Black Sun

CHAPTER 12

In the depths of the stone brig, Danielle watched as the food was brought to them by armed guards. It was an almost Dickensian scene, with dirty bowls of some rancid, salty broth and some hard, stale bread. Seven servings for seven prisoners, but no one moved toward the food until the guards had locked the iron gate and re-entered the elevator.

Zhou stepped forward first, taking the largest bowl of soup and gathering all the bread for himself. As he did the boy jumped down and snatched a heel.

Zhou grabbed for him, but the child was too quick. He raced back to his shelf.

“I cut your hand off for that,” Zhou said.

The boy didn’t respond. He was trying to feed the bread to the dying Caucasian man.

Zhou stormed toward the child. “Give me the bread!”

Danielle stepped in front of him. “Just let him have it,” she said.

Zhou pushed past her and snatched the bread from the child’s hand, then slapped the child across the side of the head. The young boy screamed and began to cry.

As the others cowered, Danielle stared Zhou in the face, an act he correctly viewed as a challenge. He did not back down.

“You must be something nice, I think.” He let his eyes fall across her hair and down the length of her body. “Otherwise Kang would have killed you.”

She stared back at him, now fully engaged in the test of wills.

Zhou seemed to enjoy it. “Concubine or whore,” he said, curling his lip. “I’m going to find out just what it is that you do.”

Zhou had leaned in toward Danielle, staring down at her in an obvious attempt to intimidate her, but the move had left him vulnerable, his legs straight, his body off balance.

Danielle sat down on the shelf of a bed, sliding back and creating some space between them, as if she’d been cowed by his threat. From her sitting position, she watched him smile disgustingly. She smiled back and in the blink of an eye pivoted and thrust her right leg out, slamming her heel into Zhou’s knee. The joint snapped with an ugly sound, like a firecracker going off. Zhou crumbled backward, howling in pain.

As he fell, he swung at her, but she dodged his fist and stood. With Zhou on the ground, she slammed a second kick into his face and his nose exploded in a spray of blood.

Zhou’s friend leaped from his bunk, charging toward her. He tried to tackle Danielle, grabbing for her throat, but she blocked his hands and using his own momentum against him, flung him into the wall.

Even as he crashed into the stone she held his arm, twisting it around backward and dropping a hammer blow onto his elbow. The man’s arm folded in the wrong direction and he screamed in agony. She slung him onto the floor next to Zhou, his face a bloody mask of shock.

She glared down at him. “That’s what I do, you son of a bitch.”

Zhou slid himself backward along the floor. His friend crawled alongside, and they dragged themselves to a deeper, darker part of the brig.

Around the room, the others looked on, approvingly it seemed. The old man was laughing, giggling at the entertainment. He moved forward, taking back the bread and proceeding to eat.

“Take it all,” he said to the others. “Don’t save any for them.” He was giddy. “With no teeth, they will not be needing food today.”

The young boy jumped down and took the largest bowl of soup, bringing it back to the dying man and trying to feed him.

“You eat it, Yuri,” the man said. “You need it.”

His voice was Eastern European, maybe Russian. She wondered what he and the child had done to Kang to warrant such treatment. Certainly he did not look like much of a threat. With great effort, he got to a sitting position.

“They will try to kill you now,” he told her. “They will want revenge.”

She thought back to the words of one instructor. If you move, make sure you do enough to prevent any countermove. She felt quite certain she’d done that.

“With those injuries, they’ll be immobile for weeks, maybe months without proper care.”

“Be careful when you sleep,” the Caucasian said. “They will come for you.” He pointed to the boy he’d called Yuri. “He can watch for you at night. He never sleeps,” the man said.

Danielle looked at the boy, perched on the shelf like a little bird.

“Is he your son?” Danielle asked.

“No,” the man said. “I kidnapped him, to sell him to Kang.”

Danielle found this revelation hard to fathom. The man seemed to have great affection for the child. “Kidnapped him?”

“I took him from the people he knew, though they were not his family. I took him from the only place he has ever known, though it was not a home.”

“He’s Russian, like you,” she guessed.

The man nodded. “He was under the care of the Science Directorate. They did experiments on him.”

The hair went up on the back of her neck. “Experiments?”

The man began to answer but went into a minor coughing fit first. “I wish I could say we were trying to save him, but that is not the whole truth. Kang wanted him. He promised us his safety and his fair treatment. But we did it for money.”

“What happened? How did you end up down here?”

The man coughed harshly once again, fighting to control it. “Things went wrong on our voyage. The navigation system, the radios, everything failed us, and my vessel lost its way in the Arctic. My crew thought we had been cursed. And maybe they were right.”

“I don’t understand,” Danielle said.

“We were tracking south through the night, following the compass. But when dawn came we realized we had been going the wrong way. Akula, orca, they followed us as if they knew we would soon fall into the sea. They pushed us onto the ice, slamming into our boat over and over again. Three and four at a time. The crew made it to the escape raft, but they were attacked and killed. And as the boat went down, I escaped to the ice floe with Yuri.”

Danielle looked him over. He smelled of decay. He had a stump wrapped in rags where his foot should have been and his hands, nose, and other parts of his face were black with gangrene. The child didn’t appear to have suffered the same way.

“How come he’s not frostbitten?”

“I used my knife, I dug us a small cave, and I surrounded him as best I could,” Petrov answered. “We were there for three days. Days almost without sun. I was certain we would be dead on the fourth, but a helicopter came. Kang’s people found us.”

“Why did he put you down here?”

“We were so far off course, he believed we meant to betray him.”

Danielle looked at Yuri. “All this for a child?” she said. “Why? Who is he?”

“He’s no one. He has no family that I know of, but he is unusual,” the dying man said. “He was born with a degenerative neurological disorder. His parents could not care for him and he was given to the Science Directorate. They use him in experiments, and somehow they stopped the progression of his disease. But there was a strange result, a side effect. They say he senses things, sees them.”

The man spoke in a wavering voice and she wasn’t sure the information was any more firm than the voice. Certainly it sounded odd.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Like a psychic?”

The man shook his head. “No. Physical things. Magnetic anomalies, electromagnetic disturbances. They say he can see beyond the normal human spectrum.”

“Can he really do this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the man said, coughing badly. “Kang thought he could.”

“Then why is he down here?” Danielle said, realizing he’d used the past tense. “Does he not think so now?”

The man shook his head. “Yuri would do nothing he asked,” he said. “No matter the beating or incentive. No matter the threat. He only talks to himself or sings. And he would not leave my side. So Kang sent us down here. His men told Yuri that he would see me die and then he would have only his new master to cling to.”

Danielle looked at the young boy, slurping up the soup broth. “Does he even understand what Kang is asking?”

“I think so,” Petrov said. “He just doesn’t respond.”

Suddenly the boy looked up. His eyes darted toward the elevator door. Nothing happened, no sound could be heard, but seconds later the car slid into place at the bottom of the shaft and the doors opened.

The guards stepped out with their Tasers in hand.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Petrov,” he said. “Alexander Petrov.”

He went into another coughing fit, his body racked with spasms for twenty long seconds, and this time when he pulled the rag from his face, it was covered in blood.