“Don’t sleep, my hero,” Olena’s voice said, rousing him. “Stay awake, okay? Sleep later.”

Marcus opened his eyes. The glare of the world flashed to life again. The valley floor stretched out below them, looking dry and scraggly as it dropped down toward Talas. Around them, the foothills of the mountains rose into a series of ridges, one piled on top of the other, growing in height. That mountain? It was there, miles away, towering above a desolate, foreign landscape like nothing he’d ever seen.

Olena stood behind the truck, holding up a jar of water for him. A little distance away a man, a woman, and several small children stood outside the door of a modest house, staring. At their feet sat the crates of cigarettes that Olena had said she was going to trade for clothes. Apparently, the barter had worked.

She had exchanged her slinky dress for a local getup. A colorful but shapeless sort of jacket, a woolen skirt so long it brushed the ground, and a hat into which her short hair disappeared entirely. He was going to miss the little red number, and she wasn’t exactly going to pass for a local with her angelic features and high cheekbones and crystal blue eyes. But from a distance she looked the part. Kinda.

He tried to cover up the pain of reaching for the jar by smiling. The effort of it, and of talking, was almost more than he could manage. “I like the look,” he said. “Doesn’t…” He exhaled, wondering where his breath had gone. “Doesn’t do you justice, but that’s probably a good thing.”

“You think I’m not so pretty now,” she said.

“God, no, I don’t think that,” Marcus said.

She brushed him off with a motion of her head. “Anyway, now we are hidden.”

He wanted to ask her how she could think a black guy with a twenty-foot striped snake tail could possibly be hidden anyplace, much less in rural Kazakh-wherever-they-were. But he didn’t. He didn’t really want to ask her. He wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that she seemed to continue not to see him as deformed. He certainly didn’t want it to end, though. He said, “You look great. Just like a local.”

“I know where to go now.” She gestured toward the watching family, and then waved at them. “They told me about a village. A good place for us.”

She hefted a large metal gasoline can into the bed and then climbed back up into the cab. She turned over the engine and pulled the truck back onto the long, narrow stretch of dusty tarmac that had taken them out of the city. They kept on rising into the mountains.

“What’s good about this place?” Marcus asked through the window.

“You’ll see,” she said.

Barbara’s sleep was restless. A dream—a nightmare, truthfully—returned, one that she’d had several times when she was younger but which hadn’t bothered her for many years now, a memory that inevitably morphed into a night terror.