Hack:Moscow by W. Len Page A

you.”
    Time slows. Luka reaches inside his jacket; Boris seems to float in the air as he dives; Milo’s grin widens; I start running.
    Someone fires just as I run inside the restroom, scrabbling through the window.
    A gun fires again. Then, again.
     
    I’m running. That’s all I can do, all I can think of. I need to run.

1.90
    Breathless. Don’t run, walk. There’s a bus stop nearby. Nobody cares about people on the buses. As I walk, the towering whiteness of the Moscow Swissotel looms beside me. On top, a glass eye is balanced on claws, as if it could see all. Luka—is he dead?
    He can’t be. Because he can’t be.
    There were gunshots. Too many of them.
    Tears roll down my cheek. Anton had betrayed us, yet he saved me with his text message. I fumble for my phone to see if there are more messages. The inbox icon throbs. Luka has sent me a link? What good did it do? How useless!
    No, I’m the one who’s useless. I betrayed Luka too: I was the one who’d told Anton about Boris. Everything collapsed back to my mistake. I’m as damned as this city.
    Be careful , Luka’s voice reminds me. Keep going, don’t stop.
    Further out, a boat chugs down the Moskva river, sparks of camera flashes flaring along its deck. I imagine pressing a button: the boat sinks while the audience, high up in the hotel’s viewing gallery, laughs at the people drowning.
    I catch the first bus I can. Onboard, there’s only one passenger, a blonde. I sit behind her. She’s on the phone and pays no heed to me.
    Think, Andrei! Boris may look for me, but he doesn’t know where I live. I’m safe—for now.
    Think, Andrei, think hard! What can I do?
    I blanked out. In the window beside me, I see a helpless-looking boy pretending to be all grown up. Why did everything happen the way they did?
    “Don’t blame me, it’s the traffic,” the woman speaks into her phone, and I dimly register what she says.
    Lies. The road we’re on is wide open.
    “I love you,” she says as she stifles a yawn.
    More lies. Maybe it’s not me. It’s them. Everyone had lied.
    The bus enters the Garden Ring Road, turning into a busy junction. In its middle, there’s the statue of Mayakovsky. Luka had lent me one of his books before. He told me the poet had praised life here, had claimed everything was the best it could be, but that didn’t stop him from killing himself a few years later. His statue stood in the square, a bronzed spirit, waiting patiently for this world to end.
    Don’t be dramatic , a cold wind flicked my ear, chiding me, teasing me. Just kill them all and be done with, it laughs.
    I pulled out my laptop and opened Luka’s email. It led to a series of dead drops in the cloud we’d set up before, each link leading to the next to the next. Luka had spent a lot of time setting these up in case we got into trouble and needed to communicate anonymously. He had needed even more time convincing Anton and me to memorize the passwords. I secretly thought him paranoid. Anton openly mocked him. Now, only I was left.
    I pieced together a dozen fragments of ASCII text into a long string. That was the key to the final cloud cache. I logged on, entered it, and something unexpected happened: What’s 2+2? , a last challenge popped out, as if Luka had sprung a last trick.
    5 , I entered. I knew the correct answer from long ago, but only now, did I appreciate its lesson: in a world that didn’t make sense, Luka had felt free to make up whatever answer he wanted.
    Inside the drive, I found a folder. Project Silence. Whatever Boris wanted was here. All I had to do was access it…and do what?
    The bus jerked to a stop as a police motorcade throttled by. They weren’t coming for me. The three policemen on the motorcycles were waving furiously, parting the traffic.
    As the bus idled, I thought everything through, bit by bit. Luka’s wife is dead. Luka is dead. Anton’s dead. I could reboot my laptop and delete everything. I could throw my phone away, wipe