I realized now the men had probably found the burlap sack they used to hold Galina in this airship’s wreckage. Maybe she had come back here hoping the boy would be resurrected, only to find that his killers had cut that chance away from him forever.

As I lowered the stick, Aleksey twitched, a single convulsive jerk that sent my heart jolting against my rib cage. I had seen dead animals move before and had even watched as snakes writhed upon the cutting board after being skinned and segmented. But in all cases, those last tremors of life had died down within minutes, and never had a creature slowly lifted its head, never had it fixed its eyes—already filmed over and sightless—on me and tried to speak.

“Lyosha!” Mikhail shouldered past me, a frantic smile passing over his lips. “Toma, we need to help him. He’s still alive. He’s—”

Crumpled purple flowers bulged from Aleksey’s mouth and spilled down his chin; green shreds clung to his sharpening incisors. The soldiers had taken precautions, but not good enough. They had severed the tendons of his limbs and filled his mouth with moss and monkshood, and yet something had remained within him to cling to life and crawl laboriously, desperately back to this mortal coil.

6

Mute with shock, I stumbled back before I could stop myself. Beside me, Mikhail’s face went dead white, and the hope that had welled in his eyes when Aleksey first stirred quickly dimmed into terror.

As Aleksey licked the grit of dirt and moss spores from his lips, his hazed eyes lifted. Dried blood beaded on his cheeks. His shirt was muddied with more of the same, and when he struggled to hoist himself from the ground, through his torn clothes I caught a terrible glimpse of his entrails’ glistening coils.

My breath caught in my lungs. This was too much for me. I couldn’t fix this.

“No, no.” A low groan left Mikhail’s lips as Aleksey lurched forward. The bogatyr couldn’t stand anymore, could hardly even move. His limbs bent unnaturally at the wrists and heels, not just disfigured now, but changing.

“All hail the Tsar.” The words left Aleksey’s mouth in a hoarse croak, his voice rattling deep in his lungs, as if there was dirt loose in his throat. “Glory. Glory...”

He spoke the words slowly, not at Mikhail, not at anyone—mumbling them to thin air the way an infant babbled. Sparks fizzled at his fingertips, weak pulses of flame that the damp soil snuffed in an instant. I could see it in his eyes; as he crawled closer to Mikhail, Aleksey was slowly circling those final moments that had taken him from this world.

I turned to Mikhail, placing my hand on his forearm as he shied away. “Don’t be afraid. It’s okay. He’s not going to harm you.”

“It’s okay?” His voice rose with an undercurrent of anger. “No. Nothing about this is okay. Look at him, Toma. Look at him.”