He picked up the little girl, carrying her out of the house. Nara followed him. Leo remained in the kitchen with the three women: their faces obscured by the shadows, smoke from the fire swirling around them. Three strangers waiting to see what decision he would make. There was no reason why Leo should care what they thought. He would never encounter them again. It was irrational to be unsettled by their unseen eyes. Except that in the gloom they were no longer strangers for they had become the three women from his own life: his two daughters and his wife, Raisa. And nothing in the world mattered to him more than what they thought. It was irrelevant that he would never hold Raisa’s hand again, never touch her or kiss her. In all likelihood, he would never be reunited with his daughters either. Yet they were here with him now, in this room, judging him. The smoke from the fire had become the opium cloud in which he’d hidden. There was to be no hiding now. It was time to decide whether he could fail his family in a way that he had sworn that he would never do again.

Returning to the main chamber, Leo bent down beside the body of the elder and picked up the man’s long curved knife.

Same Day

The village was burning. Scores of men lay on the ground. A few hopelessly clutched their wounds as if trying to put their bodies back together. Others were pitifully crawling away, leaving bloody trails in the dust. Leo walked between them, stepping over them, moving slowly, the knife in his hand, flat against his back.

A house had been destroyed; a grenade tossed inside, a wall had collapsed, the timber roof was smoking. Three of the Spetsnaz soldiers were dead. A fourth was shot, unable to hold a gun, resting on the shoulders of the only remaining uninjured soldier. He was holding two guns, firing at the vantage points above them, bullets hitting the ridge. His voice was hoarse, shouting out, furious at the delay:

—Let’s go!

The captain forced the little girl onto her knees in the centre of the village, calling out to the mountains, to the hiding places where the survivors had fled and the fighters had taken up arms.

—Here is your miracle child! Here is the child that cannot be killed!

He put the gun to her head.