New Holland, St. Petersburg.
Time: 1:30 am
Xavier, the only person on the ice. He thinks "Maybe, it's not the time...", shrugging shoulders.
But suddenly, a distant swish from the other side of the rink. "Привет" says a thin female voice.
Xavier, surprised, replies: "Katarina, thought you wouldn't be able to make it. D'you have it?"
Katarina takes out one of her skates, and pushes it towards Xavier.
Xavier, quickly replaces one of his skates with Katarina's, recognizing the beeping sound coming from it.
He sighes.
10 years ago, Xavier was a physicist at MiG, the Russian Aircraft Corporation. He was known as the humorous and convivial guy among his co-workers. He has been that way ever since he'd moved to Russia. But only until that day on which a long-haired man with a familiar face quickly pushed a black envelope into his pocket at the Dostoyevskaya metro station in Moscow, and disappeared into the crowd.
He thought they could not find him, but they did.
Katarina, a computational physicist from Kaliningrad. She spent most of her professional life in Germany, working on the development of Wendelstein 7-X, the experimental nuclear fusion reactor. But she knew that she would have to turn back to St. Petersburg to finish what her father started, once and for all.
Xavier skated back to his home that night, with one of his skates beeping into the cold, St. Petersburg night.
To be continued.
By stochasticmind