I liked the idea that they were friends, that she had someone to talk to besides Ukashin. “Do you ever talk about Petrograd, the old days?”

“We never talk about personal things. We speak of the work, her experiences on the astral.” He paused, remembering her, then his face darkened. “But Taras doesn’t like us interfering with her. He wants to be her sole contact. As you’ve seen.”

“But you’re the one guarding her door.”

How sad he looked. “She can’t be disturbed. Changes are going on now. I’m no longer privy to the discussions.” The bitterness around his small mouth. “There’s a new darkness around us, haven’t you noticed? No one talks about it. Have they said anything to you?”

Me? I was the lowest on the ladder of initiation. “No one talks to me,” I said. “But I’ve felt it, yes. I thought it was the war… the violence. Red versus White. It’s probably reverberating all over the world, even onto the higher dimensions.”

“That’s not how it works,” he said. “The disturbance is above, and manifests on this level. Energy goes from higher to lower. The war is a disturbance in the higher dimensions, materializing in the third. That’s your mother’s work, to keep it from coming through.”

I didn’t like the idea of war in the higher dimensions. I liked my higher dimensions abstract and orderly and beneficent if possible. This was spooky, like devils in the bathhouse, witches curdling the milk. “I thought you were a scientist.”

“There are all sorts of beings on every dimension, Marina.”

We moved through the pines. Traveling on this side was easier, as some of the trees had been cut, though cover for small game wasn’t quite as good. I saw something in the snow that made my heart leap. Split-hoof tracks, pretty as name-day roses. I crouched down to study them. Here were the small tracks of a mouse, and oval prints with small forward toes—marten or sable. A crow strutting. And, queen of my dreams, those delicate hoofprints of deer. Recent, too. Nothing else had degraded their edges. They were imprinted on top, firmly as a rubber stamp.

I rubbed my nose with my mitten, trying to warm it, pulled my scarf up again. If I got a deer, Ukashin would be appeased, and I would be taken off the punishment list, brought back into the breast of Ionia, forgiven my trespasses. I could feel my day brightening.

Andrei hung over my shoulder like a man reading another’s newspaper. “What do you see?”

I pointed. “Deer tracks. Here, and here.”

I scanned the trees, and there, between trunks, something large and gray moved silently. I yanked my glove off with my teeth and took the pistol from my pocket, held my other hand out to silence Andrei. As quietly as I could, I began to approach in the creaking snow. I had to get closer. There was no way to kill anything from this distance. As I moved, I was already thinking how I would get a deer home, whether I would have to hoist it into a tree, and with what. As I neared, I heard a crash. The intelligent had caught his ski and fallen into a clump of evergreens. The big shape vanished.

Damn, Andrei! Could he be any clumsier? I could have had a clear shot in another few feet. In my mind I’d already killed that deer, was already tasting a bit of its raw liver. That stag had lasted us a month. I plunged ahead to try to find the animal, leaving Andrei to sort himself out. Or he could just sit there in the snow for all I cared.

I moved in the direction where I’d last seen it, watching for tracks. There and there. Bounding. But I was no match for a running deer. I followed the prints for a few minutes anyway, in hopes it might calm down and stop to browse. Finally, I had to admit I’d lost it. Damn him! Why did Ukashin think this was such a good idea, to cripple me in my hunting? He should be thinking of the rest of the Ionians, not my transgression. And now I was in an area of the forest where I’d never been before, and the clouds were descending. I thought of Andrei back there. My charge, my albatross. My anger said leave him there, but remorse ticked like a clock. Even if he’d managed to right himself, he would probably fall in a tree hole and break a leg. The snow would be coming soon, and he would be completely lost without me. I had to get him home.

I released the deer in my mind. How sad it was to watch it spring away. Frustrated and furious, I turned to follow my big ugly tracks back to where I’d left the intelligent. The Ionians constantly preached the necessity of misery to help you awaken, but as far as I could see, suffering never made anybody better. It just made us petty and irritable and selfish. We got better despite our suffering, not because of it.

I found Andrei exactly where I’d left him, sitting in the snow, his arms wrapped around his legs, resting his forehead against his knees.

“I lost the deer,” I said.

“I’m useless,” he said. “Just leave me here.”

“You can’t sit here. You’ll freeze. Get up.”

“I don’t care anymore,” he said. “I’m done.”

“Come on.” I pulled him up, dusted him off, and we started home. I could tell that Andrei was tired. He dropped farther and farther behind. I wished I had another meal on me to perk him up.

As we moved back to the place where it was easiest to cross the river, I recognized a configuration of rocks where I’d set another trap. I tramped over to check it, watching for my ward. Yes! The trap had been sprung. But when I approached to collect my bounty, I found nothing hanging from the cord. Indeed the noose itself was gone, snapped clean, and the snow beneath lay trampled and bloody. Whatever I’d caught, it had barely been dead when the thief arrived, as the blood had flowed, not yet frozen. Although most of the tracks were trampled, one was clear as a signature. It sent a shiver through me. A doglike track, bigger than those of Ukashin’s hairy hounds. A new arrival. But how long ago? Days? Hours? The print was clean—no mouse tracks or twigs or snow around it.

“Did you find something?” Andrei asked, coming up behind me.

I stood, kicking the kinks from my legs. My nose was running, and my cheeks stung in the cold. “No,” I said. I didn’t want to frighten him. The talk of darkness brewing already had me on edge, and the sky was heavy with coming snow. I still pictured that deer drifting through the icy mist, but the rabbit and big hare would have to be enough for tonight. I could not afford to tarry.

As we set off again, I had to admit I was grateful for Andrei’s company and regretted that I’d contemplated abandoning him earlier. I would not want to be alone in the woods with the owner of that track. What was it the Kirghiz had said? If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods. The two of us would present a more formidable prospect to a predator than myself alone.

“Sorry I ruined your hunting,” he said. “I can’t seem to do anything right these days.”

If he was looking for consolation, he wasn’t going to find it with me. I thought I saw movement about a hundred meters off. It might have been my overwound imagination, but I could have sworn I saw a ghostly form weaving its way through the pines. I took my pistol out. It must have scented us, maybe back when we’d eaten our lunch. Perhaps it had even followed me when I was tracking the deer. Oh God. Ukashin might have given me hunting as my Trud, but that thing out there in the trees, that was a hunter.

I blinked to clear my eyes, my skin prickling. An icy fog gathered in pockets along the ground. Andrei’s breath was short in my ear.

There—another flicker of motion. Or was it? If I hadn’t seen the print in the snow, I might have convinced myself I was imagining it all. I turned slowly, trying to see through the trees and the deepening mist. I could feel it stalking us, as it had through the moonlit arcade of my dream.

“The deer again?” he said.

I didn’t want to say the word. I might not believe in much, but I believed in the power of naming. “Maybe. But it’s getting late. I don’t think there’ll be anything else today.” What time was it? The light was unreadable, the mist blotting out shadows. Another hour at best. We had to get back across the river.

My heartbeat pounded in my ears as we moved through the bank of fog. I tried to hurry Andrei without alarming him, but he snagged his ski tip on a buried root and fell again. He was tiring. Something flew over our heads, silent until it was right on us. I ducked, held on to my hat. Owl. All the hunters were out today. It was as if this forest wanted us, had set its own snares.

We needed to make some noise, make ourselves seem loud, robust, confident. It knew we were here. We needed to impress it with our vigor. Well, that was something Andrei could do as easily as breathing—make noise. I asked him in a bright voice how he came to follow Ukashin.

I had not expected the reaction. He stopped. He even stopped panting. His bird face with its little spectacles, its red nose, its vulnerable mouth agape. “I don’t follow Ukashin. Is that what you think?”

Well, he’d spent every day since I’d arrived doing the worst of our tasks, taking out the ashes from the stoves, washing the chamber pots, sitting before Mother’s door, all while absorbing great shovelfuls of Ukashinian humiliation and spooling out reels of Ionian philosophy. “But you were at the Laboratory.”

“You think I trotted after him like a little dog? Begging for his attention? That I’m just another of his sheep?”

Obviously I had stepped on one of Andrei Ionian’s sore spots. “No, no,” I said. “I was just asking. Really.” Keep moving. I scanned the trees around us, the mist, trying not to picture the predator taking Andrei’s skinny intellectual neck in its teeth. But Andrei wasn’t with me. He was still where he’d stopped, as if he’d been hit by lightning. “I founded Ionia,” he said. “I invented it. It’s mine. Not his. Mine.”