But he knew what this room had once been—the workshop at the back of Morozova’s home, the place where his grandfather had tampered with the boundaries between life and death, had resurrected creatures with the hope of building power into their bones. He’d tried to make his own amplifiers and he’d succeeded.

Aleksander had attempted to follow in Morozova’s footsteps. He’d cajoled his mother into bringing him to this town, to the home she’d occupied as a child. When she’d seen the church built in the place where her father’s workshop had been, she’d laughed for the better part of an hour.

“They killed him, you know,” Baghra had said, tears of mirth leaking from her eyes. “The ancestors of the very men and women walking this town and praying in this church threw him into the river. Real power frightens them.” She’d waved at the painted altarpiece. “They want the illusion of it. An image on a wall, silent and safe.”

But power was exactly what Aleksander had found, tucked away in this basement—his grandfather’s journals, the records of his experiments. They had become his obsession. He’d been sure that he could do what Ilya Morozova had done, and so he’d tried. The result was the Fold.

A gift, whispered Yuri’s voice, and Aleksander was suddenly standing in Novokribirsk, watching the tide of the Fold rush toward him, hearing the screams around him. You saved me that day.

Aleksander peered into the darkness of the basement room. He certainly hadn’t meant to save Yuri. But he was glad someone remembered the good he’d done for this country.

He felt along the wall, the soil cold and moist beneath his palm, to the niche where he’d found the journals, bound up in oilcloth. Empty now. No, not entirely. His fingers fastened around something—a piece of wood. Part of a child’s toy. The curving neck of a swan fashioned with exquisite care, broken at the base. Useless.

Why did you go to Alina? Yuri buzzed away. Why seek her out? To reclaim his power, of course. The universe wanted to humble him, to force him to appeal to a pair of pathetic orphans like a beggar on his knees.

Why did you go to her?

Because with her he was human again. She had once been naive, lonely, desperate for approval, all the things that had made it so easy for him to manipulate his soldiers in the past. So how had she bested him? Sheer stubbornness. That pragmatic impulse that had allowed her to survive the orphanage, to endure so many years without using her power. Something more. He’d known the name for it once, a hundred lifetimes ago. It’s not too late for you. Alina might be right, but he hadn’t fought his way back from death for the sake of being saved.