This level of expansion meant the trust was now making decisions that could not simply be Bol’s dictatorial decision. Indeed, it quickly became apparent that he was still treating the trusteeship as just that: the resource allocation decisions in his name were being made by the NASU chapter. The board of directors Lev theoretically represented - and, more reservedly, the government, more reservedly - wanted to strip him of the position. Meanwhile the money supply was starting to contract and Lev had squirrelled away enough to begin the promised next expansion. His shareholders wanted to blast the open pit even wider; NASU wanted to start expanding the mines underground and using underground paste backfill - followed by a long term cleanup of the river. Bol as the trustee wasn’t in on the highest-secrecy strike plans, but one night Polly heard NASU’s current grasp of them from Thomas’ abandoned radio transmitter, rolled in a seam of his sleeping bag. Thomas was off doing overtime or something else; she was lucky she had decided not to stay with Bol as she now did most nights, at his family home in Nemaska village, where despite everything there was still more space than the yurt, and a desk next to his bed looking out on a uniform skyline where the black of the trees seemed thin and harmless between the subtly different blue glows of sky and ground; the feeling of a home that would protect her and not blow away overnight, even if the memory of her unmedicated mind came over her medicated mind like a half-serious superstition; a round carpet with the texture of an overloved stuffed animal, where she could sit and stitch.

(She never stayed with Lev, at least overnight, although she had been on board the yacht he had permanently anchored in Hudson’s Bay - Sunday mornings for Orthodox Mass and brunch. It wasn’t the stereotype of an oligarch he played in his white leather coat at the bar, shuffling with his floppy glove on the small of a twerking local’s back to hardbass or Kylie Minogue. The interiors were all done in rough wood in the style of a peasant cabin, with no other amenities except a CRT TV with a collection of retro games, which to be fair probably cost more than high-end.)

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