“I’m okay. Just, well, what John went through…”

Peregrine nodded. “I know,” she said. Her voice trembled. “His life has been so difficult, and there’s nothing I can do to help.”

“I have the same problem,” Michelle said. “I want to protect Adesina, but the older she gets, the more difficult it’ll be.”

Peregrine gave her a hug. “It’ll be fine. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.” She took a deep breath, then smiled a little too brightly. “I think we’re filming a commercial next week. I’ll see you then!” She kissed Michelle on the cheek, then breezed out the door.

Michelle pulled her clothes on quickly, then looked in the mirror. She glanced at her phone. There was no time to take off her makeup. Fortunately, her hair looked halfway normal, but really it didn’t matter. She coiled it up and stuffed it under her baseball cap.

Slowing the truck where a dirt road veered off from the highway, Olena pointed at a cluster of cottages nestled on the hillside above them. “There. That’s it.”

“You still haven’t told me what’s so special about this village,” Marcus said. Certainly, from this vantage, it hardly looked like a prime destination.

“They will help us,” Olena said. That was as detailed as she would get on the matter, though Marcus had been pushing her since she first mentioned it. Shifting the truck into gear with a jolt, she turned off onto the side road and began the ascent.

They crawled into the village with the big engine rumbling loud enough to announce them to anyone within earshot. Marcus was glad when she turned it off and climbed out of the cab. The place seemed deserted. Ramshackle. Simple, run-down-looking houses, a few barnlike structures, black windows, and closed doors. The hulk of an old car perched on blocks, wheel-less. The silence was almost unnerving in the high, thin air, whipped by gusts of wind that only made the place seem more like a ghost town. A raptor of some sort screeched in the sky, dipped and dove.

Marcus shivered. He’d gotten cold the last few miles, a bone-deep cold that seemed to come from inside him.

Olena called out in Russian. She tried a few different phrases, turning as she did so and projecting her voice.

Marcus whispered, “There’s nobody here.”

Olena pinched that thought between her teeth a moment and then said, “Come down so that they can see you.”

“So who can see me? There’s nobody here!”

At her urging he slid painfully from the bed of the truck. He rolled awkwardly to the packed dirt, head swimming from the motion. He leaned against one of the truck’s large tires, panting from that small exertion.

Olena began calling out again. Something about hearing her lone voice in the place made his spirits dive. At that moment, dressed as she was and speaking as she was, she seemed completely foreign to him. It reminded him how lost he was, how out of his depth and so very, very far from the things he knew. And there was nobody here. It finally, fully bloomed on him—the understanding that he was going to die here. He could feel the life draining out of him. He wondered, for the first time, where he would go when he died. Father Squid knew. He was there already. Maybe, if he was lucky, the priest would be waiting for him on the other side of life. If they were to go to the same place. He hoped so. He truly hoped so.