Reveille and Rebellion
The alarm clock reads 4:59 when Nikolai Volkov's eyes open.
He does not need the beep. He never has. Twenty-two years of discipline have carved a clock into his bones, and that clock does not tolerate snoozing. His body simply knows: five o'clock, time to rise, time to begin the machinery of another day. Beside him, Karim sprawls diagonally across two-thirds of the mattress like a starfish that lost a bet, one arm flung over Nikolai's pillow, mouth slightly open, breathing with the deep, untroubled rhythm of a man who has never once in his life worried about being late for anything.
Nikolai eases himself upright without disturbing the blanket's careful tension, swings his legs over the edge, and plants his feet on the cold floor. Day one thousand four hundred and something of marriage. He has stopped counting precisely, though he suspects Karim keeps a tally somewhere, probably scrawled on a napkin shoved into a kitchen drawer between expired coupons and a single, mysterious skeleton key that opens nothing in their apartment.
He makes the bed first — always the bed first, even with Karim still breathing in it, which requires a logistical patience usually reserved for hostage…