每周一到周五每天晚上9：00更新，点击订阅+关注+五星好评，谢谢支持！
全文段落
CHAPTER 1: NATASHA
Part 2
Natasha kicked her legs up, balancing on an air duct on the side of the warehouse. Now she had a full view of the building, which only made her shake her head. She had seen abandoned FSB doghouses in better conditions.
No. Outhouses.
She reached higher, grabbing another light fixture like a handle, hauling her body upward—until it came off in her hand, clattering to the rotting dock beneath her.
She froze.
Der’mo.
“Vy slyshite-to?” Beneath her, a fat dock guard moved toward the sound, his weapon still slung across his back. Two more guards followed.
Untrained. Not Ivan’s guys. Unless he’s really getting sloppy.
Natasha cursed to herself, flattening her hanging body against the side of the rusted wall beneath the shadowy eaves of the tin roof. Flashlight beams now swept across the warehouse, only centimeters beneath her. She held her breath.
You didn’t hear anything, mudak. Just your old outhouse falling apart.
The guards moved on.
Natasha breathed, then flipped herself over the eaves, rolling toward a dirty skylight. The moves were instinct now, as automatic as breathing or blinking or the beat of her own heart. Slowly she eased her face above the cracked glass—taking in the view for the few seconds she could risk exposure. The world below was murky, and only two figures moved through the shadows in the central space between the shipping containers.
Two figures. One big, one small.
She could see a kid. A girl. Red haired. Dark eyed. From the looks of it, she was maybe eight or ten years old. They all looked the same to Natasha. Aside from her fellow strays in the Program, the only child she’d ever known had been herself—and she hadn’t even really liked that one.
The girl turned her face away from Ivan, who stood between her and the window, and Natasha could now see she was crying. Holding on to a ballerina doll. The kind with a ceramic head, Natasha thought. The kind they sell in the streets outside the Bolshoi Theatre. She’d had one of her own, a few lifetimes ago.
Was that how I used to look at you, Ivan?
Because now, shoving the girl and the doll aside as he stepped into the moonlight, there was her old commander— and new target.
Ivan Somodorov.
The closest thing I had to a father.
Natasha hung farther over the skylight to get a better look. What was he doing? Putting something on the girl’s head. Electrodes maybe? Definitely. On her temples. More wires on her arms, hands, even her chubby little legs. On the other end of the wires was a squat metal box the size of a phone booth, bolted to the concrete floor, patched and soldered on the surface, apparently kluged together from many lesser machines. It sprouted a mess of thickly bundled wire umbilical cords, curving and sparking in every direction. The wiring led to more boxes and then more wiring, as if it were a fundamental anatomical part of a much larger organism—one with no visible end.
An experiment. So the reports were true.
She’s one of Ivan’s little projects. Another Devushka Ivana.
Natasha stared. She didn’t wince, and she didn’t look away. The scene was all too familiar—though she’d been chained to a radiator, not strapped in a chair, and Ivan hadn’t been into electrodes back then. All the same, it didn’t matter. Enough was enough.
Natasha took in the scene in front of her, then rolled onto her back, raising her wrist to her mouth.
“Target is confirmed. Tell MI6 their tracking beacon worked. Intel is good.”
“I’ll send the Queen a fruit basket. God, you’ve got eyes on Ivan the Strange? London calls him Frankenstein.” Coulson’s voice crackled over the comm in her ear. “Human test subjects, that’s really his thing now?”
She glanced at the skylight. “Looks that way.”
“It’s alive,” Coulson said in his best mad scientist impression.
Natasha stared up at the dumpling moon. The view was even better here, from flat on her back on the top of the warehouse.
“Not for long. I’m going in.”
用户评论