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Nikolai was still struggling to comprehend that any of this was actually happening.
One day, he had been teaching a classroom full of seventh graders about sound waves. By the next, he'd been kidnapped, shoved into a hazmat suit, and instructed to conduct extensive experiments on an alien life-form to determine whether it even qualified as a life-form in the first place.
He let out a long sigh and closed his eyes for a moment.
It was a lot to process.
And that wasn't even the strangest part. No, the strangest part was that the possible life-form in question was currently eating the sun.
What the fuck.
Just yesterday, he'd been gathering his things after sixth period, stuffing worksheets into his bag and mentally planning the rest of his evening. The plan had been simple: stop for a coffee, head home, and spend the night grading assignments while pretending he wasn't putting it off.
Instead, a woman had walked into his classroom.
A very beautiful woman, if he was being honest.
She had dark skin and long, dark curls that spilled over her shoulders. Her eyes were a striking shade of blue. Sharp, intense, and impossible to ignore. She carried herself with an air of confidence that immediately commanded attention.
At first, Nikolai had assumed she was a parent he’d somehow never met. Looking back, he really should have known better.
The woman weaved around desks and chairs and stopped right in front of him.
“Nikolai Lantsov?” she asked.
Her voice was just as commanding as her presence.
“Yes?” Nikolai replied, blinking in confusion.
The suspicion was already beginning to settle in. This wasn't a parent. For one thing, parents rarely addressed him by his full name the moment they met him. Most started with "Mr. Lantsov" or launched directly into a complaint. This woman did neither.
Instead, she studied him for a brief moment. Then she said, "My name is Zoya Nazyalensky. I'm with the Petrova Taskforce."
The name meant absolutely nothing to him.
Nikolai stared.
"The what?"
"The Petrova Taskforce," she repeated. “It’s an international body set up to deal with the Petrova-line problem. I’ve been given a certain amount of authority to find a solution.”
“... Okay?”
The word slipped out before Nikolai could think of anything more intelligent to say. Unfortunately, every answer she gave only seemed to generate three new questions.
The Petrova-line problem, at least, he knew of. He could imagine why there would be an international task force dedicated to it. Humans were curious creatures. And they also rather liked living on Earth. But why was she telling him any of this?
Most importantly, why was she standing in his classroom after school hours talking as though this were all perfectly normal?
Somehow, he was becoming more confused with every passing second.
It was a shame, really. To look this much like a fool in front of a woman this attractive was not how he'd envisioned spending his evening. Under different circumstances, Nikolai would have been busy kicking himself.
Instead, all of his energy was devoted to keeping up with the conversation.
“I’d like to talk to you about a scientific paper you wrote.”
That caught him off guard.
“I haven’t written anything in years.”
It was true.
He hadn't published, researched, or even seriously considered returning to academia in a very long time. Teaching had originally been meant as a temporary detour. A chance to step away while the wildfire he'd started in his academic career burned itself out. Instead, he'd fallen in love with the job. He loved his students, loved watching them discover things for the first time, loved making science feel a little less intimidating. Before he knew it, the months had become years. Rather than postponing teaching to return to science, he'd spent years postponing science to stay in the classroom.
Zoya ignored the comment entirely.
Without missing a beat, she opened her briefcase and pulled out a thick binder. Flipping it open, she glanced down at the first page.
“‘An Analysis of Water-Based Assumptions and Recalibration of Expectations for Evolutionary Models.’ You wrote this, yes?”
Nikolai immediately regretted recognizing the title.
A sigh escaped him.
Of all the things she could have brought up. Of all the papers.
It had been nearly a decade since he'd written it. At the time, he'd been a young researcher with more enthusiasm than sense, happily publishing speculative work that most of his colleagues had dismissed as impractical.
But that hadn’t really been the problem.
The problem had been his arrogance.
Nikolai had always been good with people. He knew how to get what he wanted. He knew how to tell people what they wanted to hear, how to win them over, how to make them listen. At the time, he'd assumed that would be enough.
What he'd failed to account for was one simple fact: people hated having their beliefs challenged.
And that paper had done exactly that.
It hadn't just questioned a few assumptions. It had taken aim at ideas that hundreds of researchers had built their careers around. Stuffy, stubborn researchers who did not appreciate being told they might be wrong.
By the time the arguments had died down, a great many of them hated his guts.
"As I said," he replied, rubbing the bridge of his nose, "it's been a long time."
Long enough, he had hoped, for everyone to forget it existed. Apparently not.
“You spent half of your career combating the assumption that life requires liquid water,” Zoya stated.
It wasn’t really a question, but Nikolai still gave a reluctant nod anyway, as if that might somehow make this conversation feel more normal.
“Clearly, there were better things I could’ve done with my time,” he muttered under his breath.
Zoya didn’t react to the sarcasm. Her expression stayed unreadable, her attention fixed on him with unsettling focus.
“You still stand by what you said?”
The question landed heavier than the rest.
Nikolai let out a short, incredulous scoff. “Of course. I’d be a pretty lame researcher if I did all of that and didn’t actually believe it.”
For a brief moment, something like approval flickered across her face, subtle enough that he might have imagined it.
“Good,” Zoya said simply.
She closed the binder with a firm snap, the sound cutting cleanly through the classroom’s lingering silence. Then she slid it back into her briefcase as if the matter was already decided.
“The ArcLight probe returns tomorrow. You’re going to look at those dots and tell me anything you can about them.”
Nikolai blinked.
Then he blinked again, slower this time, as if repetition might force the moment to resolve itself into something logical. Just to be certain, just to confirm that reality hadn’t quietly shifted out from under him, he checked the room again. The empty desks. The faded equations, still half-erased on the whiteboard. The late afternoon light slanting through the windows.
And Zoya Nazyalensky, still standing there like she belonged in none of it and somehow all of it at once.
“The world put you in charge of solving this problem and you came to a junior high school science teacher?”
“Yes.”
Her answer came without hesitation.
Nikolai felt something between disbelief and amusement tighten in his chest. If he could see his own face right now, he was fairly certain he would have started laughing out of sheer absurdity.
“You want me to look at the dots?” he asked carefully. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
He couldn’t help it. A low chuckle slipped out before he could stop it.
“You must be insane.”
“I assure you, Dr. Lantsov, I am not,” Zoya replied evenly.
Then, for the first time since she’d walked in, she smiled. It was small, barely a curve of her mouth, but there was something sharp and almost amused in it, like she was entertained by a joke he hadn’t fully understood yet.
Despite the fresh wave of confusion flooding his thoughts, Nikolai found himself thinking, almost absently, that he hadn’t seen a more beautiful smile in his life.
“Wouldn’t you want to prove everyone wrong?” she asked. “Whatever these dots are, they live on or near the surface of the sun. Does that sound like a water-based life-form to you?”
“Well… no.”
“There you go, then.”
Nikolai exhaled through his nose, but the amusement didn’t last. It faded quickly under the weight of what she was actually suggesting.
This was absurd. Completely, irredeemably absurd.
“Listen,” he said, more carefully now. “You’re certainly appealing to my ego with this whole ‘prove everyone wrong’ thing, but surely there are more qualified people, right? I haven’t… done this sort of thing in years.”
“Oh, other qualified people will look at them,” Zoya had said, as if that settled the matter.
A pause.
“You’ll just happen to be the first.”
A sound pulled Nikolai out of his thoughts.
The door behind him opened, then closed with a soft, decisive click.
Zoya Nazyalensky stepped into the room.
His kidnapper.
…Okay, technically that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t actually been kidnapped. There had been no struggle, no forced removal, no dramatic bag-over-the-head situation. He’d come willingly.
But he also had the distinct feeling that “willingly” was doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
When an authoritative, extremely composed, and, unfortunately for his critical thinking skills, very attractive woman tells you to get into a black car, you don’t really end up having much of a choice in the traditional sense.
So if he wanted to mentally classify this as a kidnapping, just for the sake of emotional clarity, then honestly, that seemed entirely reasonable. And no one was going to stop him.
“You’re still here,” Zoya pointed out.
There was something almost puzzled in her expression as she looked at him, as though she genuinely hadn't expected to find him in the observation room.
“Yeah…”
Nikolai glanced back at his notes.
It was nearly midnight. About two hours ago, he'd finally dragged himself out of the lab and settled into the observation room. Since then, he'd been furiously writing, trying to capture every observation before it slipped away.
There hadn't been much opportunity for note-taking while he was actually experimenting on an alien dot.
His mind had been moving too fast. Every result, or lack thereof, had raised new questions. Even now, his thoughts were racing, excitement still buzzing through his veins despite the late hour.
He'd forgotten how much fun science could be.
Not teaching science. Not grading assignments about science. Actually doing it. Actually discovering something.
“I’m just writing down everything I tried or found out,” he explained, gesturing vaguely toward the growing stack of papers beside him. “Before I forget. I assume you'd appreciate a written report anyway.”
Zoya studied him for another moment before giving a small nod. Then she pulled a chair over and sat down across from him. Her phone appeared in her hand almost immediately, her fingers moving rapidly across the screen.
Now that she was in the room, Nikolai found it significantly harder to focus on his notes. Still, he let her do whatever it was she was doing for a minute. Given her job, it was probably important. Or classified. Or related to the fact that there was currently an alien dot sitting in the lab across from them.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of him.
“What happens when I’m done being your guinea pig?”
Zoya lifted her head from her phone. “You’re not a guinea pig.”
“Oh, come on,” Nikolai said. “We both know I’m not here just because I believe life can exist without water.” He leaned back in his chair and gestured vaguely toward himself. “I’m expendable to you. Therefore, I’m the perfect person to throw into a room with an alien cell.”
Zoya seemed to latch onto only one part of the sentence. “So it is a cell?”
Nikolai sighed.
“Not a hundred percent sure yet. That's not the point.”
A moment passed.
Then her phone pinged.
Zoya glanced down at the screen. Whatever she read seemed to make up her mind immediately. She rose from her chair, lifted a hand in what might have been a brief gesture of acknowledgment, and walked out of the room without another word.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Nikolai stared after her for a second.
“…Okay then.”
He supposed he couldn't complain. He had work to do anyway.
Turning back to his notes, he resumed writing, trying to organize the day's chaos into something that resembled a coherent report.
A few minutes later, the door opened again.
Zoya returned and sat down in the same chair she'd occupied before. This time, she was carrying a paper bag. Without explanation, she placed it in the center of the table between them.
She opened the paper bag and pulled out two plastic containers. One stayed in front of her. The other she pushed across the table toward him.
Nikolai looked down at it, then back at her.
“What’s this?”
“You haven’t eaten,” Zoya said matter-of-factly.
The statement caught him off guard. Now that he thought about it, he couldn't actually remember the last time he'd eaten. Breakfast, probably. The day had become a blur somewhere around the discovery of possible extraterrestrial life.
“You might be expendable, Dr. Lantsov,” she continued, already opening her own container, “but if you were to die, we'd rather it not be of starvation.”
Nikolai stared at her for a moment.
Then he laughed.
“That's the nicest thing you've said to me all day.”
“I wasn't trying to be nice.”
“That somehow makes it better.”
He pulled the container closer.
The moment she mentioned food, he became acutely aware of just how hungry he was. Apparently, excitement over potentially discovering an entirely new form of life was surprisingly effective at suppressing basic human needs.
He opened the container and dug in without much hesitation.
For a while, neither of them said anything. They simply sat across from each other, eating in the quiet observation room while the facility hummed softly around them.
It was strange. Not unpleasant, exactly. Just strange.
Mere hours ago, Nikolai had been a science teacher whose biggest concern was whether his students would remember the difference between frequency and amplitude for next week's quiz. Now he was spending his evening studying an alien organism and sharing a late-night meal with the woman who had recruited—kidnapped, according to him—him into the whole mess.
Somehow, it was both nice and deeply weird.
It wasn't awkward, though. Zoya seemed perfectly content to eat while scrolling through something on her phone, and Nikolai found that he didn't mind the company.
“So,” he said eventually, when the silence stretched a little too long, “really, what happens when you decide you’ve had enough of me playing lab rat?”
Zoya shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. “We let the rest of the world have a stab at it.”
Nikolai hummed under his breath.
That made sense, in a detached sort of way. Major scientific problems were rarely solved by a single person alone. Collaboration, shared effort, escalation through expertise. Standard procedure.
“So basically,” he clarified, “you let me go crazy with these dots for a few days, and then when you’ve had enough, I just go home?”
“Pretty much.”
He looked down into his nearly empty container of food, absently pushing around the last bite.
Something about that answer sat oddly with him.
Logically, it was exactly what he had just described. Temporary assignment. Controlled environment. Limited scope. Nothing unusual for a classified scientific operation, if one ignored the alien organism, and the fact that he had been recruited in a school classroom by a woman with the authority of a small government.
Still.
It had barely been a day, and yet the idea of simply walking away from it already felt strange. Because he wasn’t just “playing lab rat,” as he’d put it.
He was helping study something unprecedented. Maybe even something that mattered. Something that could lead to saving the sun, and, by extension, Earth. And, annoyingly, that made it feel a lot less like a temporary distraction than it probably should have.
Even more annoyingly, there was another thought lingering at the edge of his focus that had nothing to do with astrophysical anomalies or extraterrestrial biology.
He wanted to get to know Zoya better.
It wasn’t practical. It wasn’t relevant. It certainly wasn’t helping him process the fact that he was currently involved in what could generously be described as an international scientific emergency.
But there was something about her that kept catching his attention anyway. Something precise, controlled, and just sharp enough around the edges to make her difficult to read. She was almost as intriguing as the alien maybe-cell sitting in the lab.
Nikolai lifted his head and turned back to Zoya.
“Is there an alternative where you let me keep working on this along with the rest of the world?” he asked, offering what he hoped was his most charming smile.
He was fairly certain he looked exhausted at this point, but whatever. Charm was more about intent than presentation.
Probably.
It was worth a try, anyway.
Zoya’s brows knit together slightly.
“We wouldn’t really need you.”
The answer was immediate, flat, and entirely unhelpful.
Nikolai blinked once.
Then, more firmly, “I want to help.”
Zoya didn’t respond immediately.
She studied him for a long moment, expression unreadable, as if weighing the request against a list of factors he wasn’t allowed to see. Eventually, she looked away, thinking it over in silence.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said at last.
It wasn’t a promise. Not really. It wasn’t even a clear agreement. Just something loose enough to be interpreted in multiple ways depending on how generous she felt later. She could have been humoring him. Keeping him cooperative. Redirecting the conversation so he stayed useful. Nikolai considered all of that.
He smiled anyway.
“It’s late,” Zoya said, closing the matter. “Go home, Dr. Lantsov. Sleep deprivation can also lead to death.”
That earned her a quiet chuckle from him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
He gathered his things, still feeling the lingering buzz of the day in his veins as he stood.
On his way out, he lifted two fingers in a lazy salute.