She’d thought nothing of it when she’d first seen him hobbling around the beach with his security - his shrivelled, bent arm not quite filling its sleeve or black leather glove and shuffling walk souvenirs of a Northwest Passage skirmish. He looked too young for them, like a First World War photograph, with his Tintin wisp of blonde hair. He’d rejected a prosthetic on religious grounds which got him discharged. But he didn’t seem particularly religious. And he’d actually made a point of coming all the way out here, for a company that would be folded back under his parents’ larger shell if he did a bad job. He didn’t seem to be doing a good one. He hung out at the bar, whose size he had personally invested in doubling and brought in handpicked Moscow nightlife mixologists. Out of all three Nemaska sites he now owned, he seemed to want to turn this most remote one into a VK selfie spot, hosting weekend stayovers for consultants and sycophantic followers of his unit’s streamed exploits. Occasionally he made friends with public personalities and ladies of easy virtue from the squatter camps. He texted them from his personal phone number, which was shared in whispers at the canteen, saying he wanted to talk about her resume. At the bar. She knew better than to go, or not to go. But when she did he was gentlemanly and apologetic - “I just couldn’t wait to talk to someone else who sees the big picture. You see big picture, no? I read the papers in your CV the other night. My father used to read papers like that around table, family discussion. Best contribution would get new video game. Was rarely me!’

She had actually intended this encounter to happen - she had staked him out at the bar over the course of several weeks, left what she’d read on social media would be read as tokens on the table. His familiarity with her work made it impossible to pretend she would be on his side in the event of a strike, and she really didn’t want to use explicit honeypot tactics, especially since Bol seemed to like her outside of work, complimenting her on her dress and letting her eat her bowl of tofu chili under his stump while he looked down and serenely took in the circle of patchwork spread on the ground below him like a new type of flower. There were lots of those blowing in from the south, turning the strangely empty zen garden she remembered between the trees into a garish weekly-changed shag carpet of white and purple knapweeds, knotweed, purple loosestrife. Distribution patterns you could almost dance to as you sidestepped further out into the woods. The meat in Bol’s hoagies was muskrat from his own traps - which he set, marked with bright yellow flags, near burrows and trash sites in the camps themselves where the yurts and trailers spilled down to the water. It was surprisingly quiet at night; the band had agreed on a broad set of noise and light regulations with the intention of keeping the settlements indistinguishable from the landscape. Enforcement was mostly left up to Lev’s security but the band looked the other way if teenagers jumped someone for poaching. Bol himself spent less time thinking about the ownership of the company than the water indicators, the migration patterns, the waste processing flowchart. The government said it couldn’t keep paying for expansions to waste processing if the mine kept taking refugees, but they didn’t want the refugees to stop flowing north and to be forced to deal with them either. “They want the river to deal with them,” he’d remark matter-of-factly, “the sea to deal with them, they want us to deal with them. With the mine waste, with the people waste.”

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