The Baba Yaga Read Online Free PDF

Andrei’s besotted with you—he always has been. He’s gone now. And you—you were always the heir apparent. You’re meant to replace him. You have”—he stretched out his hands—“you have a responsibility to him. Especially now.”
    Now that their rivals were in the ascendant. A responsibility to a greater good? When he put it that way, there was only reasonable course of action, wasn’t there? Anything else would be self-indulgence. Anything else would be irrational.
    “I’ll think about what you said,” she said. It sounded to her ears as if she was speaking to a colleague rather than to a man she had loved. Kinsella seemed satisfied, however. At least she wasn’t telling him a lie.
    “Will you stay?” he said.
    She looked out at the dark city, and then back to him. Could she, for old times’ sake? For a moment, she wanted, more intensely than she had wanted anything in her life, to be able to stay here with him, safe in this cocoon. But the world had changed around them, and there was no escaping that fact.
    She stood up. “I think I should go home.”
     
     
    B Y THE MIDDLE of the second day, Maria knew they were in far greater trouble than she had bargained for. As yet, she wasn’t sure exactly what that trouble was, but she had no doubt that the spaceports weren’t sealed off just for Kit. Something else was happening on Braun’s World and runaway junior officers weren’t the only ones being prevented from leaving. Nobody was getting away.
    Kit had taken one look at the barriers going up across the road to Dentrassa’s second spaceport and turned the car round again. By dusk of the second day, they were out in the wilds. What greenery there was on Braun’s World tended to be near urban centres and, as the suburbs disappeared, the landscape quickly became scrubland: rough grass and sturdy brown shrubs. The scrub in turn gave way to desert: great red empty plains where the sun beat down and there was little to no cover. Jenny groused from the back of the car; too tired to be awake, too tired to sleep. The aircon buzzed and hummed, and kept the temperature not quite on the right side of comfortable. As night settled and it cooled outside, they threw open the windows and let air gush in as they sped along the empty track. Maria had long since stopped asking where they were heading.
    When they were sure that Jenny was asleep, Kit pulled over and got out of the car. Maria got out too, to stretch her legs, but Kit said, “Wait here. Don’t follow me.”
    Maria looked around. There was nothing for miles—miles upon miles—apart from the dim light from their car. Overhead the stars were incandescent. “Where on earth are you going?”
    “Not far. I’ll be back soon.”
    He walked a little way—not far; she could still see the light from his torch quite plainly. He wasn’t quite out of earshot. She heard snatches of his end of a hushed but heated conversation, enough to get the gist of the quarrel: he wanted to get them off Braun’s World; he believed he was owed help. The exchange lasted only a few minutes and, by the end of it, it seemed that Kit’s contact had agreed to offer them some assistance.
    “All good?” she said, when he came back.
    He eyed her cautiously. “Did you hear all that?”
    “No,” she said, which was technically the truth. She hadn’t heard it all .
    “All’s good,” he said. “Get back in, love. We’ve a way to go yet.”
    “Which way?” she said. “East?”
    That meant back to civilisation, or at least to Dentrassa. So she wasn’t particularly surprised when he shook his head. “West.”
     
     
    K AY L ARSEN HAD originally been Kinsella’s friend (Walker didn’t know whether that was with or without benefits), but over the years the two women had drifted together. If you have to go up two flights of stairs to find the toilets with the skirted figure on the door, you quickly discover who else gets this extra compulsory exercise. In an institution