The cold was a physical enemy, a thief stealing the life from Ivan's shivering body.
He lay by the sputtering fire in the fisherman's hut, his breathing shallow, his face pale and slick with sweat. The wound in his shoulder was festering.
"He's burning up," Murat said, his voice a low, panicked whisper. "He won't last the night."
Kato looked at her remaining crew. A wounded soldier dying by inches. A panicked smuggler who saw only graves ahead. And a ghost.
Pavel stood by the door, a silent sentinel staring out into the endless, snow-swept darkness. He didn't feel the cold. He didn't seem to feel anything at all.
Her order from Nicolai was a distant dream. Petrograd might as well have been on the moon.
"We are not dying in this shack," Kato declared, her voice cutting through the despair like a razor.
She stood, her movements stiff from the cold. "We need medicine. We need a vehicle."
Her eyes burned with a cold, hard light. "We are going to take them."
Her target was a local doctor, a man whose sympathies, according to village gossip, lay with the British. The logic was brutal and clean. Attacking him would get them supplies, transport, and, if they were seen, it would reinforce her lie to Nicolai.
There was no room for subtlety anymore. Only survival.
The crunch of their boots on the fresh snow sounded like cannon fire in the dead of night. The doctor's house was a dark shape against the snow-covered pines, a single lamp burning in a downstairs window.
A dog barked. A furious, frantic sound that shattered the silence.
"Damn it," Murat hissed.
The front door opened. A portly man in a nightgown stood silhouetted in the doorway, holding a heavy Webley revolver. "Who's there? I am armed!"
Before Murat could raise his own weapon, before Kato could even speak, Pavel flowed past them.
He wasn't running. He was a phantom, a blur of motion gliding over the snow.
There was a sharp, wet crack of bone. A choked gasp. The heavy revolver clattered onto the wooden porch.
When Kato and Murat reached the door, Pavel had the doctor pinned against the wall, one hand clamped around his throat. The man's eyes were wide with terror, his feet dangling inches off the ground.
Pavel's face was utterly blank. He hadn't been angry. He hadn't been scared. He had simply solved the problem with an inhuman speed that left Kato breathless.
It was terrifying.
And it was beautiful.
They found morphine and sulfa powder, bandages and antiseptic. The doctor, now a blubbering, terrified mess, told them everything they wanted to know.
Murat held a rope, his eyes on the doctor. "What do we do with him? He saw our faces."
Pavel said nothing. He just looked at Kato, his head tilted in a silent, patient question. Do I eliminate the loose end? Do I break his neck? The question was there in his empty eyes. He was waiting for the command.
Kato looked at the doctor, then at the perfect, remorseless weapon she had created. She saw the abyss. She saw how easy it would be to just nod. To erase the witness.
A flicker of the woman she used to be, the woman who had argued with Koba about the price of their work, rebelled. This wasn't a moral choice. It was a practical one.
She was afraid of what Pavel would become if she gave that order. Afraid of what she would become.
"No," she said, her voice tight. "Just tie him. Gag him."
She looked at Pavel. "No more killing than is necessary."
It was a new rule, born not of mercy, but of a deep and chilling fear.
The doctor's car was a sturdy, black Volvo, built for the harsh northern roads. They loaded the groaning Ivan into the back seat, and Kato spread a map across the hood, the lines illuminated by a weak flashlight.
"The sea is a death trap. They'll be watching the ports," she said. "We go overland."
Her finger traced a long, desperate line across the paper. "We drive east. Through the top of Sweden. Into Finland. We cross the border into Russia near Beloostrov."
Murat stared at the map, then at her, his face pale in the cold. "That's a thousand kilometers. Through a warzone. In winter. It's a suicide run."
"Then we will die running," Kato said.
Pavel didn't comment. He just got in the driver's seat, his hands resting on the wheel, waiting.
Hours later, they were a tiny island of warmth and engine noise in an infinite, frozen forest. The only sounds were the hum of the tires on the icy road and Ivan's pained, shallow breathing from the back.
Kato sat in the passenger seat, watching Pavel's profile. He was a perfect silhouette against the endless night, his eyes fixed on the road, never wavering. She tried to find a trace of the man she had known, the man who had followed her out of loyalty, not programming.
"Pavel," she said softly, her voice barely a whisper. "When we get to Petrograd... what will you do?"
He didn't turn. He didn't even blink. The dashboard lights cast his face in a ghostly green glow, showing nothing. No emotion. No past. No future.
"I will await your next order," he replied. His voice was as flat and dead as the frozen landscape around them.
The chasm between them was absolute. She was alone.
Murat, who had been watching the road behind them, suddenly went rigid. He pressed his face against the rear window.
"Headlights," he whispered.
Kato's head snapped around. Far behind them, two pairs of bright, steady lights had appeared, cutting through the darkness.
"They're coming up fast," Murat said, his voice rising in panic.
They were in the middle of nowhere. On a road no one traveled at this hour. This wasn't a coincidence.
Her lie to Nicolai. Her fabricated story of a British intelligence team on their trail.
It had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
They weren't just running anymore. They were being hunted.
"They found us!" Murat yelled from the back, his voice cracking. "How did they find us?!"
Kato didn't answer. Her face set into a hard, merciless mask. She leaned forward, her knuckles white as she gripped the dashboard, and her eyes met Pavel's in the rearview mirror.
He just gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. He understood.
"Faster," she commanded, and the car lurched forward, fishtailing on the ice as it plunged deeper into the night.