21
September 7, 1:03 P.M.
Southern Ural Mountains
Pyotr led the man by his shirtsleeve. They ran through chaos. Soldiers screamed, glass shattered, rifles blasted, flames writhed, and smoke choked. But it wasn’t chaos to Pyotr.
He tugged Monk into a sheltering dark doorway as a soldier rounded a corner ahead, searched, then moved on. Pyotr hurried the man down a hall, up some stairs, out a window, and over a pile of rubble to the next building.
“Pyotr, where are we going?”
He didn’t answer, couldn’t answer.
Reaching another hall, Pyotr stopped. In his head, he stretched outward along a thousand possibilities. Hearts glowed like small pyres, flickering with fear, anger, panic, cowardice, malice. He understood how each would move even before they did. It was his talent, only so much more now.
For he had a secret.
Over the past years, as he woke screaming from his nightmare, waking other children with visions of bodies on fire, there was a reason his other classmates performed so poorly on their tests afterward. The teachers believed it was just because Pyotr had scared them, but they were wrong. Pyotr’s talent was to read hearts. They called it empathy. But he had a secret, something he only talked to Marta about.
Something he knew from his dreams.
He could do more than read hearts—he could also steal them. It wasn’t fear that made the other children perform poorly; they had something drawn from them. For just a few minutes after waking, Pyotr could do anything. He could multiply big numbers, like Konstantin; he could tell a person was lying by listening to how they talked, like Elena; he could see to hidden places, like his sister; and so much more. It filled him until he burned.
He pictured the stars falling into him, screaming, feeding the emptiness inside him. In his dreams, he had always woken before he consumed them fully. Not today. Pyotr walked through a dream from which he could never wake. He knew he had crossed a line, but he also knew he had no choice. He was always meant to burn.
Pyotr stared out at the chaos with a fiery gaze that was not his alone. Through a hundred eyes, he teased a pattern out of the chaos. Though he could not see the future—or at least no more than a few seconds—his ears took in every noise, his eyes interpreted every flicker of flame or shift of shadow, his heart read deep into what drove a man to choose to step here or there, to take that corner or not, to shoot or run. And with a shadow of his sister’s ability, his senses extended a few yards beyond even that.
And out of that chaos, a path took form.
One he could follow.
Pyotr crossed out into the hallway, guiding Monk behind him.
He pointed to the left—and Monk shot the soldier who stepped into view a second later. The man was learning to trust Pyotr’s instinct. To move with him, to fire upon command, growing into an extension of Pyotr.
Together, they crossed through the pattern.
Moving through pure instinct.
And that’s what Pyotr was now: instinct fired by a hundred talents.
He understood fully. Instinct was merely the brain’s unconscious interpretation of millions of subtle changes in the environment, both at the moment and leading up to it. The brain took all that chaotic information, saw a pattern, and the body reacted to it. It seemed magical, but it was only biological.
Pyotr did the same now—only a hundredfold more powerfully.
He extended his senses, reading hearts, motivations, trajectories, distances, noises, voices, directions, cadences, smoke, heat…and on and on. The million details filled him and sifted through the hundred minds he shared. From out of that chaos, patterns opened, and he knew each step to take.
“Where are we going?” Monk asked again.
Where you need to be, Pyotr answered silently.
Pyotr led him down the stairs again, then pulled the man to the floor as a shot fired overhead. From there, they crawled under a row of steel desks as soldiers searched, then down another set of stairs to a long basement hall with branches into a maze of rooms and other passageways.
Pyotr hurried.
While he saw a pattern, he could not truly see the future. He danced faster along the threads of pure instinct, sensing the pressure of ages upon him. They were running out of time.
The man grew more distressed, perhaps sensing the same.
“Where are you—?”
A new voice intruded, coming from the end of the hall, pitched full of surprise. Pyotr read the pound in the newcomer’s heart. A name was called out with a ring of disbelief.
“Monk!”
Gray almost shot him. Rounding into the hall, Gray had found two figures running straight at him, one with a weapon pointed ahead. If not for the presence of the boy, Gray would have shot on instinct.
Instead, he momentarily froze between recognition and shock.
His friend did not. The pistol fired. Gray felt a kick to his shoulder, throwing him back. Pain lanced outward.
Kowalski caught him as he fell and barked as loud as the crack of the pistol shot. “Monk, you ass! What are you doing?”
Monk halted, tugged to a stop by the boy. His face collapsed into a wary mask of confusion. “Who…who are you people?”
Kowalski still fumed. “Who are we? We’re your goddamn friends!”
Gray gained his feet, his left shoulder blazing with fire. “Monk, don’t you recognize us?”
Monk fingered a red and swollen line of sutures behind his ears. “No…actually I don’t.”
Gray stumbled over to him, his mind dizzy with questions, with the impossibility of it all. Was it amnesia or had they done something to him? How could Monk be here? Gray didn’t care. He gave his friend a bear hug, earning a fiery complaint from his shoulder. Just a graze, but he would’ve taken a gut shot to have this man back in his life. He clutched even tighter.
“I knew it…I knew it…,” Gray whispered fiercely. Tears welled and rolled. “God, you’re alive.”
Kowalski grumbled, “He won’t be alive much longer if we don’t get moving.”
The man was right. Gray let Monk go, but he kept one hand on his friend’s elbow, to make sure he didn’t disappear again.
Monk looked across the lot of them. “Listen,” he said and pointed outward. “I could use your help. There’s something I have to stop.”
“Operation Saturn,” Gray said.
Monk did a double take in Gray’s direction, then nodded. “That’s right. This boy can—”
Monk suddenly twirled around. “Where’s Pyotr?”
Gray understood his confusion.