The Heir

“Good luck,” I tell him.

“You’re not staying to watch me fight?”

“Nah. You got everything you need to win.”

“Really?” Armen says.

“Yeah. Except speed, stamina, and technique.”

Armen stares at me for a second, then bursts out laughing again.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he snorts.

“You got those shorts at least,” I say.

“That I do.” Armen grins.

I head back down the tu

I pass the staircase that would take me back up to street level. I prefer to walk down to the old Park Kul’tury station and go up from there. This is a more direct route, cutting under the Moskva River. Plus, I like it down in the tu

I’ve got my phone out so the screen casts just enough light to see the tracks ahead of me. “Major Tom” plays quietly on my earbuds, my steps naturally falling in time to the beat.

Major Tom — Shiny Toy Guns

Spotify → geni.us/freshman-spotify

Apple Music → geni.us/freshman-apple

I shut the music off when I hear a scuffling sound up ahead. Not a rat. Something worse than that.

Fucking junkies.

There’s three of them, two men and a woman. If you can even call them that. They look scraggly and feral, and I can smell them from twenty feet away.

Who knows what the fuck they’re doing down here. They’ve got a duffle bag on the ground in the middle of their little huddle, and it looks like they’re pulling things out of it. Probably stolen from somebody on the subway, or on a crowded street up above.

If they’re smart, they’ll let me pass by.

Two of them have the right idea.

But the third stands up, twitchy and bright-eyed.

“Hey,” he says. “Where you goin’?”

I ignore him, continuing to walk past.

“Hey!” he shouts a little louder in his raspy voice. “I’m talkin’ to you!”

His lank, unwashed hair hangs around his shoulders. He’s wearing a jacket with nothing underneath, so his ski

The government has tried to stamp it out a dozen times, but it always pops up again. It’s just so cheap to make. You can cook it in your kitchen with shit bought from pharmacies and hardware stores: hydrochloric acid, paint thi

It’s an imitation of heroin, just as addictive. The only downside is the way your flesh rots away from the injection site, and your brain starts to atrophy inside your skull. Which doesn’t lead to the best decision-making.

Which is why this fucker thinks it’s a good idea to talk to me.

“That a new iPhone?” he demands, eying my phone greedily.

I stop walking, turning to face him slowly.

“You want to fuck off now,” I tell him. I slip the phone into my pocket, so my hands are free. While I’m doing that, I close my fingers around the smooth handle of my switchblade instead.

Without that faint blue light, the tu

They’re all standing now, fa

“Give us the phone,” the second man hisses.

The problem with fighting these three is that I have no idea what diseases they might be carrying. One scratch from an uncut fingernail and I could get hepatitis.

So as they close in around me, I plan to end it quick.

The guy on the right charges first. I send him right back again with a kick to the chest. The second guy isn’t as lucky. I press the button to flick out my blade while it’s already whistling through the air toward his torso. I stab him right in the liver with medical precision, then jerk the blade back before I get any blood on me. It still splashes down on the toe of my sneaker.

He drops to his knees, groaning.

That takes the steam out of the other two.

The girl raises her hands, blubbering, “We don’t want any trouble.”

“Then fuck off like I said,” I tell her coldly.

She grabs the duffle bag and scrambles off down the tu

The guy I kicked looks at his fallen friend, then at me. He runs off after the girl, abandoning the man I stabbed.

I ignore him too, continuing on down the tu

He’ll probably bleed to death, but the thought doesn’t disturb me any more than the knowledge that every butterfly you see will be dead in a month’s time. That’s the cycle of life—junkies die young, from the drugs, the company they keep, or trying to rob the wrong person in a tu

I continue on my way, until I reach the staircase up to Krymskiy Proyezd.

Spring in Moscow is hell.

There’s a word the Russians use to describe it: slyakot, which means “slush mud.” That’s partly why I stayed down in the tu

The roads in Moscow are always shit. In the springtime you have to worry that you’re about to step through a slush drift into a pothole that will break your ankle. The sidewalks become crowded with shuffling, slipping pedestrians, and the traffic is worse than ever. The melting snowdrifts are black from a whole winter’s worth of car exhaust.

Without any proper drainage system, the melted snow sits in stagnant puddles. It’s rasputitsa—the time of the year “when roads stop existing.”

I hate Moscow.

I’m an American. I was born in Chicago. My mother is American.

And yet my father brought me here, back to the city he never liked himself. Back to the environment so miserable that it drove my mother to drink herself half to death, until the only way to save herself was to leave.

I’ll be leaving soon myself.

Going to the one place my father will support—the one thing he won’t view as abandonment.

Finally I reach Korobeynikov Lane, where the slush has actually been painstakingly cleared from the street for the benefit of the elite residents of Noble Row. It’s a long, sandstone building divided into six luxury residences, worth about twenty-one million each in American dollars.

That’s where I live with my father.

I would assume that the other five houses on Noble Row are bright and clean inside, full of sparkling chandeliers and gleaming woodwork.

That’s not how our house looks. Not on the inside.

It’s dark, crowded, and filthy, because my father won’t allow any maids inside. He won’t let anyone in the house but me. Not since my mother left.

He’s holed up in there like Howard Hughes, only leaving when he absolutely has to handle his business in person. And he’s barely managing that these days.

I open our front door, struck in the face by a waft of stale and dusty air. It smells like the carpets haven’t been vacuumed in six years, which they haven’t. It smells like the windows are never opened, and the walls are full of mice.