The angle of the sun made Rakitin's shadow long and hard-edged on the pavement. Evening was settling over the base. He followed the flow of people and turned away when he would not be noticed. It was best no one see him go off on his own. He sought the base's edge, where the population was sparse and it was quiet. There was a tower situated at the border, meant for looking far away and not at its own base, where Polya slipped into the narrow alley between it and the outer encasing wall. He liked places like this, close but with more than one way out.

Polya leaned against the base of the tower and let the mask fall from his face. It was a rare relief.

Sammuil was dead, in all the official ways. He did not think Liadov suspected anything. He seemed to accept without doubt that Polya was protecting Volgin, not protecting another from him. He had done all he could. The worst was finished, and all that was left was to wait and hope. The former was familiar, the latter strange.

It was silent here, the shoulder of the building cutting sound as well as the wind. Above the concrete gray the sky was a fierce, cold blue. By tomorrow the helicopter carrying the body would be the a black speck, shrinking until it vanished and was irrevocable.

Polya did something it had not occurred to him to do in quite some time. As he let his eyes drift above the horizon where wall met sky, he prayed.

The corpse arrived that morning.

Rakitin knew the face he would uncover when he approached the shape under the sheet. In fact, it was good. The first thing that could go wrong had not. Now, there was only the next. He knew it, so it could not be shock he felt.

Samuil looked calm and trusting, as the dead always did.

Rakitin knew what he would say in the report. Internal burns. Blood clot, ischemic stroke in the right hemisphere. Swift and invisible, from the outside.

Pale, with dark hair falling over his forehead, he looked like a black and white photograph of himself. For a long time Polya watched, and convinced himself he saw the barest hint of breath. He set his fingers against his neck to feel for the whisper of pulse. His flesh was chill, even against Rakitin's cool hand. Perhaps it was all a joke, and he was sending a genuine corpse to lie in the alleyways of Moscow, waiting for a revival that never came.

No. He was alive, and he would live. That was what Rakitin decided, as he would never know. Perhaps that was what faith meant. If mysticism could raise the dead, science could make a Lazarus as well.

Internal burns. Blood clot. Ischemic stroke in the right hemisphere.

The nameless man looked alive, unharmed. So did many corpses. Everything Rakitin thought became a mixture of the reassuring and the ominous that evened into something resembling calm. He had the bodybag prepared, small folded knife underneath clothes at the bottom, money sewn into a fold of cloth. He was good with a needle.

He was thankful he had other reasons for keeping his distance from Liadov and never letting down his guard. After the events of the other day he feared him, in a cold, steady trickle across his nerves, but a traitor to his country and commander had no right to condemn anyone for loyalty to a friend. Rakitin avoided him and worked as much as possible when he was not there. If anyone noticed something was off, they were both as good as dead. Rakitin for treason, Samuil for being in the wrong place, the wrong man, whoever he was.

Rakitin would not lie to himself. He looked at the nameless man's face, in sleep as in death, and thought of him as a spy. He was freeing an enemy. He was endangering everyone on the base. Everything he had ever told him could be a lie calculated to gain his cooperation. A good and loyal man would report that there had been a mistake and hand him over to serve his death sentence.

What he feared more than death was the point where nothing mattered at all.

If the worst was true, it changed nothing.

When Rakitin was alone, he put Samuil into the bodybag, checking that the fabric would allow for breathing. It was strange to wrestle him, like a doll of dead weight. He had moved bodies before, but never a living one. He pulled the zipper up, and by steady degrees the nameless man disappeared.

Internal burns. Blood clot. Ischemic stroke in the right hemisphere.

(continuing on the day of this)


The base at night was generous with shadows. Rakitin stayed to them, traveling in moments of motion interspersed between long, patient stillness, as he waited for the rare human being to pass. It seemed to take hours, but he would not let himself hurry. He touched the narrow, delicate shape in his pocket, talismanic amid coins and scraps of paper.

The day was spent in preparation. Now there was nothing to do but what had to be done.

Behind the infirmary he could move freely, protected by the building's hunched shoulder. He counted the dark windows. When he drew nearer he saw it was cracked open, as he had left it. The pane slid up with a small, smooth sound. It was more difficult to climb in without help, and being careful of his right coat pocket.

Rakitin's eyes adjusted to the closer, deeper darkness. Soon, the moon was enough to see the bed and the soldier held there. The bandages were a network of pale markings.

Suddenly, the restraints filled Rakitin with a brutal sickness, and he undid them, pulling the buckles apart by feel.

"I'm back," he said softly.

Rakitin was pacing. The sun was slanting and thinning the last of its light over the base, surrendering its efforts against the evening's chill. In the middle distance the gate rattled open, and a truck drove in, stained orange by the retreating light. The air was sharp and cold, good as long as he kept moving. He had always found it easier to think while walking, especially if there was no destination to distract him.

It was the edge time, between one phase of life and other, and the courtyard was seeded with movement. The shifts were changing.

It was a day exceptional in its ordinariness. Irinarhov had vanished without a word and gone back to wherever it was that he existed. Rakitin did his job, Liadov did his, and the blank place in reality that was Isaev was never breached. Nothing was said about the previous night. Nothing needed to be.

Rakitin did not know if this was change or merely the final acceptance of what had always been.

It was good just to have a moment to think for a while.

On his aimless circuit, he watched the soldiers as they made their paths across the open space, like a circulatory system exchanging old blood and fresh. Rakitin altered his trajectory when he saw a broad figure and blond hair he recognized. Just the man he had a question for, through providence or, well, force of the odds. That he was alone could only be luck.

"Lieutenant Semeyonev!" he called, walking toward the Ocelot.

Rakitin cleaned up and put Vladya away. It was interesting how there seemed to be so much more of a person when you took him apart, but it all added up to the same. The body was a puzzle box, everything in its place.

Liadov hadn't made an appearance at the lab today. That wasn't unusual. Often he had other business to attend to. In fact, there had been no one at all in the lab, except for when Aryol had stopped by and inexplicably stayed and talked for a while, as if they were ordinary people in an ordinary world.

In any case, there were reports to deliver, and aspects of the case to discuss.

He slipped through the hallways, unnoticed among officers going about their duties. He tucked the papers under his arm and knocked at the door to Liadov's office.

"Major? Are you in?"

It was good to be alone again. Rakitin had an appreciation for these moments of solitude in the silent lab, when he could relax his guard and release the siphon of energy that maintained control over his expression. He could not grow accustomed to the sensation of eyes following him, or find direction in Semeyonev's uncalculated kindness. It was better this way. The logical, organic patterns of his work reflected back his patience.

He had not expected that Liadov would relent on the issue of his watch. Perhaps he had simply, rightly, concluded that it did not matter. Inertia was law, and, eventually, everything returned to its natural state. Liadov had his own concerns, manifesting in a tightness by his eyes that made Rakitin wish he could do something but add to them.

Rakitin did not think about the night that had completed his ruin. It was a silent companion, a cool hand on his shoulder. He found it curious that it should be possible to think about not thinking about something, and so easy.

He was as though far above a world made tiny and unreal as wooden toys, numbed by rushing air, so constant a fall as to become the same as stillness. When he hit the ground, it was going to hurt.

For now, Rakitin was weighing Borishnakov's kidney as he heard the door open. He schooled his face to an acceptably neutral configuration and looked up.

On Rakitin and Liadov's arrival in the infirmary, the nurses, radiating sharp and businesslike smiles, informed them that Nurse Morozov had the night shift and was currently off duty. Further inquiries revealed the location of his quarters and that, no, no one had been following him, and there hadn't been anyone else by to ask, especially not anyone in a space suit.

Rakitin exchanged glanced with Liadov. Perhaps The Fury was all talk, and he had merely gone back to his unit to do what Phobos had mentioned this morning and that Rakitin was determined not to think about.

He and Liadov walked in an even silence, as if behind individual panes of glass.

There was a light under Morozov's door, and no screams or stench of sulphur. Good signs.

"Nurse Morozov?" Rakitin called as he knocked. "We have some questions for you."

It was remarkable what a body could do on its own. While his hands attended to their work, Rakitin's mind was elsewhere, in the center of an endless, empty calm.

Though he did not think of it in anything as pitiless as word or image, Polya carried with him, soft, dormant, the moment when he had believed Leshovik would do as he asked. He held the memory of that peace. He wondered if Vladya had felt the same, or died in fear, or even knew. The tiny mark on his arm could change everything, or nothing.

Rakitin thought of that as he settled Vladya into the chill of his temporary resting place. At another thought, he placed the two coins The Fury had left into the cooler beside him. An odd myth. The boatman of the dead could have little use for money. Still, no one crossed without payment.

When he looked up, it was with mild surprise that he noticed he wasn't alone. Semeyonev was leaning against the counter with the ease that made him into a seamless part of his surroundings. Liadov was at his table, looking over the files of their new candidates for suspects. After cleaning up and putting everything into its proper place, Rakitin approached him.

"Major," he said. "If I could have a moment?"

"How did she die?" Odette was saying as she eviscerated a potato.

"My grandmother said it was fox spirit possession," Polya answered. "In front of us, the doctor called it the falling sickness. He must not have thought children would understand that it was caused by faulty wiring in her brain."

Late sunlight slanted through the window to lay over her hands. Her family's kitchen was small, with cupboards that seemed to lean over their shoulders. Used to it, they used the space well. They moved deftly past one another.

"Chop this," said Odette, handing him an onion.

Polya liked to help her cook. While he didn't have her knowledge, he was good with a knife.

Her parents kept a distance, smiling with unsure eyes whenever Polya saw them, as if they did not dare approach her sphere too closely. Mostly, as now, they left them alone.

"The effect was that she fell," he continued.

The strange groaning cry, almost mechanical, as in a stalled machine, had called Polya out into the stun of the sunlight. Around her head was a bright star of blood. It was not symmetrical. She had fallen to her right, and she lay with her shoe slipping off at the heel.

Polya took up the space at an adjacent corner of the counter and split the onion in half.

"I stood looking at her for a long time. It didn't seem real. She was there, and she was not there. There was no intervening space. I was ten. I had never seen a body before. She wasn't declared dead for a while - there's protocol, an examination by someone qualified -" Odette nodded, as though she knew this - "but I knew as I looked that this was not my mother any longer. I was looking at an abandoned home."

Odette swept potatoes off the cutting board into a pot of water. It was not so much that she did not notice Polya was strange as that it was an irrelevancy she had no time for.

She did not engage in the polite pretense of trying to pretend death did not exist.

"The effect," she said, nodding once. "The cause?"

Her name was Avdotya, but no one called her that. It could have been that her hair, black and straight, suggested the markings by a swan's eyes. More likely, it was a dark joke toward the malignant transformation she faced.

Polya's knife made even, ordered sounds.

"The neurotransmitters in her brain fell out of balance. Electricity built up and released all at once, in an uncontrolled burst. The neurons fired without direction. In her case, it crossed the entire brain. The motor cortex is one of the worst affected. So, the body moved without reason, following incoherent electrical orders."

Odette said, "And what caused that?"

Polya's knife fell in a quick, precise pattern. "Fox spirit possession."

He finished chopping the onion, and blinked the water from his eyes.

Odette set the pot to boiling and checked the height of the flame.

She said, "I can never decide whether or not you're really a fool."

Rakitin's lab was empty and restfully silent. There was no trace that anyone had ever been bound and propped against the wall like a wounded manikin, except for a faint residual ache in his shoulders. It could have never happened.

Rakitin emptied ash from a petri dish.

His footsteps on the tiles echoed.

The lab smelled of the sting of antiseptic, and beneath it, the scent of decay that Rakitin had long ago stopped noticing.

He decided to think only of what had to be done.

The place calmed him. It was where he knew best how to be.

There were files that needed looking over.

He arranged them behind a wall of empty flasks. The documents, procured from the medical staff, described every person on the base with the blood type of AB-. It was a small and lonely stack.

Rakitin took the first.