“And this?” His fingers poised over the burn scar encircling my upper arm.

“I don’t remember.”

“The way it curls around, it almost looks like a handprint, doesn’t it?”

I chuckled, feeling a twinge of disquiet. “Maybe I strayed too close to the oven in a steam bath, and a bannik grabbed me.”

The bathhouse spirits were known to scratch, and more than once, I’d felt the bannik in our house’s run-down banya rake a claw down my back. But this scar too had come from the past, and it disturbed me even more than the marks left by thorns. All I could think about was the nightmare I’d had since childhood—a man set afire, striding between the white birches even as his clothes smouldered.

Tomochka, whatever you hear, don’t make a sound.

As if sensing my unease, Vanya lowered his hand from my arm. His gaze searched mine. In the moonlight, his eyes were the deepest malachite. Slowly, he lifted his hand to my face, cradling my cheek in his palm. I held my hand over his, cupping the warmth of him. My disquiet slowly faded. I wanted this.

“And this?” His thumb traced the side of my mouth.

“There’s no scar there,” I whispered.

“I know.”

Vanya leaned in closer, or I leaned in, and somehow the rest of the distance between us dissolved until his lips brushed against my own. The kiss lasted only as long as a spark in a storm, but it left me with a warmth that lingered.

“Toma, we all have scars,” he murmured, searching my eyes. “Some people just carry them more visibly than others. Nobody leaves this world untouched.”

He was right. Something was happening to me. Just being next to Vanya, breathing the same air as him, staring into his striking green eyes—he was changing me.

As another train scoured the darkness below, I leaned against him and rested my head on his shoulder, watching as the light skidded across the riverside before slowly, silently sinking into the night.

23

It was drizzling when I awoke, and a small puddle had gathered on the floorboards by my bed. I settled back for a moment, watching the rain streak down the skylight. I felt mildly disoriented, as if I hadn’t just woken up in a strange place, but a different era as well.

Faint voices came from down below—the metallic clatter of silverware and pans, Aergul’s silvery laughter, Pelin’s own bored drawl, the hazard whistle of a passing train. I closed my eyes, trying to summon the dream that had slipped through my head moments before waking and that had left me in a cold terror sweat.

No good. Just darkness and a sensation like running, as though I’d been dragged forward with sickening velocity.

Through the skylight, the sky was a putrid shade of yellowish gray, already fogged with the smoke trails of the riverside factories. It made me think of the mining machines back in my hometown, grinding behemoths of steel that swallowed entire wheelbarrows filled with coal and spat out black grease and gouts of smoke until the mud ran black. Strange how the more I thought about my past, the more distinct the memories became, like the excavation of a grave.