Kingmakers, Graduation

22. Adrik

22

ADRIK

W ithin a week of Sabrina’s idea, I’ve already found her the perfect place for a lab. It’s an old brewery in Nekrasovka—closed for the last eight years, surrounded by a cluster of textile plants pumping out fast fashion and the counterfeit purses that Russians love almost as much as the real thing.

With all the smog pouring out of the plants, and the steam and noise of the dim sum shops and shawarma stands serving the workers, no one will notice if a couple more boilers fire to life in a squat brick building that ought to be empty. No one who matters, anyway.

It’s farther from the Den than I’d like, but I bought Sabrina her own bike. I park it right in front of the house so she sees it the moment she steps out the door.

It’s the brand new Aprilia superbike, ultra-light and sleek, black like mine. It amuses me to see the two bikes side by side, the difference in size mirroring the physical difference between Sabrina and me. Sa brina very much reminds me of a revved-up engine in a compact frame.

She can hardly contain herself when she sees it, dancing around the bike with many whoops and gasps as she examines the features. We’ve discussed her preferences enough times that I was fairly confident of picking right—still, it was a risk surprising her. Her obvious delight repays every second of stress I had finding just the right motorcycle to suit her tastes.

“How are you so fucking smooth?” she says, kissing me again and again, then rushing back to the bike. “This is exactly what I wanted.”

“I know.” I grin. “I didn’t exactly have to twist your arm for details. In fact, it would have been harder to get you to keep it to yourself.”

Sabrina punches me on the arm hard enough to hurt.

“Oh yeah, were you wanting to discuss Proust? Shut the fuck up, you love talking bikes.”

Her eyes are roaming over the chassis like it’s a naked cheerleader.

“I can’t wait to open it up and take a look at the engine.”

“It’s brand new! You’re gonna mess with it already?’

“Of course!” She’s laughing, bouncing on the balls of her feet like a kid on Christmas morning. “You guys have tools, a lift? Whaddaya got in that garage?”

I take her for a tour of what used to be a greenhouse, now functioning as a garage, tool shed, and general storage area.

Chief is already inside, working on Jasper’s KMT. He’s the best at repairs, and fixes most things that break at the house. Not because he has any special knowledge of plumbing or air conditioning units, but because he has the patience to puzzle over diagrams online and then cobble together a fix until Vlad or Andrei fuck it up all over again.

Chief was in my year at Kingmakers, though not my dorm. He was an Accountant, me an Heir. In our finance classes, he was the only one who could calculate projections faster than me, and I was the only Heir who could do it faster than the other Accountants.

We were drawn together immediately because I could see how smart he was, and he could see that I could see it. I brought him into my circle. Some of the others gave him shit at first—especially Vlad. Chief has that vulnerable quality that draws the attention of a bully like Vlad, a wounded chick stumbling around the biggest rooster in the yard.

Defending him would only make it worse. I give him chances to shine, to show what he’s best at. He makes himself useful around the house to make up for the fact that if we’re ever rolling out strapped, he prefers to stay in the driver’s seat while the rest of us handle business.

His real job is the books. He’s a wizard with numbers, which I really fucking need at the moment since we’re operating on a razor-fine margin. I only have my own bankroll—I haven’t taken a dime from my father or Ivan.

Sabrina wheels her bike in so she can show it off to Chief. He looks it over, all smiles and compliments, like he wasn’t with me when I bought it.

He took to Sabrina at once. He’s always ready to like what I like, and she’s the prettiest girl who’s spoken more than five sentences to him. Actually, Sabrina is more than cordial. She’s warm and open, especi ally to anyone she sees as an underdog. Her sense of justice compels her to celebrate the unappreciated, while puncturing the inflated egos of those at the top of the heap like Jasper or Vlad, or sometimes yours truly.

Bubbling over with excitement, she’s hitting Chief with a full blast of charm. He looks dazed, like he’s taken a couple shots to the head. It’s good for him—Sabrina is so overpowering that he forgets to be nervous, and he talks more like his real self.

Once she’s borrowed his tools to open up the crankcase and they’ve both pored over the engine, she nods to Jasper’s KMT, saying, “You working on the rattle?”

“Yeah—I dunno what’s causing the issue, though. I took the whole engine apart and cleaned it and put it back together again, no fucking dice.”

“Hm,” Sabrina says, her sharp eyes flicking over Jasper’s bike.

I’m sure she could fix it if she wanted to, but that’s the spiteful side of her. Jasper hasn’t exactly been friendly, and Sabrina has too much pride to extend the first olive branch.

It doesn’t matter—she’s finding her way in the house faster than I could have hoped. She’s been gaming with Hakim and Andrei, and she cooked her first dinner with only a moderate level of misery. She dropped the platter of chicken and veggie skewers triumphantly in the middle of the table, her hair piled in a frazzled mess on top of her head, a streak of charcoal across her forehead from where she’d swiped away sweat with the back of her arm. She looked like she’d been through several world wars, but she was grinning.

“So? What do you think? ”

Andrei was brave enough to take the first bite of the singed and strangely solid chicken breast.

“Hm,” he said, chewing carefully. “It’s…edible.”

Vlad gave his chicken a pained look, but since he wasn’t about to miss a meal for the first time in his life, he doused his skewers in hot sauce and shoveled it down.

Only Jasper refused to eat. He didn’t say anything out loud, and neither did Sabrina, though I saw the color in her cheeks when she scraped his full plate in the trash. It pissed me off, but I stayed out of it ’cause I know that’s what Sabrina wants.

I finished all my chicken. Nothing bad happened after, which I counted as a victory.

Once Sabrina is finished showing off her bike and Hakim has stumbled out of bed—late as usual—we ride down to the old brewery.

Sabrina’s already getting used to the vagaries of Moscow traffic. She zips neatly between the lines of cars, leading the way to Nekrasovka, only having to drop behind me once we pass out of the neighborhoods she recognizes.

Her ability to learn Cyrillic street signs reminds me of Sherlock Holmes when he bragged that he was the only person ever to memorize the immensely convoluted train schedule of Victorian England. Sabrina’s brain is like that—she sees something once and downloads it into her head.

She’s riding faster than she needs to right now, excited to see her new workspace. Hakim can hardly keep up. He’s probably still half asleep .

When we reach the brewery, Sabrina barely pauses to put the kickstand down on her bike before running inside.

The interior of the brewery smells strongly of hops and mold. Inches of thick gray dust that have settled on the old tables and windowsills like the fallout from Chernobyl.

All the windows are high up on the walls, so tiny and beveled that the light leaks through in scattered shafts.

Weeds grow through the cracks in the moldering floorboards. Some are covered in prickled spikes, others in fragile, papery blooms.

Sabrina dashes around the brewery, her boots splashing through puddles of muddy water, her hair swirling as she spins around in the vast, open space.

“It’s perfect!” she cries. “Fucking perfect!”

Hakim examines the space calmly but with no less interest. He’s mostly checking the outlets, the water supply, and the drainage pipes.

“We’ve got full power?”

“Try the switch.”

He flicks the uncovered switch on the wall. For a moment nothing happens, and then with a rumble and a hum, a couple overhead bulbs illuminate. The others remain dark.

“Is that the wiring or the bulbs?” Hakim frowns.

“I dunno. I’ll send Chief to take a look.”

“Or someone who knows what they’re doing … ”

“I thought that was supposed to be you?” I grin.

Hakim scoffs. “Not even close. I’ve got a buddy I can call who went to school with me—he’s been building hydroponic systems for basement grow-ops. I’m not the only dropout turning tricks.”

“Sure.” I nod. “Keep it quiet otherwise—we don’t want imitators before we’ve even started.”

“Of course.” Hakim nods.

Sabrina has completed her circuit of the space. She dashes back to us, flushed and bright-eyed.

“Let’s get started already!” she shouts.

It takes another month to clear out the lab and get it operational. Everyone pitches in cleaning up the space, even Jasper and Vlad. I pay Hakim’s friend a consulting fee to source the necessary equipment. We have to hire a professional to run fresh plumbing and install a new furnace and gas lines, but it’s Vlad’s uncle, so I’m not worried about loose lips. We don’t explicitly tell him what we’re doing, though I’m sure he can guess.

The most difficult part is finding the supplier for our raw materials.

We could buy from Amsterdam like the Slavs, but then our pills would be too expensive, even at the premium Sabrina thinks we can charge. Jasper wants me to approach Krystiyan Kovalenko. He’s got access to the Ukrainian’s drug pipeline that runs from Kiev to Lisbon.

“No fucking way,” I tell him flatly. “I’m not working with the Malina. ”

Those motherfuckers already stole three years of my life. I could own Moscow already if I hadn’t been dancing on their puppet strings trying to keep Ivan alive.

“Krystiyan isn’t Malina, technically,” Jasper says. “He’s just related to them. Besides, Marko Moroz is dead.”

“I know,” I say coldly. “I watched Rafe hack him up like a ham. That doesn’t mean I’m ready to buddy up with his second cousin twice removed or whatever the fuck Krystiyan is. Besides, you knew him at school—he’s a fucking snake.”

“What’s your brilliant idea, then?” Jasper says, impatient.

“I don’t have one yet … but I will.”

The solution, when it finally presents itself, is far from ideal. I broker a deal with Lev Zakharov, a broker out of Rostov-on-Don, thirteen hours away on the edge of the Black Sea. Though several of the traditional smuggling routes have been cut off in recent years, his location allows him to bring materials through Romania, Georgia, Turkey, or Bulgaria, and he has connections to the cheapest manufacturers of raw materials in Thailand and China. Though he’s only a small broker, he’s known to be reliable and has no prior commitments in Moscow.

He happily agrees to work with us. But our agreement comes with a hell of a tax.

“He wants a five percent cut,” I tell Jasper and Sabrina. “He’ll give the materials so cheap that we won’t even notice it.”

Now it’s Sabrina who fires up, crying, “We don’t need a partner! Just a supplier.”

“He won’t accept anything else. ”

“Find someone else then!”

“There isn’t anyone else!” I snap. “It’s not sugar and flour, they don’t sell it in the baking aisle!”

Sabrina narrows her eyes at me, silenced but not at all satisfied. If she had a tail, it would be twitching behind her. She’s pissed that I’m overriding her, but there really isn’t any other option. None that I’ll accept.

Getting the worst over with, I inform Jasper, “He’s sending his son to Moscow. To protect their interests.”

Jasper’s so angry he’s stiffened up like a corpse, arms crossed tightly over his chest.

“Zigor Zakharov is a fucking buffoon,” he seethes.

“I’m aware. Once everything’s running smooth, he’ll back off. Or get bored. He’ll be whoring it up at the brothels five nights a week, you’ll barely see him.”

Jasper and Sabrina respond with stony silence. I’ve managed to piss them off equally, for different reasons. Even in this shared state of annoyance, they’re not looking at each other, their bodies angled in opposite directions.

“That’s the deal for now,” I tell them firmly. “Once we’re rolling we can reevaluate.”