Evidently, everyone in the house was already asleep. The only light was on the second floor. Actually, it wasn’t even light but its dim remnants. Filya pulled on his pants and, half-naked, left the room. He stood on the staircase a moment and listened hard: absolute silence reigned in the house. From time to time, something clicked in the radiators and heating pipes, but Filya caught no living, organic sounds. Everything that might think, rage, amuse, hate, frighten, delight, and, most of all, disappoint—all that had quieted down and slunk off to hide in some corner.

  Filya, stepping carefully, went down the stairs and into the living room, which was lit only by an orange spiral heater. The rug by the couch was still strewn with glass. The shards blazed and flared orange, which made the carpet seem to bloom with bizarre, living flowers. Above this sudden magnificence, in the half dark of the couch, lay the mutt he and Rita had crippled. Sensing a human’s presence, it opened a shining orange eye but didn’t lift its head. Like an independent being, this eye lived its own life and moved, following Filya’s displacements across the rug. Filya hadn’t taken the time to put on shoes, so he was trying not to step barefoot on the shimmering shards. The living room was noticeably cooler than upstairs, and shivers were already running down Filippov’s bare back.

  It turned out to be not so easy to ascend the stairs in the dark carrying the heavy mutt. A couple of times Filya tripped and nearly lost his balance, stubbing first his right toe and then his left on a high step. The mutt took these shocks rather hard and both times clasped Filya’s naked shoulder in its teeth, not really clamping down, but still making it clear that Filya shouldn’t do that anymore.

  It was warmest by the closet next to which Filya lay the mutt in his room. To clarify this, he had spent a minute walking from corner to corner with the mutt in his arms, and in the end his bare feet told him where would be best. Back on the floor at last, the mutt yawned loudly, sneezed, and shut its eyes. The move to the warm room had worn it out.

  Filya squatted next to the dog and put his still-bandaged hand on its evenly rising and falling side. The mutt opened one eye slightly, inquiringly.

  “You and I are playing for the same team again,” Filya softly said, explaining his attack of tenderness. “Downed pilots. All I need, bro, is this thing.”

  He touched the slide rule poking out of the dressing on the dog’s leg.

  “A classy item, by the way. Look what you can do with it.”

  Filya tugged at the slide rule, which pulled out of the bandage like an antenna.

  “Listen, what if I use this in my new show? Mummies and zombies could wander around the stage in bandages, and then these things come out of their arms.”

  He fiddled with the slide rule a few more times and looked into the mutt’s half-open eye.

  “That would be some show. Come with me? Want to see it? This time will be different. I promise you. Will you come?”

  The mutt breathed a sigh.

  “Only first, help me find this kid. Help me. Okay?” Filya started getting busy. “You don’t have to do anything. Lie here and recuperate. You just have to want me to find him. That’s enough—I know it is. All I need is for you to want it.”

  Filya didn’t know whether he had the right to ask the dog such things after what he had done to it at that performance, nonetheless he did ask, and now the mutt had to decide whether he deserved its help or not.

  “No rush.” Filya, happy that he had shared the responsibility at least a little, straightened up and rubbed his feet, which had fallen asleep. “You go think. We’ve got plenty of time ’til morning.”

  Waking up a couple of hours later from strange scurrying sounds, he saw in the dark someone’s silhouette squatting in front of the mutt. Other than the Demon of the Void, who’d gone missing all day yesterday, no one else should have been sitting in his room in the middle of the night, squatting like that.

  “Get away from the dog,” Filya demanded in a voice caught half-asleep. “I need it.”

  The silhouette turned and spoke in Tyoma’s voice. “You should have hit me, not it.”

  “Tyoma?” Filya half rose in bed. “What’s the matter? Why are you acting like a lunatic?”

  “Danilov said Rita slept with him.”

  Filya took a deep breath and sat up on the bed.

  “Listen, let’s do this tomorrow,” he said after a long pause. “I have one very important thing to do. I need some sleep. Want to go with me in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we have a deal.”

  They both were silent a little longer.

  “Can I take the dog to my room?”

  “No.”

  Filya was awakened a second time, by shots outside. Surfacing convulsively from sleep, gasping and grabbing for something in front of him, he had time to be scared but immediately decided he’d dreamed the shots. But in the next instant, there was another bang right outside his window.

  Filya hid under the blanket and held his breath. No more sounds came in from outside. He waited about ten minutes, thinking he probably should get up and look out the window, but then, imperceptibly, he fell asleep. Nothing else disturbed him until morning.

  “Who was shooting last night?” he asked when he went down to the living room, where at seven thirty all the house’s residents had already gathered.

  “Those were my men,” Danilov replied, turning his head away from the TV for a second. “Scaring off looters.”

  Filya surveyed those gathered in the large room. Everyone was listening tensely to the news about the situation in the city.

  “We’ve got television,” Filya said. “That means it’s not the end of the world.”

  No one responded to what he’d said. Only Tyoma looked his way.

  The newscaster started reading out the weather reports. “Over the entire republic, temperatures are significantly below normal. The villages of Anabarsk, Bulunsk, and Verkhoyansk are down to minus fifty. In the republic’s capital, it’s minus forty-four . . .”

  “Lord, it’s like we’re in an Agatha Christie novel,” Zina sobbed.

  “Stop it,” Pavlik responded immediately. “Agatha Christie wrote exclusively in the detective genre, whereas our situation is more of a disaster novel. To be absolutely precise, she has six nondetective novels, but they were written under a pen name, Mary Westmacott. Therefore, technically speaking—”

  “Pavlik, quit it, I beg of you,” his wife’s voice flew up. “You know what I mean. We’re cut off from the world, the killings have started around us, and we aren’t getting out of here.”

  So he wouldn’t have to hear any more of this raving, Filya nodded barely noticeably to Tyoma and turned an invisible steering wheel. Tyoma rose immediately. However, before exiting the room, he turned and looked at Rita. She didn’t respond to his look.

  “Why is living so hard?” Tyoma asked when they were well away from the house. Ten minutes had passed in silence as they looked into the dense, dark predawn fog.

  “I don’t know,” Filya replied. “I wasn’t the one who thought it up.”

  “But after that . . . does it get easier?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Of the list of car owners Filya had taken from the investigator, only two were registered in the city. The first was Pavlik. Filya was well acquainted with the second address. The building was next to the theater where he’d once worked as fire warden. Jumping out of the car and looking at the columns of the front entrance, blurry in the fog, he thought he’d come full circle. Or was just about to. His course was coming to an end.

  People were crowded on the square in front of the theater. Despite the early hour, there were forty or fifty people jumping up and down around the huge bonfires they had going next to the theater’s tall staircase. Clustered around two Kamaz trucks piled to the top with firewood, they were wreathed in steam, busy doing something important. A welding iron sparked and hissed, and the strikes against the metal rumbled. The fog had transformed the scene into a spectral and seriously infernal act in a play, but Filya wasn’t thinking about devils anymore. Now he had a genuine and all-encompassing mission.

  “Let’s go. What’re you standing there for?” He gave Tyoma, who had fallen still next to the car, having forgotten to fasten his down parka, a shove in the shoulder.

  “What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know. Do up your jacket or you’ll get sick.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Filya recognized this indifference. Not even indifference but the desire to shift emotional pain into the physical sphere, to make his suffering perceptible bodily. A naive desire. Anger, dismay, and the feeling you’ve been betrayed have no physical analog. If they did, there’d be nothing but invalids crawling through the streets.

  One of the blurry shadows by the Kamazes leaned over, picked up something, and flung it in their direction. A substantial piece of ice went flying into the Land Cruiser’s side with a dull thud. The shards flew off in different directions, and Filya could feel them cutting the back of his neck, where his cap didn’t cover it.

  Tyoma picked up a similar piece and drew his arm back to throw it.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Filya said.

  The men crowding by the trucks were now nearly all looking their way. And although he couldn’t see their faces in the fog, Filya knew what was written on them.

  “Don’t,” he said softly. “You’ll be one against all of them. Or do what you want, but they’ll rip both our heads off right here. Tyoma, I have something very important to do.”

  Tyoma lowered his arm and dropped the ice.

  “Well done. To entertain you, I’ll tell you about other means of suicide. There are less painful ones, believe me.”

  Barely had they gone through the creaking front door overgrown with a gigantic frost beard when it slammed behind them and Tyoma’s phone came to life in his pocket.

  “Oh, that means there’s service now,” Filya said. “Life is getting back to normal.”

  Tyoma took out his cell phone, looked at the screen, and then put the phone back. “Rita.”

  “Aha. You mean it’s already reached that point?”

  “I just don’t want to talk to her.”

  They went up one flight, and the phone in Tyoma’s pocket cawed.

  “You can read it.” Filya nudged him with his elbow. “The woman did try. She did text, after all.”

  Tyoma stopped on the landing between floors and drilled his inflamed gaze into Filya’s face. You could tell he hadn’t slept at all.

  “What are you standing there for? Check it, I’m telling you. Maybe it explains everything. Maybe Danilov lied to you.”

  Tyoma took out his phone, clicked some buttons, and froze for a few seconds, his head leaning toward the screen’s ghastly glow. The steam that had been tearing from his lips even before this and was hotly and nervously forming clouds before dissolving in the perfectly still, cold air now stopped right there, not rising to the frost-shaggy ceiling. For a while, everything stopped in that rimy space. Everything in general.

  “It’s a message for you,” Tyoma said at last. “Some Anna Rudolfovna called. She asked that someone tell you to come by this address.”

  He held out his hand and showed him the text on the screen.

  “Yaroslavsky Street,” Filya read. “Is that anywhere nearby?”

  “In the neighborhood, I think. It runs parallel to the avenue.”

  Filya looked into Tyoma’s eyes to figure out just how disheartened he was. Tyoma looked back with morose indifference. His look reflected nothing Filya had expected to see in it—no anger, no pain, no dismay, no self-pity. Gazing at Filya was an oppressive void, and for a second he even wondered whether instead of Tyoma standing in front of him it was his old friend who’d enjoyed sulking over him.

  “What’s with you?” Tyoma asked, watching as Filya started shaking his head.

  “It’s all good. Let’s keep going.”

  But it was all far from good. Filya had lied to the young man in a desperate attempt to protect himself, although the void revealed to him in Tyoma’s gaze had already surged, already penetrated Filya, and he didn’t have a chance in hell of withstanding it. The heavy indifference of someone who’d suddenly had taken away from him what he’d lived for was sucking at him like a greedy, champing bog, pressing on his rib cage, cracking open everything there was to break in it, and Filya was helplessly falling into it, into this indifference, looking at the surrounding world now with the eyes of the crushed Tyoma. It was as if Filya were once again in his hated past and could feel the familiar, icy deafness, which not only sounds but generally everything in his life had such a hard time passing through. This deafness was as viscous as the local fog, as the cold. As limitless as winter.

  Now Filya knew the boy hadn’t been lying to him the previous night. Tyoma really did regret that Filya and Rita had hit the dog and not him. He truly did not want to live. Why the boy’s misery had gone off the charts and reached this incredibly high pitch in a single night was beyond mysterious. The fact was, though, that Tyoma had taken a leap and was flying off into an abyss, even though just two days ago he’d seemed absolutely fine. At his first meeting with him, Filya never would have guessed at this forgotten but nonetheless kindred hatred for the world. A lot changes in boys’ worldviews when they find out their girlfriends sleep with other guys.

  The door was opened by an unpleasant, fussy little man who obviously took them for who he’d been expecting and so let them in without question. He was a little man not because of his physical size but because he was fussy on the inside. Although significantly taller than average and fairly solidly built, inside he obsessed, endlessly and minutely, and unable to make a choice, he grabbed everything at once. While he was leading his early visitors to the kitchen, hopping like a grasshopper over the boxes that blocked the entire entryway and hall between rooms, he managed to inform them that this wasn’t all the goods, that he had his own Azerbaijanis at the market, that fruits would be a little more, and that he’d nearly solved the problem of a second heated truck.

  Listening to his murmuring with half an ear, Filya realized why the apartment smelled of tangerines. The little man had bought up everything that might freeze in city traders’ now-unheated warehouses for cheap and was quickly sending these perishable goods to the villages, where prices were not about to fall. By all accounts, the take promised to be considerable, so the little man was sincerely pleased by the municipal accident.

  “Did you see the master craftsmen on the square in front of the theater?” he said quickly. “Those guys figured it out. That’s class for you. Riveting sheet-metal stoves together and selling them with firewood on the spot. People’ve come flocking. They’ve been open for business for more than a day. They take rubles and hard currency both. Even gold jewelry—whatever deal you make. Beauties. What can you say?”

  His voice held so much sincere admiration and envy simultaneously that Filya couldn’t stop himself from kicking one of the boxes of tangerines, which before this he had politely stepped over.

  In the kitchen, Tyoma immediately hunkered down on a stool in the corner and fell quiet, though Filya could sense him the whole time. An invisible but very strong umbilical cord stretched between them, pulsing with disaster.

  “It’s warm here,” Filya said to the trader bug, who’d hastily cleared the table of his unappetizing dinner remains.

  “Uh-huh,” the man said, nodding readily. “Yesterday the cold was nasty, but last night I took a bottle to someone from a local furnace that’s autonomous from the main line, and he patched me in. They promised not to turn off our building anymore. They put us on emergency status.”

  “Emergency?”

  “Well, yes. Emergency resources, like for hospitals. I have to go from apartment to apartment and collect a kopek from everyone.”

  “You grovel?”

  “Why do you say that?” The bug smiled easily. “I was looking out for people. I paid for the whole building myself. You should give back something.”

  “You were worried about the tangerines,” Tyoma said quietly, staring at the floor in front of him.

  At that moment, Tyoma’s face changed, as if he’d arrived at a difficult but very important decision for himself, and now a strange half-smile roamed across it. Without tearing his frozen gaze from the invisible spot on the dirty floor, and obviously not aware of that fact, he kept slipping the wide silver ring that adorned his left thumb off and on. Filya hadn’t noticed the ring before, but now, together with his strange smile, this repetitive gesture made a sinister impression.

  “Did you drive across the day before yesterday?” Filya finally asked the trader bug. “Or lend your car to someone?”

  “I did,” he answered, taking a big fish frozen like a log from the cupboard under the window. “Care for some stroganina?”

  “No. Frozen fish slices were never my thing.”

  “Wait. How do you know I went across the river?”

  The bug had already slapped the huge fish on the table by its tail, getting ready to slice it, but froze with the knife in his hand and looked searchingly at Filya. His knife was a good one, a hunter’s knife, with an ivory grip.

  “Doesn’t matter. Did you see a dead car on the road? Next to the island?”

  “Yeah, I saw it. But what does that have to do with—?”

  “Quiet. Just answer my questions.”

  “You mean you’re not here for the fruit? Who are you guys? You didn’t send a text?”

  “Not us.”

  He reacted to the news about the dead people as if it had nothing to do with him. He stopped slicing his fish for a second, frowned slightly, and then renewed his smooth and confident movements, which absolutely did not match his previous inner fussiness. The alarming news seemed to have stymied him momentarily, but he pulled himself together, stopped fussing, and prepared to defend himself. Filya watched the thin pink slices with amber veins curl off the sharp Yakut knife and listened to the cold, absolutely calm explanation of the apartment’s owner, who assured him that neither he himself, nor Filya, nor anyone else was going to answer for that incident.