Midby, Northern Sweden

The Midby village was located about 20 kilometers north of Luleå, a reasonably safe distance from my birthplace given all the time that had passed, and about four kilometers from the seaside. It had just one small grocery shop, and for anything more complicated than that I had to ride my scooter along the coastline to one of the nearby towns, none of them much bigger than Midby itself, in the bitter cold of the Swedish winter. Not that I had to do that very often; I had come in with all the equipment that I needed, and planned to ride out the winter in a small traditional country house painted with red ochre and with the door and window frames highlighted in white. The house had the characteristic enclosed porch in front of the entry hall to keep the winter cold outside, and in addition to them and the bathroom the ground floor had four rooms: the living room, two bedrooms and a traditional kitchen with a fireplace that would keep the house warm during winter storm blackouts. The porch held the staircase to the attic which was mostly a cold dark uninsulated space with a special built-in summer bedroom at the northernmost end where the midnight sun would be least annoying. The rustic atmosphere was somewhat disfigured by a satellite dish, but there was only so much peace and quiet I could take without a few dozen movie and documentary channels on a huge TV set.

I had rented the place in early December when snow had already arrived and the northern lights were blazing bright almost every night. I´d been lucky; the 11-year cycle of the Sun was at its most active, promising spectacles all winter long, and many nights I bundled up and lay in the soft snow on my back, watching the shimmering ribbons of electric storms high above. Some nights, when the world was exceptionally quiet, I could hear the barely audible whisper of the snow just a fraction of a second after some particularly strong ribbon flared across the sky. That´s how I spent my Christmas Eve, in the snow, watching the cold and clear skies, but that night all the fiercely burning stars and the dancing shimmer of electricity failed to move me. It felt kind of weird to know that no one was following my transmission. I still carried the coin and everything was recorded for my benefit, but only a quasi AI program kept an eye on the data flow to raise an alarm if I found myself in trouble. I would have expected it to be a liberating experience, but instead I found myself feeling lonely. Not even Alex was calling me as we had parted ways with a huge fight when I´d told him about my trip to Paris, once again lying about the motive, and we still hadn´t made up. But then, it was only natural that he´d want to distance himself from me and all the weirdness that I couldn´t and wouldn´t shake.

As the winter advanced, wind blew chest-high snow drifts like dunes around the house during snowstorms, and getting to the nearest snow ploughed road sometimes took a real effort. Never having been a big fan of Nordic skiing, I now discovered the practical side of the sport and got all the latest gear in one of my trips to a nearby town, including a one-piece, professional ski suit. After that, I learned the lay of the land quite well even though I did my best to avoid coming in contact with the people of the village. During the short daylight hours I spent a lot of time just watching snowflakes play in the wind outside my warm cozy house, while listening to music or keeping distractedly in touch with the world through the Internet.

One day in early February, with the first signs of the sun creeping a little higher in the sky and the temperature having risen to just below freezing for the first time for days, I decided to go out for some exercise. I put on the nylon ski suit which stretched over my body like a silky blue second skin, with a few strategically placed black stripes that underlined the male V-shape. It was just like a fetish costume, except that as long as you carried a pair of skis it was totally legit in public. The part I always had problems with was the bulge, though; the suit designer´s ideas about the male body were rather different from Engineer´s, and it took a tight pair of underwear to be able to fit everything into the suit without looking like some kind of a maniac. Even then, passers-by couldn´t help a thoughtful double-take when they saw me.

It was early afternoon, and the sun already hung close to the horizon, but on this latitude it would take three more hours for it to set. I had plenty of time before I´d have to get back home. I soon found tracks left by someone else, which always made skiing much easier, and followed them through a small forest and into open farmland. The tracks ran to the direction of a large country house, and for the first time I realized it wasn´t a dairy farm but stables as four horses were outside in their enclosure, enjoying the relatively warm weather. A large green and yellow tractor was inching along the road towards the house, trailing a huge cargo of hay bails on a flat bed. Too lazy to move to deep fresh snow from the easy tracks, I skied closer to the house and watched the driver back the flat bed halfway into a tall barn. He got off the tractor, and as he climbed on top of the bails I had a better look at him. A Nordic blond: tall with a well-proportioned, strong body that had been built by throwing bails instead of gym. I skied onward. It was becoming clear the the tracks originated from the house, and it crossed my mind that whoever had made them had skied directly between my house and the stables. His wife, perhaps, curious of a newcomer to the village.

I was still some distance away when he noticed me and glanced at my direction, and I could tell he had attractive regular features: a square jaw and broad cheekbones, with a wide but unsmiling mouth and a straight nose. All in all, handsome straight-guy-next-door looks. I pegged him around thirty years of age, and the closer I got the more I liked what I was seeing. Warmed up by the exercise he had pulled off his cap and showed a shock of blond curly hair, about a month beyond the point where it should have been cut. I skied next to the flat bed, trying to figure out some neighborly thing to say, when he stopped and looked at me. His eyes lingered a moment on my bulge and I thought he seemed a little surprised when he caught himself doing so.

“Hi,” was the smartest thing I could come up with.

“Hi,” he answered gruffly, and ran his eyes over my suit. “Want to have a real workout instead of just skiing? I´ve got some bails here to take care of.”

“Sure,” I said, hiding my smile while releasing the skis.

He gave me a dubious look. “Can you even walk in those shoes?”

“We´ll find out,” I replied, scampering up the mountain of bails like a happy little monkey knowing that straight or bi, he couldn´t avoid checking out my ass in the tight suit.

“Can you pile them up against the back wall?” he asked once I got to the top and realized that the barn seemed much bigger on the inside and that stumbling down might easily send me to an emergency room with a few broken bones.

“OK,” I said and picked up a bail.

When I got back there was another one waiting for me. I was secretly quite impressed by the distance he could throw them, but said nothing, and we fell into the rhythm of the work.

“What´s your name?” he asked after a while.

“Jonatan.”

Fuck! Without thinking, I´d given him my real name. If he ever saw my passport he´d think I´d lied to him. Now wouldn´t that be ironic.

“I´m Harry,” he said.

Exchanging a few words every now and then I managed to find out that he wasn´t married and lived alone, but in Luleå there was a girlfriend who had been one of the clients who came to ride the horses. His real income didn´t come from horses, though; apparently he owned large swathes of forest towards the town of Älvsbyn and the stables were more like a hobby.

“So, basically, you could live anywhere in the world?” I asked.

“I guess,” was the somewhat surprised answer. “But I like it here.”

The sun was touching the horizon when we finished the job.

“Thanks Jonatan,” he said once I was back on the ground. “Listen, I´m warming up the sauna tonight. We could eat something, have a sauna, and later I could give you a ride home. I owe you.”

“Sounds good.”

I discovered that he didn´t subscribe to the in-house electric sauna philosophy, and had an old-fashioned sauna building which looked like a miniaturized version of my house with the red ochre and white paint. We picked up some small logs from a shed and took them into the sauna, and I sat on a bench and watched him build a fire in the stove. The place smelled wonderful, of wood and smoke and soap, and the single small window cast a pleasantly dim light into the room. I realized the sauna didn´t even have tap water: there was a container attached to the stove where we would get hot water, and a large plastic barrel almost full of cold water standing on the floor.

“You do have a shower in the house?” I quipped.

“I do, don´t worry,” he said and fell quiet, his back turned.

Now why would he think I´d worry about him having a shower or not, I wondered and then reminded myself that I had just asked. Let´s not start imagining things, I scolded myself, but looking around the sauna I was beginning to have second thoughts about staying. What would happen to my self-control once we both got naked and hot and were sitting right next to each other in this small dimly lit place?

The fire took, and we sauntered back to the main building. The house was furnished in a perfectly typical local style, with lots of wood and red bricks and leather with a few incongruous paint jobs thrown in. I bet the curtains had been chosen by his girlfriend. I discreetly looked for a photo, and there it was in the living room bookcase, a fresh-faced slim blonde standing next to one of the horses. He noticed me noticing and said, not without pride, that her name was Britta.

“You make a good-looking couple,” I said, well aware that it would sound a bit weird to him.

The huge TV set in the living room was the same brand and size as mine, and a quick glance at his film collection proved that we had almost similar taste in movies, too. The familiar titles of 2001: Space Odyssey, Solaris and Avatar were stashed in between the Bourne series and, God forbid, Forrest Gump.

We prepared the food in near complete Nordic silence, with me wondering if my earlier remark had something to do with it. We were having a moose and vegetables stew – a friend had brought him some from a hunt – with extra potatoes and excellent dark rye bread. He drank milk but I preferred the diet Pepsi he kept in the fridge “for Britta”. Halfway through the meal I decided I needed to get the conversation going again, and told him my stock lies about my parents being in China for an engineering job.

“What´s your last name?” he asked, and I gave him the name in my passport so that at least half of my identity would be consistent with my stories.

“And yours?” I tallied.

“Sundström.”

I almost choked in my moose stew. It´s a common last name in Sweden, I reminded myself.

“That sounds kind of familiar,” I said faux thoughtfully. “I think one of my uncles had a friend called Sundström somewhere near Luleå... Wait... I think his name was Johan?”

My mother had had an estranged brother I had never met and who was something like twenty years younger than her.

“My father´s name is Johan.”

“Really?”

Focusing on my stew I made some feverish calculations. The result was that whoever this Johan was, he really, really needed to have had Harry when he was young.

“I wonder if it´s the same Johan,” I said, reaching for more bread. “I think he had a kid when he was still in his teens. His parents didn´t approve.”

Harry laughed. “Then it´s not my father. He had me when he was already forty.”

“What´s your mom´s name?”

“Susanna.”

Fuck me... Harry was my first cousin. This was exactly the kind of thing that happened when you lived in the countryside. There just weren´t enough people to go around.

For the rest of the meal, I was in silent panic. Refusing the sauna would be considered rude at this point, but the idea of the calamity that might happen to me in the sauna – and caused by none other than my own cousin for heaven´s sake – was driving me crazy. Once we´d finished, Harry told me that he´d go and add some wood into the stove, and asked me to make myself comfortable in the living room while he was gone. I sat down in the leather couch and fretted over the situation, knowing that my guardian angel program was going through algorithms like crazy trying to decide whether to red flag or not to red flag. After a while I came to the logical conclusions that a) Harry was straight and b) he´d never know I was his cousin anyway. So why worry?

Half an hour later, I got pretty worried pretty quickly as we entered the small changing room of the sauna. While I stalled with my shoes and socks Harry was already stripping off his clothes, unselfconsciously like any straight guy, revealing a strong thick neck and broad shoulders, then biceps that were so big he had trouble pulling his shirt off and a pair of hard, meaty pecs. He didn´t turn his back while pulling down his trousers and the girth of his thighs was nothing short of spectacular. I stole a glance at his underwear when a leg of his trousers got snagged around an ankle, forcing him to hop around awkwardly a couple of times, and knew that I was in real trouble. Apparently, not everyone in the family needed Engineer´s tricks. When it was the turn of the underwear and not only a massive uncut dick but also a pair of heavy, shaved balls tumbled out, I had to turn and pretend that the zipper of my suit was stuck.

“What´s wrong?” he asked, and when I turned to answer him over my shoulder I saw that he was standing behind me totally naked.

“The zipper,” I explained. “It sometimes does that. You just go ahead.”

“No, wait,” he insisted. “Let me have a look. I bet I have stronger fingers than you do.”

Not one to dither uselessly he put a large hand on my shoulder, instantly aggravating my situation, and turned me around. Thanks to the carefully chosen underwear my problem wasn´t immediately too obvious even though Harry seemed a little taken aback just the same.

“Let me see,” he said, focusing tightly on the problem which vanished miraculously as soon as he tried to move the zipper. “There you go.”

Then he was gone, and I had a few seconds to pull myself together. I peeled off the suit and pulled down my underwear, took a deep breath, and entered the sauna. Darkness had fallen outside the small window, and the room was lit only by a dim lantern and a few rays of flickering light that escaped from the ill-fitting stove door. As luck would have it, Harry was pouring water over his head while rinsing himself and didn´t see me enter, but the custom demanded that I do the same before climbing on the benches. The sight of water pouring down his muscular back and the perfect round glutes in the dim warm light of the sauna nearly made me lose the fragile grip I had on my self-control, and as soon as he had finished I grabbed the ladle from his hand and splashed cold water all over my body. To any onlooker, there was no question whether my dick was swollen or not, but I hoped the state remained within explicable margins.

When I turned to climb to the benches Harry let out a friendly chuckle. “For a kid you sure pack some big meat between your legs.”

That did it. I felt blood rush into my dick and I quickly settled down, drawing my legs up to hide my hard-on. To keep it out of Harry´s sight, I had to press it down against my right thigh at just the right angle, and as the shaft kept getting harder and harder it took ever more effort to keep it in the right spot without looking awkward.

“Would you throw some water on the stove?” Harry asked, nodding at the small wooden bucket and stove ladle sitting next to me.

I swallowed as I went through several possible scenarios in my mind. Using my left hand would look totally awkward, and moving my right hand would not only make my hard-on spring up but also probably slap loudly against my abs. Pushing the bucket to Harry would have the same consequences. He was looking at me, puzzled by my not moving.

Then he chuckled gleefully. “I´m fucking with you, kid. I know you have a big ol´ boner there.”

My face flashed red and I didn´t know what to say.

“Oh come on,” Harry continued. “Relax. I was your age once and I know what it´s like.” He frowned. “How old are you, exactly?”

I had to go with my passport. “Fifteen.”

His frown deepened a little but he said nothing. I set my feet down on the lower bench, a further encouragement for my now totally visible hard-on, and his eyes widened.

“Fuck,” he said, amazed. “That´s big.”

Trying to make a joke, I grabbed my dick – my fingers didn´t reach around the shaft – and pointed it around like a garden hose.

“It can get pretty embarrassing at times,” I admitted.

Then it really did. A huge glob of precum squeezed out of the tip, hang there for a second, and started running down the shaft. Dismayed, I let go of my dick, and watched as it swayed heavily up and down and sprung another big glob of precum off the tip.

“Sorry-” I started, but he only laughed and shook his head.

“Don´t you have a girlfriend?”

“No,” I said, deciding not to elaborate.

“You need one,” he laughed and dropped the subject, pulling the wooden bucket to himself and throwing a ladleful of water on the stones.

I stole a glance at his direction and noticed that the heat had had some effect on his dick as well. Fat and swollen, it rested on the bench between his muscular legs. I sat back, trying to relax and enjoy the sauna, but there was nothing to be done. With Harry sitting next to me, naked and handsome, my dick just refused to go down. In the end I gave up, and scampered down to the floor to soap up. Harry soon followed, but kept just enough distance not to have my hard-on slap against his thighs as I maneuvered in the small space with the soap and rinsing water. Apart from another joke, “Don´t expect me to wash your back as long as you have that boner,” he ignored my hard-on, and when we were toweling and cooling off in the changing room my dick finally started to relax. The air outside felt very cold after the sauna. We walked back to the house and had a drink in the kitchen, and then it was time for him to take me back home. He drove a large Japanese pick-up truck, and I threw my skis on the flat bed before climbing inside. The ride didn´t take long, and when we got to my house – or as close as we could, as the snow was blocking the last part of the road – he said he wanted to ask me something.

“You said you won´t be going back to school until next fall, right?” he started. “I need a hand in the stables, and I was wondering if you´d be interested in working for me, say, three afternoons every week?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised at the question and how enthusiastic I was about the idea. “I´d like that.”

“Great,” Harry said. “Britta is coming for the weekend, so I´ll pick you up at 2p.m. on Monday?”

“OK.”

The weekend dragged by ever so slowly, and for the first time I was bored in my red and white house. There didn´t seem to be anything interesting on the satellite channels, I didn´t have the patience for surfing the web, and the weather turned cold and nasty so I couldn´t even go out. Finally, on Monday afternoon, Harry´s pick-up truck showed up at 2p.m. sharp and I scurried through the snow banks to the car. He greeted me with a brief and gruffy smile as if he was regretting his offer and my mood deflated. We barely exchanged a word during the trip, but once we reached the stables and he showed me what to do his mood seemed to lighten. At the end of the day his regrets seemed to have disappeared and we talked about the chores on the way back to my house, and he told me he´d need me again on Wednesday. Just before I left the car he made a joke about Wednesday, a traditional mid-week sauna day, telling me to “take care of things” so that I wouldn´t have to worry about embarrassing myself.

“Do you want me to work for you, or do you want me to go blind?”

He chuckled and waved as the car pulled away. In the following days we formed our routine: he picked me up three afternoons every week, and most days we had an early dinner and a sauna once we had finished with work. My hard-ons persisted and provided ammunition for his jokes. Whenever Britta was around, I wasn´t invited.

At the beginning of March, when there still was no sign whatsoever that the winter might one day end, Harry asked me out of the blue if was free on the next Saturday night.

“Britta is in Stockholm for the weekend,” he explained, “and I´d like to go to the movies in Luleå. What do you think? Are you free?”

“Yes, I´d like that,” I said.

He shot me a sideways glance. “You don´t have too many friends here, do you?”

I shrugged. “Haven´t really looked for them.”

“You shouldn´t have stayed out of school this year,” he said, genuinely concerned. “All alone in that house. It´s not good for you.”

“I like it here,” I countered. “It´s not that bad at all.”

“Still.”

He picked me up at seven on Saturday night so that we´d have time to grab something quick to eat first. When it came to the movie there wasn´t much of a choice available, and we went to see a rather maligned fourth installment of a science-fiction franchise. All night long, we were both quiet and subdued and the movie, not the best in the series, didn´t provide much to talk about on the drive back home. The night was clear, and we watched the icy road slip by in silence, the low rumble of his powerful truck in the background.

Back at my house, I discovered that the driveway had been cleared of snow.

“I asked one of the neighbors to plough it when he happened to drive by,” Harry explained.

“Thanks,” I said, touched by his consideration. “One more storm and I would have been cut off from the world until May.”

“I think I´d have needed you before that,” he grumbled and drove the car all the way the house.

As I was getting off, he asked me if I´d seen the third movie of the series, reputed as the best one. Of course I had.

“No,” I answered. “Why?”

“I have it on Blu-Ray. Do you want to see it one of these nights?”

“Sure. Any time you want. I´m curious about it.”

“Tomorrow?” he said, and then suddenly looked as if he wanted to bite his tongue.

I hesitated, trying to figure out if he wanted to see me on Sunday or not. Well, he had asked, I told myself.

“If that´s OK with you, yes. I have nothing better to do.”

“Pick you up at seven, then?”

He drove away, and I watched the receding car until it turned to the main road, confused whether I should have said yes or no given how weird the evening had been. In any case, the next day he was as punctual as ever. He´d had his hair cut earlier in the week, and every time I happened to glance at his direction I still couldn´t help noticing how good he looked with a shorter style. I wanted to ask what Britta thought of it but kept my mouth shut. When we got to his place he pointed out a bowl of peanuts on the living room coffee table, and told me that popcorn was coming up soon. To complete the movie snacks array, he also brought a large glass pitcher filled with juice on ice to the table before turning off the lights. A suspicious scent drifted in the air around the pitcher.

“What´s in that?” I asked as we settled down on the couch and he fiddled with the remote control.

“Tropical fruit juice,” he replied, and then added with a crooked smile, “and some rum.”

“I´m going to fall asleep halfway through the movie then,” I warned him, pouring myself a glass.

“The sound effects should keep you awake,” he said, unable not to brag about his ridiculously overpowered sound system which I secretly envied.

The movie started, and every now and then we commented on the action in between mouthfuls of popcorn and an occasional swig of the rum-spiked juice. I was soon feeling pretty good and relaxed, and when Harry said something about an impressive sequence, I added, “The underground power station scene is pretty good, too-” before realizing that we hadn´t gotten to that part yet. I threw a sideways glance at him, but apparently he hadn´t caught my slip of tongue. And besides, if he had, he´d be making fun of me already. After that I paid more attention to what I said but, just as I had warned him, about halfway through the film the rum got to me and my eyelids inexorably began to grow heavier and heavier.

“You weren´t joking about the rum,” Harry said when I nodded off and then came to with a jolt. “Lie down.”

“I´ll crowd you,” I mumbled, focusing back on the movie.

“Don´t worry about it. Lean on me.”

He was being serious. After a moment of hesitation, I sort of snuggled up to him, laid my head on his arm, and found a comfortable position. He was warm, and the plump, relaxed muscles of his strong arm were the best pillow I could imagine.

“I´d be the worst alcoholic ever,” I told him. “I´d always fall asleep long before getting drunk.”

Being so close to him woke me up for a moment, but after another few minutes the rum did its job and I couldn´t help falling asleep. It just felt too good to be so close to him, warm and safe. Maybe twenty minutes later, I gradually woke up to fingers caressing the back of my neck, and every now and then moving up to play with some unruly lock of hair. Suddenly my heart was racing even though I pretended I was still asleep. Of course he knew I wasn´t; but there was no way I´d do anything that might make him stop. Things were quickly getting uncomfortably crowded in my trousers, but I had a baggy pair of cargo pants on and unless he paid close attention there was some hope he might not notice. Not that I really cared; he already knew quite well how trigger-happy I was.

“Jonatan...”

His voice was so hoarse it was almost unrecognizable. I said nothing but nuzzled up to him, and he wrapped one of his big arms around me, pulling me even closer. The side of my face came to rest against his chest, and I could feel his heartbeat, pounding as strong and fast as mine. The only other person who had ever had such an overpowering effect on me was Alex, and this was just the first time Harry was actually touching me. It was kind of scary to think where this might lead.

“So you´d never seen this movie before,” his amused voice rumbled against my ear.

“Maybe I stretched the truth a little.”

“I´m glad you did.”

The need for words fell away. After a while, there were some window-rattling explosions and crashes, but neither of us was paying any attention. We both knew that the first kiss was approaching, and neither he nor I felt a need to hurry. We had all the time in the world.

The next weekend, Britta was back. I´d spent every night at Harry´s during the week, and when he told me on Friday morning that Britta would arrive late in the evening I was stunned.

“I didn´t know how to tell you,” Harry spread his arms, defending himself. “It´s just... I can´t change so much, so fast. You have no idea what it´s like.”

After my initial dismay, I couldn´t say I didn´t understand. After all, I was anything but an idealistic fifteen-year-old who believed that Walt Disney himself had created the world four thousand years ago. I bit my tongue not to say that considering all the things we´d been doing in bed the last four nights – from dusk to dawn, and I was talking about Nordic winter nights here – he´d changed quite a lot, and quite fast, too, but that wouldn´t have been fair. Especially taking into account that they´d easily been among the best nights of my life. The man needed to take his time to come around, and if in the end he didn´t, there was nothing I could do about it. The weekend was going to be hell.

“You do what feels right,” I told him, and then specified, “And I don´t mean what you think is right. I mean what feels right.”

Somehow he managed to look like a big shaggy dog caught under a thunder shower. “I´ll pick you up on Monday then, at the usual hour?”

We both knew I was helpless to say no. “Sure.”

And that was how the rollercoaster ride began. On Mondays, when he picked me up, he´d be sullen and angry at me for upending his life, but usually his mood changed towards the evening. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were great. He´d fuck me over and over again with what I thought of as, in amused quotation marks, “deep romantic passion”, but when he held me tight in his arms and whispered things to me with his soft lips brushing against my ear and his huge lubed cock sliding up deeper and deeper into my ass until I thought I was going to die the quotation marks just vanished and I couldn´t deny that that´s what it was, and it was mutual. Then, Thursday nights, our last night together before the weekend, he´d become so anguished that all he wanted to do was to lie together in the bed, all night long, his arms around me, unable to sleep. In our third week together, late into the dreaded Thursday night, he revealed that our meeting hadn´t been a total coincidence. He´d seen me outside the grocery story one afternoon, and out of curiosity had asked the shopkeeper if a new family had moved into the village. She´d disapprovingly told Harry about me living in the house alone while my parents were in China. The same night, not having anything better to do, he´d skied over to my house to have a look what I was up to.

“I could see right into the house and there you were, wearing only a pair of workout shorts and nothing else, and vacuuming the living room, and it was 10p.m.! Only someone a bit crazy would do that so late at night. I guess you had music on, real loud to drown out the noise, because every now and then you did some silly dance move with the vacuum, and then you laughed, not knowing that somebody was watching... That´s when I first realized that something weird was happening. I kept watching you and thinking about knocking on the door and carrying you, kicking and screaming, into the bedroom and pulling down the gym kit to get at your ass... I just couldn´t believe that I was standing out there in the dark, with a total hard-on, fantasizing about raping a boy. I mean, I´d always sort of known that guys looked good to me too, but since I love to fuck girls, why bother with the complications? And then, the very next day, you were following my ski tracks back to my house and my first thought was that you´d demand to know why I´d been spying on you. Instead, you looked so happy when I came up with the idea of the bails that I invented the whole thing about needing help... I figured you were from the city and didn´t know that farms really don´t need any extra help during the winter.”

“Later, in the sauna, I kept repeating Britta´s name in my head like some kind of a mantra to keep myself from doing something really bad to you... Well, now I know you like that kind of thing. But then, I was in big trouble, and so were you, literally.”

“And I can´t keep this up any longer. Something has to change, I have to make a decision. All things equal, I´d know what to do. But, you see, I´m not a kid any more, like you... I have to think further than that. Britta is talking about getting married. And your parents will be back in the fall and you´ll start school in Stockholm, or in some other country altogether... So you see it´s not that easy.”

The words Britta and marriage took my breath away. This couldn´t be happening. He was breaking up with me.

Harry felt me tense up. “Jonatan... every time I think about you going away it´s like I can´t breathe. But that´s what you´re going to do: you´re going away in any case. To you, us is no big deal. To me, it would completely change everything.”

“Are you telling me you´re not picking me up on Monday?”

Pause. “I don´t know. It would kill me... that´s all I know.”

I tried to stay calm, but I soon realized I couldn´t stay in his place after what he´d just told me. I was about to break down and I wasn´t going to do it in front of him.

He read my mind. “Do you want me to take you back to your place, now?”

We dressed up and climbed into his car, at half past two, and he drove me home. Tonight, I hated the sight of the house I´d liked so much until now. It looked like some kind of a grotesque Brothers Grimm prison. I realized that all the time I´d lived there, not a single person apart from me had entered the place. When he stopped the car, we sort of just looked at each other for a while, and then I got out, without a word, and he drove away.

Before, I had thought that weekends away from him were hell, but now I found out what a fool I´d been. All Friday, I stumbled around like a zombie, unable to form a coherent thought. Saturday was worse. I forced myself to get up from bed in the afternoon and eat something, and then I stood under a hot shower for the longest time, trying to decide whether I should leave Midby on Monday if Harry didn´t show up. But then, Monday would be too soon for him to make his mind up. I couldn´t leave only to have him come and knock on the door of an empty house. But if I stayed, I´d go crazy, I knew that. Around and around, these thoughts repeated themselves in my mind, without making any sense or reaching any conclusions. I found myself sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark, not eating, with no music or TV on, lamps unlit, when my cell phone rang. No one ever called me, not even Harry because we spent all our free time together, and when I saw that the caller ID was an unknown number I found that my hands were shaking a little as I picked up the phone.

“Jonatan?” It was Mauro. “You have to get out of the house.”

“Fuck,” I said, already knowing why, a shock of adrenaline waking me up. I stood up and went to get my coat and shoes. “What happened?”

“We just got some unofficial intelligence. There´s an Axiom operation in progress. We don´t know the timeline and not even who the target is, but it might be you. Call me back as soon as you´re out and in a safe place with people. We´re on our way.”

“OK.”

The problem was, there was no place with people that I could go. Midby didn´t have a bar or a restaurant, and the shop had closed hours ago. Harry was out of question, with Britta spending the weekend at his place. I decided I´d put on long johns and an extra sweater, and ski into the forest to huddle there under a tree until Mauro´s team arrived. Darkness wouldn´t be a problem with the clear sky and an almost full moon reflecting from the snow, and with the extra clothes I could easily handle the cold for an hour and a half. The transmission from the coin couldn´t be triangulated, which obviously meant that it used some weird unknown technology, but my own mesh transmitter would be detected if the Axiom got closer to me than one hundred meters. All I had to do was to get farther than that from the house and I would be OK. I had finished bundling up and was on my way outside to put on the skis when a car turned into the driveway from the main road. I was caught in the headlights, and instantly a powerful motor roared as someone revved it up. I had barely enough time to secure the ski bindings and get moving when the black Jeep was already skidding to a halt in front of the house.

Catch me if you can, fuckers, I thought as I speeded up towards the nearest forest, moving as fast as I could in the virgin snow. I glanced back and saw three hateful, familiar figures jump out of the car, the three mousy accountants who had cut Jonatan open and killed him. They seemed human enough, conferring among themselves, but Mauro had told me that behind the facade they were actually hybrids with an Axiom mind overlaid on human behavioral patterns. They quickly reached a decision that I didn´t like one bit. Three rifles were pulled out from the back of the car, and the group started after me. If it hadn´t been for the rifles I would have laughed at them, imagining the threesome trying to get through the deep snow without skis fast enough to catch me. But when I threw the next glance over my shoulder I saw something that almost froze my blood. They were running through the snow almost as if it wasn´t thicker than a fog; with each step, they threw off a spray of white flakes under the cold moonlight, and they were moving faster than I was. It was the most frightening thing I´d ever seen. I could only imagine the kind of military enhancements they were embedded with: infrared vision, combat routines, hidden arms. And something that allowed them to move through icy snow at a high velocity without ripping their flesh into shreds.

I was just about to reach the forest, where I´d be more sheltered from their rifles, when a young birch tree right ahead of me shuddered and dropped little chunks of snow from its branches. A fraction of a second later the sharp crack of a gunshot reached me. I propelled myself in between the trees, and under the clear moonlight I had just enough time to notice a quivering tranquillizer dart stuck on the white tree trunk. They weren´t using bullets; I would have to be alive for the vivisection.

It was darker inside the forest, and I was sure that the frozen underbrush, hidden by the snow, would slow them down. However, I didn´t have time to congratulate myself before I suddenly felt a sharp gnash at my right calf. Looking down, I saw that a dart had torn a rent in my trousers, and the edges were already turning dark with blood. I quickly checked out the wound and saw that the dart had just grazed my leg and was nowhere to be found, allowing me to move on, but as I kicked with my ski there was already a numb patch on my calf where the sharp pain should have been. The discovery chilled me to the bone. I didn´t know how strong their tranquillizers were, and just one grazing dart might be enough to do the job.

I´d been right about the underbrush slowing them down, but numbness was quickly spreading deeper into my calf muscle and making it very difficult to control the ski. I kept jabbing it between saplings and against trees, and to keep myself from falling I had to reduce my own speed. Then another dart grazed my thigh, and I instinctively swatted it off before much of the venom had had time to enter my bloodstream. However, another numb patch had immediately formed around the wound, and I knew I was losing the fight. I had to come up with something right now or I´d be tied down on their operating table before the night was over.

Still struggling onward, I mentally mapped out my surroundings and a horrible idea came to my mind. There wasn´t any spare time to think the plan over, I just had to do it. I could hear the snapping and crunching of the frozen forest behind me, ever closer as they gained on me, and as I took a sharp turn to the right I inevitably squandered some of my lead as they took a shortcut instead of following my tracks. My leg was growing heavier and heavier, and they could see I was slowing down. They´d be already planning their next step, knowing they had won, but then I finally reached the edge of the forest and a strangely bumpy snowfield opened in front of me. It was one of the ubiquitous northern swamps, a lake left over by receding glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age and now a mixture of bog and half-hidden springs. At the end of March it was mostly frozen over, but the depressions told me where there might be open water hidden under the snow. If I went over a too large of a depression I might fall into the water myself despite the skis, but if I chose my path well one of the Axiom could find himself in deep, cold trouble. Out there, I would be an easy target to their tranquillizer guns, but I had no choice.

I moved on, plotting my course as well as I could to avoid making them realize something was not quite right. My slightly erratic skiing could easily be accounted for the worsening condition of my leg, and I was starting to wonder if my plan would make any difference in the end. If I fell and couldn´t get up, I´d slowly freeze to death in the snow even if I managed to escape the bastards. A tiny geyser of snow blew up next to me, and I knew they´d reached the edge of the forest and were shooting at me again. Another one struck the left ski with a rapping sound and I knew my time was up. I threw myself down in the snow, and crawled to the nearest depression to minimize the target area. They´d reach me within a minute, at most.

I counted the seconds, and upon reaching thirty I thought I should be hearing their crunching of the snow by now. When nothing had happened at sixty, I lifted my head, very carefully, and looked back at the edge of the forest. Only about thirty meters from the trees, a sole figure was visible, on his knees. Two of them had fallen deep into a spring, and in their struggle to get out their strength was only working against them, driving their feet and legs deeper into the bottom mud and tangled, half rotten vegetation. The immediate danger wasn´t drowning, though, but hypothermia in the near-freezing water. Trying to help his friends, the only survivor had no time to shoot at me, and I struggled back to my feet and resumed skiing. I was almost across the swamp and closing in on the forest on the other side when an inhuman howling rose into the night behind me. My body instantly recognized the sound as something that didn´t belong to this world, and I shuddered like an animal trying to shake a nightmare.

The numb area had spread to the entire leg now, and the only way I could keep going was to watch my leg the entire time to make sure it was following my orders. I was starting to think that they´d shot me with an anesthetic instead of tranquillizer, as my mind was as clear as ever. That made sense, considering what they´d been planning to do to me. The numb area was still spreading, though, and I had no other choice left but to try to reach Harry´s place before I´d freeze to death, or the one surviving Axiom came after me with vengeance. I could only hope that Harry and Britta would be home and not somewhere else having fun on Saturday night. Fifteen minutes later, about halfway through to Harry´s house, I fell for the first time and after that every meter was a struggle, but once I´d passed through another small patch of forest I could already see the house across the fields. There was a dim flickering light in the living room, of someone watching TV. They were home. Skiing across the last fields I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see the horrible sight of the Axiom moving through the snow, but perhaps my plan had worked even better than I´d expected. To move the way they did, the freaks had to have enhanced metabolisms and energy reserves which probably kept them alive longer in the cold water, holding back the survivor. In any case, I knew that sooner or later at least one of them would show up.

For the last hundred yards, the leg was completely useless. I had to keep myself upright with the help of the ski poles, and in the end, unable to align the ski, I had lie down in the snow to undo the bindings and leave the skis behind, to half stumble, half crawl the last meters to his snowploughed yard. I couldn´t walk or jump on the icy surface, and I just lay there, calling Harry´s name. At first, nobody heard me, but then there were steps in the enclosed porch and the front door opened. When I saw him standing there, tall and handsome in a rumpled t-shirt and jeans, I started crying. I just couldn´t help it.

He saw the red streak of blood I´d left on the snow, and strode the distance between us with three huge lunges.

“Harry...”

“What happened?” he asked, horrified, scooping me up from the ground in his big arms.

“I was shot – twice,” I tearfully explained as he carried me into the house. “My leg isn´s working-”

Britta appeared, and alarm spread to her face when she saw us. She was much prettier in person than in the photo, and I was so exhausted and scared that this little detail was almost enough to make me burst into tears again. Without a word, she ran to lock the door behind us.

“Who did this?” Harry demanded as he set me down in the living room couch and ran his hands all over me to assess the damage.

When he saw the second red patch on my thigh, without an obvious exit wound, his face went so dark that he was almost unrecognizable.

“They weren´t bullets,” I reassured him. “Tranquillizer darts.”

He stared at me, speechless. “Who would shoot at you with tranquillizer darts?” he asked then, and as he thought it over the dark look returned.

He didn´t have time to ask more questions before my cell phone rang, and I dug it out from the breast pocket of my jacket. It was Mauro, as expected.

“Are you following the live feed?” I asked.

“I was patched into it. We´re on our way.”

“I killed two of them in the swamp” - I heard Britta gasp somewhere in the background - “but one is still after me. What do you want us to do?”

Harry was staring at me, shocked.

“You have to get out of there. They won´t harm Harry and Britta, but after what´s happened I don´t know what they´d do to you.”

“Harry -” I heard Britta say. “I´m calling the police.”

“No!” I raised my voice, and saw that she already had her cell phone out. “Don´t do that.”

Harry shook his head. “Britta, wait. We don´t know what´s going on.”

“Two people are dead, and I don´t know who´s out there. I´m calling,” she repeated and turned her back, punching in the numbers.

Harry´s eyes searched my face in desperation as he tried to decide whether to trust me or to let his fiancée do the rational thing.

“Mauro, she´s calling the emergency number,” I yelled into my phone.

“I heard. Working on it.”

There was a tiny beeping sound, and someone answered Britta´s call.

“Hello, this is-” Britta frowned. “Hello? Hello?”

Frustrated, she started to punch in the numbers again, then noticed the text on the screen. “No service.” She quickly stepped to the regular landline phone sitting in the bookcase, afraid that Harry would stop her, and lifted the receiver. The line was busy.

She turned to look at me, taken aback, and then asked me, her voice low and careful, “Did you just do that?”

I didn´t know what to say. Eyes wide, Harry pulled his hand away, only now realizing that he´d been caressing my hair the way one does to a sick child.

“The people after me are under strict orders not to harm bystanders,” I told her. “You´re safe. But we should all get out of here, now, just in case.” I turned back to Harry. “You have a gun, right?”

He nodded, and got on his feet. As he disappeared into the dark part of the house, Britta stayed in the living room, staring at me. Gradually I realized that her pinched expression and white lips had nothing to do fear. She knew. She´d seen Harry´s face when he saw me out there, and the utterly familiar way he had frisked my body for damage once back inside, and the way he hadn´t been able to stop touching me and caressing my hair to calm me down. We stared at each other without a word, and she took it as a silent confirmation.

“How old are you?” she asked then, quietly.

“Sixteen,” I replied. She didn´t need to know that I was officially under the age of consent.

Harry walked back into the room, a rifle hanging from one hand and a package of ammo in the other, oblivious to our discussion, and told Britta to go and get their coats.

A warbling sound came from my phone, and I lifted it up to my ear.

“Get moving,” Mauro ordered. “Take the road to Älvsbyn.”

Britta came back with their coats and boots, and once they were ready Harry handed the loaded gun over to her.

“I´ll carry him into the car. You shoot anything that moves.”

Going back into the cold moonlight and snow almost freaked me out. I had one arm around Harry´s shoulders, and when he saw my expression he murmured in a low voice, “It´ll be all right. I won´t let anything happen to you.”

Britta kept sweeping the snow-covered fields with the rifle, ready for anything, and I had to admit that she looked kind of formidable. I could see why Harry, or anyone else, might fall hard for her. We packed into the single wide seat of the pick-up truck, me in the middle, and Harry started the motor.

“Take the road to Älvsbyn,” I told him, and he nodded silently.

“Why Älvsbyn,” Britta asked worried. “There´s nothing there but forest.”

Harry revved up the engine and I didn´t have to answer. He swerved the car into the driveway and took the curves so fast that I flopped around with my bad leg. Between two curves, he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me closer so that I could lean on him. We reached the main road, and he pushed the pick-up truck to full speed. I heard Britta breathe in sharply when suddenly the wheels skidded on ice for a second before gaining traction again, but she said nothing. For a few minutes, nobody spoke a word.

Then, carefully, Britta said, “What´s going on?”

Words stuck in my throat. These two didn´t deserve another barrage of lies.

“Your parent´s aren´t in China, are they?” Harry said, glancing at me, but not angrily.

“No, they aren´t. They´re dead.”

Britta gasped, and I tranquillized her, “It happened a long time ago.”

From the corner of my eye, I could tell she was looking at me. “Who are you?”

“Jonatan is living in the old Finfors house, you know that red and white on the other side of the forest?” Harry explained, a little too quickly. “He´s been helping me with the horses this winter.”

“Living alone, at sixteen?” Britta said, and I felt Harry tense up by my side. She added, flatly, “And you know that´s not what I meant with the question about who you are.”

I said nothing, and neither did Harry. There was another protracted silence.

“What happened with the phones?” Harry finally asked me, and there was a harder edge to his voice this time. “And why is yours the only one working?”

Again, I said nothing. I nudged at his arm, out of Britta´s sight, begging him to stop the questions. Inconspicuously, he shifted just a little further from me.

“I think we deserve to know,” Britta said, quietly.

I was still clutching at my phone, and I lifted it to my ear. “Mauro?”

He was there, his voice firm. “You can´t tell them anything. You shouldn´t even have used my name.”

I set down the phone. “I´m sorry.”

Harry took a deep breath. “Britta´s cell phone and my landline have different carriers. Who can shut them both down in three seconds, but leave your phone working? You gave me your number and you have the same carrier prefix as Britta.”

“Harry-” I tried, and then turned silent. There was nothing either truthful or dishonest I could say that didn´t demand more questions.

“Listen...” I tried again. “If it weren´t for you, I´d be dead by now. You know I´m not kidding.” A long pause. “Two people died in the swamp, and either one of them could have been me. I had no choice.”

“What did you do?” Harry asked.

“I tricked them into falling into open water.”

Britta turned his face away, to look outside the door window.

“They deserved it, “ I said.

“Nobody deserves to die,” she said softly.

Harry groaned in frustration. “Are you in some kind of a witness protection program?”

What a perfect occasion to calm them down with a few lies. “No.”

I heard Mauro´s voice from the phone. “Don´t say anything more,” he ordered when I lifted the phone up. “I´ll visit them and tell them personally what happened once we´ve extracted you.”

“Fine.” I turned to Harry. “Someone who knows exactly what´s classified and what´s not will visit and explain you everything.”

“Lie, you mean?” he said, exasperated.

He still couldn´t bring himself to be angry with me, but even so every word I said or didn´t say was pushing him away from me, and back to Britta, and she knew it.

“Where are we going?” she asked after a while.

“I don´t know,” I mumbled.

I kept my eyes on the road, trying to keep my mind blank. Like hell was I going to start crying again, here, between the two of them, but suddenly it crossed my mind that this was probably the very last time ever I´d see Harry and I couldn´t hold back. I didn´t make a sound, but the evidence was there just the same. Harry sensed that something was wrong and glanced at me.

“The tranquillizer is fucking with me,” I said. “They had some strong shit in those darts.”

Harry knew I was lying, and shifted his leg just enough for it to brush against mine.

“Jonatan,” I heard Mauro warble from the phone. “Tell Harry to flicker the headlights.”

He did, and Mauro said, “We´ve got you. Ask Harry to stop the car, leave you there and drive back.”

When Harry heard the plan, he grabbed the phone from my hand.

“Listen, Mauro,” he snapped. “Whoever you are, I don´t like you. And if you think I´m going to leave Jonatan here alone in the cold, in the middle of nowhere, think again. It´s not going to happen.”

There was a long silence, and then I heard Mauro give him new directions. Harry gave the phone back to me, and told us that we´d stop at the nearest straight patch of the road. After a couple of long shallow curves we reached a reasonably long stretch of the road with good visibility and Harry came to a halt. About thirty seconds later, a shuddering bright light appeared from behind the trees lining the road, and a rather large military-style helicopter slowly came down, sending plumes of snow to every direction. Britta turned to look at me, to gauge my reaction, and then shook her head in disbelief. The helicopter settled down on the road, and Mauro, not properly dressed for cold weather, jumped down from the back. Harry and Britta got out of the car, and Harry pulled me out, a little too unceremoniously, and lifted me in his arms to carry me to the chopper. He barely deigned a nod at Mauro, who consequently chose to talk to Britta while Harry set me down in the back of the chopper where a stretcher took up most of the room on the floor. He was kneeling by my side, holding my arm, and I thought I´d have to warn him.

“Britta knows. I didn´t say anything,” I added quickly. “She just saw us together and she figured it out.”

“Fucking hell,” Harry said, anguish creeping into his voice.

Then he shook his head, postponing the problem until the two of them would be alone, and gave me searching look.

“Who are you, Jonatan? Can you tell me?”

“I wish I could.” I was choking up. “But I just can´t. I can´t.”

“It´s killing me to see you go.”

He stepped back and down from the helicopter, gave me a last look and walked away, passing by Mauro without a word. The pilot started accelerating the engine and after saying goodbye to Britta Mauro climbed to the back of the chopper. The pick-up truck had already turned around and was driving away into the night when the helicopter took to the air, and there was nothing left to see but an occasional glimpse of the moon through the small portholes.

“We need to run some tests,” Mauro said without a preamble. “I want to make sure that they used only tranquillizer and didn´t shoot you up with behavior-changing DNA or some other nanoshit.”

That was the first time I´d ever heard Mauro swear, and I blinked in surprise. The night had really riled him up. While he was drawing a blood sample from my arm, I apologized for Harry´s behavior. For a moment he said nothing, but then relented, sort of.

“He´s really protective, I know. The AI summary from your feed gave him high marks,” he huffed in response. “The AI also found him reasonably interesting as a potential Rep.”

That shut me up. Mauro wouldn´t have said something like that without a reason. He pulled out a flat wand-like thing, and started carefully going over every inch of my body. I felt a strange tingling sensation reach deep into the tissues, even bone.

“What happens if that thing beeps,” I asked warily.

“I´ll have to kill you, instantly. You won´t even know it happened,” Mauro added, a rather feeble consolation. “If they´ve used something that messes with your brain we have to stop it before it can influence your next life.”

Instantly the wand took on a far more sinister air. I gulped, and watched it move over my good leg. “How did they find me,” I asked to distract myself.

“Not by coincidence,” Mauro sighed. “They must have drugged you in Italy to find out your real name, and now it seems that in the last couple of weeks a Sundström has been googling ´Jonatan´ in every possible combination until it got red flagged by a scout program.”

There was a rather large amount of satisfaction in hearing that Harry had been so obsessive about me.

“What were you getting at with the AI´s comment about Harry?”

Mauro looked at me, his lips drawn into a thin line. “You know we take very good care of our own,” he said. “But we haven´t been able to do that with you.”

“But-”

“Please let me finish,” Mauro interrupted. “I shouldn´t be telling you this, but as a compensation you may be granted the right to recruit one person. That has never happened before, and it´s still being discussed. But if the final decision is affirmative, and as long as the person passes the AIs´ scrutiny...”

A small blue light lit up at the tip of the wand.

“Fuck