Chapter Text
Alina wasn't sure why she'd come. She ate another piece of popcorn and stared at the tiger, asleep in a fake savanna. The weather was uncharacteristically mild for February but she was still vaguely concerned that they let an animal from such warm climates lounge outdoors in winter.
She looked at her watch. Even after slowly wandering through most of the zoo and buying a snack before making her way over here, she was still fifteen minutes early.
She’d gotten the email yesterday afternoon. Ever since the New York Times had written up the work she and her lab partner had been doing, she'd started getting lots of emails — some from media outlets requesting interviews, some from companies looking to hire them. And, occasionally, acquire them, for amounts that caused her jaw to drop.
Nikolai waved these offers away. “We’ll stick with the plan and work on this ourselves. We only have a couple months until graduation, and then we’ll have the time to give Solnyshko the attention it deserves."
It was easy for him to be dismissive — with one parent a senator and the other CEO of one of the largest corporations in America, sums that would have been more money than she’d ever dreamed of wouldn’t make a difference to him. Alina half-jokingly referred to the Lantsovs as a family of kings. (She said this once in front of Nikolai, who had only scoffed. “Please, we prefer kingmakers .”)
Nikolai had offered to pay her salary — a generous one — for a couple years and fund the project to see if it would get enough traction, so she responded to the emails with polite refusals. But the email she got yesterday was different.
The sender made it stand out in her overflowing inbox; it was from the Ravkan ambassador. Her breath caught, though she wasn’t sure if it was more out of curiosity or fear. The email in its entirety read:
"Ms. Starkov,
The ambassador wishes to speak with you. He'll meet you at 11 A.M. tomorrow at the downtown zoo."
It was a command rather than a request. From the Ravkan ambassador.
Nikolai had wanted to mention her history in the interview with the Times (“People love drama,” he’d said), but Alina had rejected the idea. She knew as well as he did that the story of a Ravkan war orphan brought to America as a screaming infant would get them better placement in the paper (“Maybe the front of the science section!” he’d pleaded. “Above the fold!”) but she wouldn’t be cast as a victim here. The story was about their work. He’d cajoled and whined for days, but in the end he’d made the reporter agree not to publish anything about her history. The reporter had no problems with that — her beat was science and she was clearly excited just to get to write about a Lantsov.
The article may not have mentioned Ravka, but Ravka had noticed. Clearly.
She told Mal about the email carefully. They’d been fighting nearly all the time now, usually about her continuing to work with Nikolai after graduation. The two had disliked each other ever since their first meeting freshman year when Mal dropped by the lab on his way back from work. A few months of classes was all it took for Mal to categorize all her classmates as hopelessly stuck up rich kids, so when she’d introduced Nikolai as her new lab partner and Nikolai extended his hand and reintroduced himself as Nikolai Lantsov, she knew Mal would hate him forever. She flushed to see that the tattoo on Mal’s forearm was visible when they shook hands, and she noticed Nikolai’s eyes widen when he saw it.
“He has weird tattoos,” Nikolai had said when Mal left.
“We all have our quirks.” Alina wasn’t about to let Nikolai see her embarrassment at the “let’s cuddle” tattoo Mal had gotten after losing a drunken bet a few months prior.
Nikolai scrunched his nose. “Wouldn’t you rather be with someone whose quirks include being charming, incredibly rich, and almost too handsome?”
Three years later, not much had changed.
Mal’s reaction to the email from the ambassador was about as she expected. "What does he want? Why are you going?"
"I don't know and I'm not quite sure."
He'd glowered and stormed out of their apartment. She feigned sleep when he stumbled into bed at two thirty, reeking of beer. She’d left in the morning before he woke.
So here she was, waiting for the Ravkan ambassador. Eating popcorn. At the zoo.
She spotted what could only be his bodyguard approaching from the other end of the tiger habitat. He was suited, scanning the crowd, walking deliberately. He caught her eye and headed towards her.
He was enormous, with a nearly comically thick neck and a chest that spoke of long hours in the embassy gym. Alina might have considered him handsome, but the fact that he looked like he could crush her with one hand made her too nervous to spend time contemplating his aesthetics.
He stopped a few feet away. " Vy dolzhny byt devushka. "
She blinked a few times quickly. "Oh," she stumbled, "I'm not — er — I don't —"
He frowned. "English is okay," he said, in a way that made it clear that it was not. "I will pat you down, front, back, sides." He started before he'd finished the sentence.
The other zoogoers were staring, and Alina avoided their eyes. The bodyguard did a professional but very thorough patdown before he stood and nodded, satisfied.
"Are you going to manhandle my popcorn, too?" Alina joked uncomfortably.
"Not necessary," he said, and started to walk away. She let out a bark of laughter and followed.
She’d researched Ambassador Morozova right after getting the email. She'd spent the better part of last night researching him, in fact, because it was surprisingly ... unfruitful. She'd found his standard embassy bio, but that said barely anything other than his tenure and that he had been a decorated General in the Ravkan military. There was a photo of him that looked like it had been scanned and enlarged from a group shot in a printed black and white newspaper, which revealed nothing other than that he appeared to be of human form.
And that was it. That was all she could find. There were mentions of his attendance at events or speeches he'd given, but nothing else. She assumed there was more about him on the Internet in Ravkan, but there was no way she'd be able to find or make much sense of it.
She turned a corner behind the bodyguard and saw the ambassador sitting on a bench. It had to be him — who else would be bent over a pile of manilla folders in a black suit at the zoo? There was a smartly-dressed woman standing beside him, talking on the phone and gesticulating wildly. As the bodyguard approached the ambassador glanced up from the folder he was reading and caught Alina’s gaze.
Her jaw dropped. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting but this was not it. He seemed almost impossibly young for an ambassador, just a few years older than she, but those important few years where the last vestiges of baby fat drop away. His jaw and cheekbones were sharp, skin pale against his jet black hair, his eyes a piercing grey. He might be the most attractive man she’d ever seen.
The ambassador stood and glanced at his bodyguard, who grumbled a few words in Ravkan. The ambassador only nodded mildly before turning to her.
"Ms. Starkov." He dipped his head in greeting. “Alina, please,” she mumbled, bowing her own head slightly in return.
"Let's walk," he suggested, already moving in the direction she’d come. She had to run a couple steps to catch up, but once she had he slowed to a stroll. She glanced backwards to see the bodyguard trailing a respectful distance behind them, and vaguely wondered if he ever stopped scowling.
They walked in silence past the small tree where the tiger remained sleeping and turned a corner. A child wailed.
"Ravka is a small country." The ambassador spoke easily, fluently, only the slight clip of his cadence betraying that English was not his native language. "We don’t have the natural resources of some, and we are surrounded by countries hostile to us. The last few decades have been difficult — civil war followed by battles with our neighbors to the north and the south. We have invested in war, and as a consequence, our people are tired. They are poor. They are beginning to lose hope."
Alina blinked. She hadn’t spent much time with ambassadors, but she was pretty sure this wasn’t typically how they spoke about their country.
“Our terrain is full of mountains and valleys. People live isolated from one another, and as our neighbors squeeze our airspace and cut off trade over land, it is hard for us to provide our people with the things they need. This is where we are now. This is the situation we have to deal with.”
He led them towards a jaguar that was pacing in an enclosure far too small for an animal of its size before stopping and turning to her. From this close, she noticed a faint web of thin white scars across his face. His expression was impassive but his eyes focused intensely on hers. “Tell me about your work . ”
Alina swallowed. “What … would you like to know?”
“You’ve developed a solar cell that is thin, flexible, and made of materials far more common than have previously been used.” She nodded. “Is the work yours.”
“Excuse me?”
“You have a partner, you work in a lab. How much of the work was yours.”
She wondered if he’d been chosen as an ambassador in spite of his bluntness or because of it. “It’s been a collaborative effort.”
His jaw tensed. “Are you indispensable to the project.”
She could never have done it alone. She knew it was Nikolai’s humor and persistence — not to mention his family’s contribution the lab that allowed her to make just enough to pay her tuition —that had kept her sane throughout the long nights of modifying, testing, scrapping, and trying again. But she also knew that the ideas had mostly been hers, that she knew how the light interacted with the materials and how they trapped the energy almost like she knew how to breathe. And Nikolai did not. She was grateful for his companionship, for the ease of working with him. She’d never admitted that the work was hers to anyone, not even to herself. “Yes,” she whispered.
The ambassador gave a small nod. “Tell me more about it.”
“Most available cells cap out at about 35% energy efficiency. Ours outperforms them.”
“By how much.”
“Five, six percent,” she said, shrugging.
He raised an eyebrow. “But you think it can do better.”
These were hopes she’d had, hopes that she and Nikolai had only shared with each other for fear that saying them aloud might break some spell. But the research she’d done, the equations she had come up with, supported her idea, even if it wasn’t yet a reality. “I know it can.”
His mouth twitched, and she realized his was the closest he’d come to smiling. “How much better.”
“Double.” She took a deep breath. “More than double.”
“How close can you get to the limit suggested by Carnot's Theorem?” She let out a laugh — he’d done his homework.
“I think if we’re going to get close to 85% energy conversion with a panel that tracks the sun, Solnyshko is how we’ll do it.”
He nodded again and resumed walking. She fell into step alongside him.
“Solnyshko ,” he said, slowly, and Alina shivered. The word sounded, when he said it, like hearing her adoptive parents tucking her in at night nearly fourteen years ago. It sounded like she’d felt as a teenager in stolen moments when Mal held her naked in bed and whispered pet names in her ear. It sounded like she’d meant it to sound, when she’d affectionately begun referring to their solar project as little sun . It sounded like a caress. It sounded a little like hope.
“Your adoptive parents, they spoke to you in Ravkan?”
“Sometimes. They were first generation immigrants but came over when they were young.”
“But you haven’t spoken it since you entered the foster system.”
“No.”
She’d been only eight when the couple who brought her to America died and she was moved into a group home. Even at eight she was already fascinated with energy, and her parents had cultivated her interest with science projects, building batteries together. She was excelling in school, and despite her age would have been a great candidate for adoption. But she quickly learned that there isn’t much of a market for adopting a kid whose parents have already died twice.
It was only a few months later that she met Mal. She started helping him with his homework, and he would sneak her treats from the pantry in return. They became friends, and though other kids moved in and out of their lives they always seemed to end up together. At sixteen she finally worked up the courage to kiss him, and when she was admitted to the best engineering school in the country he got a job so he could move them into an apartment near campus the day he aged out of the foster system. He’d been so proud of her. Things had been good. She still wasn’t sure what had happened.
They passed the aviary. There were flightless birds, ones with clipped wings. There was a net over the opening to the sky to keep the unclipped ones from flying away.
“I want you to come to Ravka and develop Solnyshko .”
Alina started. “What? Why?”
“We need a source of power that is durable, easy to make, can be transported to villages and doesn’t rely on coal and oil we don’t have. We’re far enough north that most of the year standard solar power just isn’t an option. We can give you the materials and collaborators to make this. A factory, when it’s ready.”
“Why in Ravka? Why not just wait until I develop it here?”
“We need it now. We don’t have time to wait for you and the Lantsov boy to figure out how to set up a lab and develop a product, and we won't be able to buy enough at whatever markup a company that would buy the design would charge.” He turned to her. “Nikolai isn’t the scientist you are. What happens when he loses interest after spending years on the same project? You need funding that won’t disappear because a rich boy decides it’s easier to work on Mommy’s staff instead.”
It occurred to her that the ambassador was right. She stood to lose everything if the business failed and Nikolai would lose nothing. It also occurred to Alina that the ambassador may actually know Senator Lantsov.
“Come run your own lab. For your own people.”
She blinked. My people . She’d never had people before. Unless you counted Mal.
Oh. “I can’t just pack up and go to Ravka. I can’t leave my boyfriend.”
“Why.”
“Why can’t I leave him?” Alina sputtered. “He … needs me.”
The ambassador seemed to ponder this for a moment. “You can leave him, you know.”
“What? ” Alina turned, furious. He glanced her way before turning his attention back to the road ahead.
“You can leave him. You’re unhappy.”
She spoke through gritted teeth. “You met me ten minutes ago — don’t act like you know everything about me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t. But I learned enough when you answered ‘he needs me’ instead of ‘I love him.’”
She swallowed the bad taste in her mouth. She did still love Mal, probably, but she hadn’t had the thought in a long time. She held on to Mal as a piece of her past. He clung to her like a lifeboat.
They stopped in front of a spider money who stared fixedly at Alina.
“I’m flying back to Ravka on Thursday. We’ll pick you up that morning at seven.”
“ Thursday ,” Alina gasped. “You expect me to, after one conversation, pack up and leave everything in three days?”
“Why not.”
This was infuriating. “Other than my plan of developing this with Nikolai, and my boyfriend, I don’t know — midterms and finals?”
“I’m sure we’ll be able to find someone suitable to proctor them for you.”
She exhaled loudly. "My student loans."
"We can take care of those."
“I don’t even have a passport.”
His lifted an eyebrow, and she realized that she’d as good as told him that she would go. “I’m the Ravkan ambassador. This isn't a problem.”
A short distance away, the woman who had been on the phone when they’d first met was approaching. The bodyguard stepped towards the ambassador and said a few low words in his ear. He nodded as the woman joined them, then turned to Alina.
“Seven Thursday morning, Alina,” he said, voice soft, letting his hand rest lightly on her shoulder.
She watched him walk away, flanked to either side by the bodyguard and the woman.
“Wait!” she called, and they turned back to her, the bodyguard still scowling, the ambassador’s face unreadable.
"Why —" She wasn’t sure which question to ask. Why her? Why now? Why …
"Why a zoo?" she settled on, finally, aware of how lame it sounded. She tried to control a blush as the bodyguard clearly stifled a groan.
There was a minuscule twitch in the ambassador’s facial muscles that she thought might be amusement. "Zoos are good reminders."
Alina watched him walk away before turning back to the spider monkey. It blinked a few times, eyes wide, slow.
She thought she understood what the ambassador had meant.