement. He had, indeed, spun me a sales pitch. The hook. The problem. The soothing empathy, and the inevitable solution. He was playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma against me… that would be the next stage, if I listened to him. The only reward was paranoia, and eventual self-destruction.
“Fine. Then tell me where Vincent is.” I lowered my face, as if sighting down along a horn.
“Preparing,” Yuri wheezed. “To become a master of the knowledge of good and evil. We have a fruit from the T-Tree, Alexi. The Tree.”
“As in… the Tree of Genesis? In Eden?” The God talk was definitely beginning to get to me. My trigger finger loosened again, but only slightly. “Yggdrasil? What tree? I’m not religious.”
“I ain’t talking about religion. I’m talking about reality.” Yuri’s face flushed. The slight increase in energy made his skin even more sallow, bringing out the purplish veins of his cheeks. His voice became clearer. “Vincent has joined us. He is the Hound, and he will harvest the fruit. It’s here, in New York. You could be there. With us.”
“And who, if I might ask, is ‘us’?” I asked, cracking my neck.
Yuri’s grin spread. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“You know… Yuri, I never owned a television,” I said, moving back slightly towards the door. “Partially because moving pictures make me queasy, and partially because I really, really hate advertisements.”
Yuri’s gaze fixed, and all of the sick pleasure drained from his face. “I’m not lying, Lexi. You’d be the most powerful man in the Organization.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be the most powerful man in the Organization,” I said. It felt like a weak retort.
Yuri dropped his face slightly, lips parted. Whatever was looking at me definitely wasn’t the terse ex-soldier I had known since my youth. Whatever was looking at me was not human. “Bullshit. If it didn’t interest you, you’d have shot me half an hour ago. And besides… your soul’s already injured. You think you can make it on your own with a gimpy Neshamah?”
Injured? My eyes narrowed, but his words caused an unmistakable, involuntary flush of fear. Injured? How could Kutkha be injured? My expression flattened. “I think you’re wasting my time.”
“You talk like you got time. You are… still weak.” Yuri’s mouth drooped open farther, and the thick buzzing sound in his voice began to intensify.
“And… to what ‘Master’ do you answer to, Yuri Juriovich?” My eyes tracked a trickle of pitch as it wound past his teeth, down his chin, slippery and slick. Shit.