As I flew farther inland, a vast, circular valley stretched out below me, with a gray shelf of rock built up all around it. Hulking objects dotted the yellow land, and when I dove lower to get a better look, I thought I was seeing things in my exhaustion. At first my spirit soared at the realization that those dots were thousands of animals…

Until the smell hit me.

Every single creature lay dead. Lions, zebras, giraffes, all in varying stages of decomposition.

Uh, pretty sure there aren’t giraffes in Russia, rotting or not.

I saw someone wrapped head to toe in a burgundy fabric, huddling over one of the fresher corpses—some kind of deer. I stood watching nimble fingers snatch bones already picked clean and tuck them into hidden pockets.

Finally, I tucked my wings inside my sweatshirt and cleared my throat, and the figure turned.

The amber-colored eyes were all that was visible beneath the folds of fabric, and they widened at my approach.

“You are not burned!” a woman’s voice exclaimed.

“No…” I said uneasily.

Was that something she hoped to fix?

“Every person that comes to us from the city is burned.” A man I hadn’t seen stood up from behind the bulk of a water buffalo. He was also in a full robe.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not from the city. Which city, by the way?”

Which country and which continent, for that matter?

The two swaddled figures turned toward each other in silent communication.

“Do you know why all these animals died?” I interrupted.

“Come,” the woman said, walking away. “Come with us to our home and we will talk.”

Exhausted, starving, and desperate for answers, I followed.

34

“THERE WAS A very bright flash of light, and then heat all around.” Azizi was an animated storyteller, and his breath made the candle jump.

Once inside the mud-packed hut, my hosts had pulled their cloaks down around their shoulders, and I saw that Azizi and his sister, Nuru, had albinism. “We have to cover our skin,” Nuru explained. “Or the sun cooks it.”

They reminded me of Angel and Gazzy, and it wasn’t just their fair hair and skin. Nuru was measured and unreadable, while Azizi could be goofy, filling the spaces between his sister’s silences.

“A Jeep from one of the travel groups, its windows, pfft.” Azizi made a fist and shot his fingers out to signify the explosion of glass.

The travel groups were safaris—I learned that I was in eastern Africa, in the Ngorongoro Crater. I’d gotten pretty turned around in that storm.

“And then the animals, they sink to their knees and lie down, one by one,” Azizi went on. “They raise their voices and beg for Death to come to them! And Death, he comes.”