“This piece,” he said, tapping a paragraph. “It made me think of your thesis abstract. Disrupted migration routes, pipeline conflict zones, the NATO-fossil linkage. You might find it… clarifying.”
Klara flipped the page. The article was titled “Green Empires and Gray Militaries: Western Ecology as Strategic Hegemony.”
Her eyes scanned the first few lines — references to Lithuanian radar emissions, Polish shale gas corridors, avian behavioral shifts across NATO air bases…
She looked up at him. “You’ve read my abstract?”
“I make it a point to study promising minds,” he said simply. “Especially those that haven’t yet been dulled by institutional compromise.”
He smiled again, almost fatherly.
“There’s a reception tonight,” he added. “Nothing official. Just a few of us — independent researchers. Eurasian, Central European, postcolonial climate voices. You might enjoy it more than the recycled net-zero slogans in the plenary hall.”
Klara hesitated.
“Where?” she finally asked.
He passed her a folded slip of paper. Just an address and a time.
“No pressure,” he said. “But I suspect you’ll find the conversation… more honest.”
And with that, he left her standing in the corner of a Baltic conference room, holding a Russian ecology journal in one hand and a handwritten invitation in the other — her first breadcrumb down a path she didn’t yet know she’d follow.
But she would.
The building wasn’t marked. All she found was a lacquered green door beside a closed flower shop on Ģertrūdes Street, a few blocks from the city center. There was no banner, no NGO flag — just a small sticker on the door that read “Common Ground Baltic.”
Inside, she found warm lighting, quiet jazz, and the low hum of conversation in at least four languages.
Klara paused just inside the doorway, suddenly aware of how Scandinavian she looked — tall, windblown, carrying a canvas bag filled with summit notes and a copy of
Then someone approached — a woman in her late thirties, dark hair tied back, black mask, no visible makeup around her eyes, Baltic-knit sweater and felted wool skirt.
“You must be Klara,” she said.
Her accent was hard to place.
“I’m Irina,” said the woman. “Sergei mentioned you might come.”
Klara smiled cautiously beneath her mask. “I wasn’t sure if I’d be welcome.”
Irina’s eyes sparkled. “You are exactly the kind of person we welcome.”
She gestured toward the gathering. There were maybe thirty people scattered between couches and standing tables, sipping tea or Georgian wine. No one wore a lanyard. A small projector flickered slides on the back wall — photographs of steppe fires, flooded grain fields, and black oil lines slicing through bird migration maps.
One slide read, “Kazakhstan: Migratory Disruption in the Trans-Caspian Axis.”
Klara blinked.
“That’s my thesis topic,” she said aloud.
Irina tilted her head. “Then perhaps you’re already one of us.”
They sat together on a small settee beneath a bookshelf lined with Russian-language climate theory and old Worldwatch Institute reports. Klara noticed a sticker on one of the mugs that read, “There is no neutrality in ecological collapse.”
“Tell me,” Irina said, pouring herbal tea into mismatched ceramic cups, “do you believe your government is serious about saving the climate?”
Klara hesitated. She’d said things — angry things — in dorm rooms and in student forums. But this was different.
“I believe they’re serious about pretending,” she said. “Sweden talks like Greta. Spends like Exxon. We green-wash our missiles now.”
Irina gave a slow nod. “You see clearly, then. Most don’t, not at your age.”
Klara looked down at her tea. “Sometimes I feel like I’m being told to organize deck chairs on the
“And what if,” Irina said, “there were ways to do more than just ‘organize chairs’?”
Klara glanced up. Irina’s voice was gentle —
“Ways to right the ship?” Klara asked.
“To fix the berg hole in it,” Irina corrected. “To save the passengers.”
Irina leaned in slightly.
“We don’t need saboteurs, Klara. We need
Klara felt something stir in her — recognition… respect.
“I’m not a spy,” she said reflexively.
“No,” Irina replied. “You’re a scientist. An idealist. That’s much more useful.”
A young man nearby asked Irina a question in Russian, and she excused herself to answer. Klara sat in silence, watching the projector switch to a grainy photo of a US airfield carved into wetlands outside Constanța, Romania. Below it was a graphic of displaced stork migratory routes.
