The helicopter ride had felt endless nothing but cold air, gunmetal, and the sound of muffled sobbing behind a cloth gag. She could still smell the fuel, still feel the sting of the zip-ties cutting into her wrists. They’d caught them both off guard Hopper had tried to hold them off, yelling for her to run but there were too many. They hit him hard, again and again, until he stopped moving. When she screamed, they’d turned the butt of a rifle on her too. Everything went dark.

When Joyce woke, the cold was the first thing she felt. It bit into her skin like punishment, seeping into her bones until she couldn’t stop shaking. The walls were concrete, slick with condensation; a single light flickered overhead, humming like it might go out any second.

For the first few days if they were even days she hadn’t seen anyone else. Just guards barking orders in Russian, dragging her from the cell for questions she didn’t have answers to. They’d wanted to know what she and Hopper had done at Kamchatka. Who sent them. What the Americans knew. Every time she said nothing, they got rougher. Her voice was already gone by the third interrogation.

She thought Hopper was dead. She’d seen him fall before, in the blast, and now again on the floor of that transport. But one night, when the hallway lights dimmed, she heard it the faint clank of a chain being dragged, the sound of someone breathing, ragged and familiar.

Joyce lifted her head from the cot, her heartbeat stuttering. “Hopper?” Her voice cracked like glass.

There was silence. Then a weak chuckle. “You sound worse than I do, Joyce.”

Her breath caught. She scrambled off the cot, crossing to the bars, pressing her face between them to see. He was across the hall or what was left of him. His head had been shaved, the beard gone, replaced with bruises and cuts that ran along his jaw. He looked thinner, colder, like he’d aged years in days.

“God,” she whispered, tears burning her eyes. “They told me you were dead.”

He gripped the bars tightly, the metal biting into his palms. “Would’ve been easier if I was.” Then, softer, “You shouldn’t be here, Joyce.”

She laughed bitterly, the sound broken and small. “I could say the same to you.”

They sat there, facing each other through rusted steel and silence. For the first time since being dragged here, Joyce felt something other than despair something like warmth. But it didn’t last long.

The guards didn’t like them talking. Every time they caught the two exchanging words, they punished them. Hopper got it worse beatings, long nights in the cold yard. Joyce could only listen from her cell, clutching the blanket around her shoulders as she heard him scream in the distance.

Her own sessions weren’t much better. They cut her hair short, laughed about how “American women break slower.” The burn on her arm from a cigarette still throbbed under the bandage. They wanted to make her forget who she was to make her talk but she wouldn’t give them anything. Not even her fear.

And yet, no matter how bad it got, she found her eyes drifting across the hallway, searching for his silhouette. He was her anchor in this nightmare, the only piece of home left in a place that was designed to break them both.