Then I pressed the stop button and glanced round furtively. The doors of the bedroom and the nursery were closed. Naturally, I couldn’t check the Twilight right now, but our home was surrounded by such powerful defensive spells that even Gesar and Zabulon working together would have taken hours to break through them. The spells were an entitlement of my rank—and since Nadya lived here . . .

Did I want to hear the prophecy?

I knew now for certain that it existed. Arina had said as much. There was no point in hoping that Kesha hadn’t pressed the button on the toy phone. Or that the prophecy was about the price of oil or the presidential elections . . .

I sighed, closed my eyes, and pressed the button.

Silence. With crackling, like from an old-fashioned record.

“You are Anton Gorodetsky, Higher Light Magician . . .” a childish voice said quietly. My hands started trembling as they clutched the minidisc player—someone wasn’t just walking over my grave, they were dancing jigs and reels on it. “Because of you . . . all of us will be released . . .”

Released? What did that mean?

“The Tiger’s coming, the Tiger’s coming, the Tiger’s coming,” said Kesha, suddenly speaking rapidly, almost incoherently . . . “A long time. A long, long time . . . Nadya Gorodetskaya! Nadya can do it, Nadya can . . .”

I actually jerked up off my chair when the hasty muttering was interrupted by my daughter’s name.

“You can’t divide anything by zero, you can’t divide anything by zero . . .” the voice reminded me, like the feverish ravings of some star pupil. “Anything multiplied by zero is zero, anything multiplied . . . Kill the Tiger! Kill the Tiger and you kill the Twilight! Kill the Tig—”

The recording came to an end. The toy phone only had a small memory chip.

A few seconds of silence—and Vysotsky started singing again in midline . . .

In a strange country everything’s queer,

You could get lost, you could just disappear.

It can raise goose bumps thinking too long

About all the strange things that could go wrong.

The ground cracks apart, raising a doubt:

Will you leap boldly, or just chicken out?

And that’s the basic complication

Of such a tricky situation.

I took off the headphones, turned the player off, and tossed it back into the drawer.

Basically, I’d understood quite a lot.

“The Tiger’s coming, the Tiger’s coming for you . . .” No comment required.

“The Twilight is falling asleep . . . not enough Power, not enough, not enough . . . the prophecies have been waiting . . . A long time. A long, long time.” The Twilight was short of Power? That was kind of strange. Was there really not enough grief and joy in the world? Well—let’s just accept it. “The prophecies have been waiting . . .” Which prophecies did that mean? The one that Wen-yan had not made known? The one that Arina had “retarded”? Possibly.