The Boy from Reactor 4

Two rusty bicycles with headlights bolted to the handlebars lay beneath a tree. In the foreground, spotlights illuminated a giant chimney encased in scaffolding. It rose from a dome a few hundred yards away. The silhouettes of two other smokestacks and a dozen cranes surrounded it.

“Welcome to the village of Chernobyl,” Hayder said.

He scanned the reactors and the buildings around them, his eyes blazing with anticipation.

“The thing people don’t know about the Zone,” he said, wetting his lips, “is once you are here, you want to come back. You need to come back. The Zone…It pulls you in.”

Hayder loosened his scarf. He turned to Nadia and revealed a V-shaped scar on his neck.

“Last chance to turn back,” he said.

Nadia recognized the scar from photographs of children at the Chernobyl Museum. Cancer of the thyroid.

Her dosimeter chattered steadily. Meeting her uncle suddenly seemed far less compelling than it had in Kiev. But then again, she needed the money, and there was also the boy, her cousin. How dangerous could Pripyat be if they offered daily tours of the place?

Nadia swallowed but shook her head.

“You go on?” he said.

Nadia imagined having a little cousin who looked up to her, and logging onto her brokerage account and seeing a seven- or eight-figure cash balance. “I go on.”

“Okay. You go on.” The tips of his silver-and-gold teeth shined in the dark. It was the first time she’d seen him grin. “You go on. I have some respectability for you.”

Hayder disappeared into the forest to tell Volodya he could leave and returned thirty seconds later. The truck rumbled away in the darkness.

Nadia checked her watch. It was 8:34 p.m. “I have twenty-six minutes. Will I make it to Pripyat in time?”

“Sure, sure. Three kilometers. I put you on the main road to Pripyat before I go. We meet back here ten thirty p.m.”

Nadia recoiled. “You go? Go where? You told us you’d take me to Pripyat yourself. To the Hotel Polissya. That I would wait for you afterward in the Chernobyl café. Where there are people.”

He pursed his lips sympathetically. “Small change in the plan. Very small. Before we go in the truck, Volodya relay message from the business contact. Schedule change. I meet him at nine o’clock now, so cannot go with you. You must go alone.”

“But isn’t Pripyat a ghost town? Are there any lights there at all?”

“Sure, sure. Good light on the bicycle, and I give flashlight, too,” he said. “Check cell phone. The coverage good. Is very good.”

Nadia pulled out her phone. Five bars lit up in green. Hayder did the same and nodded reassuringly. She punched his number into her phone and hung up as soon as it rang.

“See?” Hayder said. “No worries. Hayder is the stand-up guy. You get lost, any problem, you call me, we work out together. Just like New York.”

“Yeah,” Nadia said. She eyed the wreckage on the horizon and imagined a team of human robots cleaning it all up. “Just like New York.”

At the outskirts of the power station, the edge of a cooling pond shimmered in the night. Nadia remembered the skates the boy was wearing in the photo and wondered if he played hockey on it during the winter. Perhaps that was as good as it got for her cousin out here, a topless Madison Square Garden manufactured out of radioactive water, as frozen during the winter as Chernobyl was in time.

CHAPTER 36

ADAM FELL TO his knees in the field, gasping. His necklace popped out of his shirt. The locket bobbed before him. He reached out to tuck it back in.

“No strength,” his hockey coach said.

The snap of the homemade whip cracked the air. The braided rope lashed Adam’s shoulders and back. It dug through his sweatshirt and T-shirt and burned his skin. Adam’s hands fell to the ground for support before he could grasp the locket. He gritted his teeth, determined not to make a sound no matter how much it hurt.

“No stamina,” the coach said.

He snapped the whip again.

Moisture blurred Adam’s vision. The whip thrashed his spine.

“No heart,” the coach said.

He whipped Adam again.

Tears streamed down Adam’s cheeks.

The locket. Where was the locket? He focused, grabbed it, and tucked it under his shirt.

The coach towered over him, his huge potbelly hanging over his waist like a sack of potatoes, rope coiled in his right hand, slapping his left as though counting the seconds until the next beating.

“I’ve been training you to play hockey since you were seven. Seven years old! And you are what—fifteen now? That’s eight years. And you still can’t climb that hill? You really are a useless bastard. The son of a scumbag Ukrainian thief and an ugly American whore. How many times have I told you? If you can’t climb that hill, there’s no hope for you. There’s no future for you. And guess what? You’ll never climb that hill.”