alert than brainsick bucks, and they returned to the road a quarter kilometer past the checkpoint. The sun shone yolk-yellow between white clouds. Nearly noon. The trees they passed repeated on and on into the woods. None was remarkable when compared to the next, but each was individual in some small regard: the number of limbs, the girth of trunk, the circumference of shed leaves encircling the base. No more than minor particularities, but minor particularities were what transformed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into a face.
The trees opened to a wide field, bisected by the road.
“Let’s walk faster,” he said, and the girl’s footsteps hastened behind him. They were nearly halfway across when they came upon the severed hindquarters of a wolf. Farther into the field, blood dyed the snow a reddish brown. Nothing had decomposed in the cold. The head and front legs lay exposed on the ground, connected to the wolf’s back end by three meters of pulped innards. What was left of the face was frozen in the expression it had died with. The tongue ribboned from its maw.
“It was a careless animal,” Akhmed said. He tried to look away, but there was wolf everywhere. “It didn’t watch for land mines.”
“We’re more careful.”
“Yes, we’ll stay on the road. We won’t walk in the fields.”
She stood close to him. Her shoulder pressed against his side. This was the farthest she’d ever been from home.
“It wasn’t always like this,” he said. “Before you were born there were wolves and birds and bugs and goats and bears and sheep and deer.”
The heavy snow stretched a hundred meters to the forest. A few dead stalks rose through the brown frost, where the wolf would lie until spring. With heavy breaths they shaped the air. No prophet had augured this end. Neither the sounding of trumpets nor the beating of seraphic wings had heralded this particular field, with this particular girl, holding his particular hand.
“They were here,” he said, staring into the field.
“Where did the Feds take them?”
“We should keep walking.”
White moths circled a dead lightbulb.
A firm hand on her shoulder lifted her from the dream. Sonja lay on a trauma ward hospital bed, still dressed in her scrubs. Before she looked to the hand that had woken her, before she rose from the imprint her body had made in the weak mattress foam, she reached for her pocket, from instinct rather than want, and shook the amber pill bottle as though its contents had followed her into her dreams and also required waking. The amphetamines rattled in reply. She sat up, conscious, blinking away the moth wings.
“There’s someone here to see you,” Nurse Deshi announced from behind her, and began stripping the sheets before Sonja stood.
“See me about what?” she asked. She bent to touch her feet, relieved to find them still there.
“Now she thinks I’m a secretary,” the old nurse said, shaking her head. “Soon she’ll start pinching my rump like that oncologist who chased out four secretaries in a year. A shameful profession. I’ve never met an oncologist who wasn’t a hedonist.”
“Deshi, who’s here to see me?”
The old nurse looked up, startled. “A man from Eldár.”
“About Natasha?”
Deshi tensed her lips. She could have said no or not this time or it’s time to give up, but instead shook her head.
The man leaned against the corridor wall. A one-size-too-small navy pes with beaded tassels roosted on the back of his head. His jacket hung from his shoulders as if still on the hanger. A girl stood beside him, inspecting the contents of a blue suitcase.
“Sofia Andreyevna Rabina?” he asked.
She hesitated. She hadn’t heard or spoken her full name aloud in eight years and only answered to her diminutive. “Call me Sonja,” she said.
“My name is Akhmed.” A short black beard shrouded his cheeks. Shaving cream was an unaffordable luxury for many; she couldn’t tell if the man was a Wahhabi insurgent or just poor.
“Are you a bearded one?” she asked.
He reached for his whiskers in embarrassment. “No, no. Absolutely not. I just haven’t shaved recently.”
“What do you want?”
He nodded to the girl. She wore an orange scarf, an oversized pink coat, and a sweatshirt advertising Manchester United, likely, Sonja imagined, from the glut of Manchester apparel that had flooded clothing-drive donations after Beckham was traded to Madrid. She had the pale, waxen skin of an unripe pear. When Sonja approached, the girl had raised the lid of the suitcase, slipped her hand inside, and held an object