air. And yet, for all the reality of the scene, the people on the Arbat couldn’t see her. When she said hello, they did not greet her.
She strolled away from the Arbat and continued walking until she came to Red Square. She marveled at the white Kremlin walls and paused to admire the red brick and the cupolas of St. Basil’s Cathedral, built to resemble a bonfire rising to the sky. Vika had never been to Moscow, but it was beautiful to behold.
After a while, she had gotten her fill of churches and monuments and squares. She was ready to leave Moscow except . . . how? It was not as if Nikolai had provided an obvious exit. Her heart pounded faster. She looked all around her, at the people who could not see her and the city that was too fake to be real but too real to be feigned.
Oh, the devil, it was a trap. He’d finally caught her. Her stupid curiosity had led her here, and now she’d be stuck in Moscow forever. It was even worse than being confined, as Sergei used to say, to the jinni bottle that was Ovchinin Island. Now she was literally trapped on a bench in a dream.
A never-ending, lonely dream.
But wait. Dreams could be woken from. Right? Yes, please, please, please, be right.
Vika shook her head from side to side and yawned. She stretched her arms above her head and opened her eyes wide. A few seconds later, Moscow began to fade away, and reality and the island came into view again. She exhaled.
She was free.
And even better, it had not been a trick. Nikolai had not tried to hurt her, just as she had not tried to hurt him with this island. She sighed and leaned back against the bench.
Then it dawned on her how incredible it was what Nikolai had created.
There were other benches along the promenade. If this first one had been such a glorious rendition of Moscow, what else had he done? She stood and hurried across the gravel path—the benches zigzagged across the promenade, each fifty or so yards from the next—and wandered to the next bench.
A subtle fog hung over this one, too. Sea green, rather than blue. It also had a brass plaque on it, but instead of Moscow, it was labeled Kostroma. Kostroma was a small city at the junction of the Volga and Kostroma Rivers, and famous for the venerable Ipatievsky Monastery and the Trinity Cathedral, both beloved by the tsars. Had Nikolai been to all these places? A prick of jealousy twinged inside her.
She wanted to sit on the Kostroma bench, but she was still a little skittish from panicking inside Moscow. So she ran down the gravel path to look at the next one instead. Kazan. The largest city in the land of the Tatars, where mosques and Orthodox churches coexisted, and where the tsar had recently founded the Kazan Imperial University.
After Kazan came Samara, then Nizhny Novgorod, seat of the medieval princes, followed by Yekaterinburg on the Ural Mountains, the border of the European and Asian sides of the empire.
Vika spun in a circle in the middle of the promenade, looking at all the benches behind and in front of and around her, each with a different plaque and a different, subtle mist about it. “It’s a dream tour of the wonders of Russia,” she said aloud.
The next bench was Kizhi Island, known for its twenty-two-dome church constructed entirely of shimmering silver-brown wood, each piece painstakingly interlocked at the corners with round notches or dovetail joints. Legend had it that the builder used only one ax to construct the entire church, and when finished, tossed the ax into the nearby lake and declared that there would never be another ax like it.
Now that one, she would sit on. Maybe after she’d seen all the others. Vika was sure she could spend hours on Kizhi Island.
Next came benches for the crystal clear waters at Lake Baikal in Siberia, the glacier-capped Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains, and the Valley of Geysers on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The second-to-last bench was not a historically significant location. It was not a particularly populous one, either. It was not as stunning as Lake Baikal or Mount Elbrus or the Kamchatka Peninsula, and hardly anyone knew it existed. But these were Nikolai’s benches; he was the final arbiter of what qualified as a wonder of Russia. And he had decided this would be the penultimate