The house in the middle of the park had vanished, every part of it long ago scavenged for building materials: the rough paths still converged at that point though, nothing more than a memory.

They hurried on. They were deep in the park, surrounded on all sides. Petrovitch’s face was set in a rictus grin, but the sister was in tears as they vaulted over yet another half-rotted corpse. He took hold of her wrist.

“Come on, babochka. You can’t afford to care.”

“But…”

“They chose this.” He turned left and headed for the Black Bridge, dragging her behind him. “There are no guards to this prison. And if you’re at all sensitive, don’t look over the sides of the bridge. Straight down the middle, eyes front.”

“How… how do you know these things?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t show me in a good light, does it?”

They arrived at the bridge. He didn’t follow his own advice: there were things in the dark water, little bloated islands that not even the seagulls dared touch. The wind had accumulated a small drift of them on the far bank, beached and slick where the rain beat down on them and cleaned the filth of the lake away.

When the Neva thawed in spring, there were always bodies washing under the St. Petersburg bridges along with the gray lumps of ice. But there was an effort to collect them, identify them, cut holes in the frozen ground and bury them.

That this—this squalor—was permitted, burned in his soul.

Not far now. The bridge carried a road, and the spaces between the rude dwellings roughly followed the remains of the tarmacked surface.

Someone had died, that night or that morning. They lay face down, features obscured by long graying hair. Their bones stuck out against their pale skin, each knuckle-joint a knot. They would have weighed no more than a child.

The rain beat at the body lying across their path, trying to dissolve it away.

She lost it. She shook him off hard enough to hurt him and crouched down beside the cold, stiff figure. She wept uncontrollably.

Petrovitch looked on, gazed at the short distance they had left to go. He could see the start of Exhibition Road on the other side of the gate.

“Whoever it is, is beyond help. Unless you can raise the dead.”

The way she moved her shoulders showed him his opinion wasn’t at all welcome. She reached forward, hesitated, then turned the body over so that the sightless eyes were filling with rain.

It had been a woman, her age impossible to guess, her cause of death likewise. There were so many things she could have died of. A broken heart for one. Sister Madeleine pushed the eyelids down, first one, then the other. She sat hunched on her heels, dejected, defeated.