Koschei’s voice echoed from the device, a low and compelling intonation that rose and fell like a chant. I could understand how it might have compelled the masses. It was the kind of voice you had no choice but to listen to, and the longer I listened to it, the more mesmerizing it became. Without reason, it made me think of my own father, not Papa, but the stranger I could only remember in bits and pieces like a phantom.

It was the kind of voice that held you.

“No bogatyri, no tsars,” Koschei declared, and even across the room, his words pierced me to the core. “Soon, this will cease to merely be a slogan. It will become our future.”

22

Midnight found me on the terra-cotta rooftop, on the widow’s walk accessible through the attic’s skylight. I dangled my legs through the gaps in the wrought-iron railing, peering out across Detskaya.

Past the spiderweb of cables, streetlamps glinted in the night and danced like flames across the river. I sighed, pressing my forehead to the railing as I fingered the bead strung around my wrist. Galina could be anywhere in this city. Could she see this same view now, or was she locked away somewhere, trapped in the darkness?

Soon, my thoughts strayed to my past among the living. No matter how hard I tried to remember, I could only dredge up snippets. The black stains on my father’s pants from the silver mine, and the bristly roughness of his unshaven cheeks. My mother’s laughter. My mother...

My earliest memories were of my mother, strands of thread streaming over her fingers as she taught me to embroider. She had made it seem so important, as if somewhere inside her meticulous stitching, there was the secret for how to hold together everything.

I rested my face in my palms, trying to follow that snowy road step-by-step, seven years back, southeast from the Edge, over the border, into the mainland and the mountains. My mother and I had taken a wagon from our village—the farmer’s wife had smiled and given me an apple—and I had jostled awake in a city, yes, the city of Serebrograd.

Look, Tomochka, our town made those, my mother had said, pointing at the noble white-stone buildings lining the city streets. She meant that the silver from our mines had made those, that these were the people who flourished while people like my father mined deep below the earth and died for their good fortune. They didn’t have to stain their hands black from the silver ore, or red with a sacrificial cock’s blood to atone for the sin of digging. By the time our ingots of silver reached them, the ore had been purified by Troika priestesses or smelted down by someone else who would take the Unclean Force unto them.

I felt so close to a revelation. I just needed to go back a little further, back to the village, back to my mother.