Page 47

Theoretically, I know that the human ear can detect sounds between twenty and twenty thousand hertz. I know this, because I teach it every year, assisted by a diagram of the cochlea. No textbook I’ve ever cracked open has ever prepared me for this night—for what bullets and other ammo raining down every which way feels like, the cacophony and terror of it all. Nobody ever taught me what approximately eight inches of steel can block out. The way it’s too much, yet not enough.

In this makeshift vault, the gunfire is more an endless thumping of pressure, the equivalent of an angry fist against a door. As I sit on the floor with my lover’s gun clutched between two trembling hands, I am at a loss. Somehow, all I can think about is the last time Leonid Yuri left me behind to stare at the shut door in his wake. It had been the heavy, ornate church doors then. He’d come back. He’d earned my trust, day by day, after that. The scattered memories of the past few whirlwind weeks of my life play in a supercut in my mind.

I’m so lost in it all, I almost believe I’m imagining the silence when it bears down on me from every side. All sound seems to peter off, ebbing away, fading to nothing but a mirage.

I want to say that silence is better than the alternative. But it’s not. Silence is the absence of data, and the absence of data is where the mind goes feral.

Desperately, I squirm close to the door and press my ear up against it. My heart is so loud it’s contaminating the sample. I don’t know how long I stay like that. Time went shapeless on me once before, in a glass bowl under white lights, and it goes shapeless now—stretched and mangled, unquantifiable. The fluorescent light source in the ceiling bleaches my vision when my head tips back. The gun sweats in my hands, or I sweat on the gun.

That’s when the silence is finally sliced through: Two knocks. My whole body convulses toward the door, scrambling up against it. Then four more knocks.

Somehow, I manage to get to my feet with the gun held up and aimed true the way Leonid taught me, despite both arms shaking like a faulty centrifuge. I force them as steady as I can to punch the code in.

The vault’s bolts release in a sequence I feel through my feet.

The door swings, and I am aiming at a face I’ve gotten to know well, given how often he’s been helping chaperone me around. Lebedev raises his hands palms out in front of himself, his eyes darting from my face to the gun and back with what appears to look a lot like horrible, absurd respect. I prefer it over the pity in his eyes at whatever he sees on my face.

“Ms. Gallagher. It’s me. You can—”

“Where is he?”

And I watch it happen. I watch this enormous man—a person whose entire profession is weathering awfulness and violence and cruelty—fail to look right at me. The half-second of his hesitation threatens to unravel me at the core.

“Say it,” I breathe the words out shakily.

“They took him,” Lebedev says. “But they took him alive.”

Alive. The word does two jobs at once and both of them badly. Alive means breathing. Alive also means wanted, means useful, means there is a purpose waiting for him somewhere with its sleeves rolled up.

I don’t decide to move. I’m simply past Lebedev and into the bedroom, into the hallway, and then I am standing in the wreckage of the only place that’s felt like ground in three weeks. My mind begins to catalog what my eyes see, fighting to make sense of madness.

The terrace I’ve been sipping my morning coffee on is a hole with teeth of glass in its gums. Smoke lingers in the air, acrid and bitter. There is a body—a man’s body—by the windows with someone’s jacket over his face. Yet I know, from the shape of him and the watch on his wrist, that it’s Vetrov. The same soldier who, only two days ago, held the elevator for me on the way back from the store and pretended not to smile when I thanked him.

Sticky crimson rivers of blood stain the marble in quantities my brain refuses to convert to volume.

There are men moving with flashlights and clipped Russian.

And there is Mara. Mara, standing over Div.

Div, on his side, his flank heaving, a soaked towel pressed to his shoulder by a soldier kneeling in the red.

The gun is out of my hands—someone takes it, I think, or I drop it—and then I’m on my knees on the bloody marble with no memory of crossing the room, my palm flat on Div’s skull, and his tail thumps. It thumps. Even now. My exhale flies out of my mouth in a beaten sob.

“Apply more pressure,” I cry, the same order in a voice not nearly as somber as my mother’s, the one I grew up hearing through a clinic door. All I want is my mother. Her calm hands and her steady voice telling me, It isn’t over until it’s over, Meera. “Constant pressure, don’t peek at it, don’t—”

“Vet’s eight minutes out, ma’am.” The soldier doesn’t even look up at me. “We have a vet. We have everything.”

Of course they do. Of course this world has its own veterinarians, its own surgeons, its own tow trucks and locksmiths and gravediggers, a complete parallel civilization running under the one I used to live in, and the only service it cannot seem to provide is the man. The man is gone. The man is the one thing not on retainer.

“Ms. Gallagher.” Lebedev summons my attention from behind me. “I have to push breach protocol. I know you may not want to, but we have to move you to the estate. Now.”

“No,” I snap, scratching Div’s ear.

“Ma’am—”

“No. He’s—You don’t understand, he went back out there, he went back out for—I’m not leaving, he said he’d come back, he said—” And then I’m up and I’m not reasonable at all, I’m wading toward the ruined terrace like he might be under the glass, like grief is a search-and-rescue operation, and I am screaming his name into a room that has already finished answering. Hands close around my arms in a firm grip I can’t break. I fight it, regardless, frantically. I try to fight, but when I scream again a gloved palm clamps over my mouth.

For one fully dissociated second, I am on a sidewalk in Roslindale with curry leaking across the concrete. My lungs burn and the rest of my body goes numb and cold.