IT WAS TOO cold to keep hiding. Svyatoslav could not remain still anymore. With the plastidown blanket wrapped around him, he crept down the hill.
He had been sleeping on a small rise, about a hundred meters from the camp, when the attack came. He’d chosen that spot because the ground there was flat, and dry. He had drifted off looking at the stars. They were so dense here, in this landscape without light, with no moon to dull them, that he could imagine trade routes between them, civilizations weaving a web of ships. He remembered an ancient map he had once seen, of trade routes across the Mediterranean. The map depicted some of the features of the shore, but mostly it showed the main trading ports, with distanced-marked lines connecting them to one another. Not a map of terrain, or of the sea itself—a map of connectivity. That was what he saw in the stars above him as well. With enough societies, with enough energy, with enough technology, you could build a web of life that stretched over even those distances.
This was how his mind moved, when he was alone. These were his private thoughts, told to no one. To his father, the drone Svyatoslav piloted was a toy. To Svyatoslav, it was part of much more. With it, he reached out beyond the confines of his body. He looked from another position down on his world. Saw himself and others for what they were—miniscule, embedded in a much larger world, a world which itself was just a point in something vast.
To his father, Siberia was the world, and it was enough. This land was big enough for anything, and he knew it the way few others knew it. He never thought of leaving it: he thought of mastering it, taking from it, using it. But for Svyatoslav this vastness was just a point, a peripheral node in a network of connections. Mastering technology could bring him to other places. Skills were rays pointing outward. They became line segments when you discovered where they led. To other points. To a university in another country, maybe. And that university would be a point more central to the network—a point from where he would be able to view many segments, many connections. He would be able to see, then, his place in this network of possibilities. He would be able to move in it. To move away from all of this, out into a wider world.
His mother had been a geography teacher in a secondary school. She had brought maps home since before he could remember, showing him a world that was both limitless and accessible: if it could be documented, it was real. It could be reached.
One of his first memories was of a map. He remembered sitting on his mother’s lap, at the table in their little kitchen. It was night, and snowing outside the window. He could see the flakes when they came close to the window or when a gust of wind whirled them against the glass. He could see the snow as it fell into the haloes of the streetlamps, solar systems whirling in the darkness. His mother’s arm was around him. She sang softly under her breath. On the table was a notebook, a blue pen, and a book. The book was open to a map. She stopped taking notes and pointed to a place on the map. An island off the boot of Italy.
“This is called Sicily. We could go there one day.” She moved her finger. “Or we could go here. This island is called Corsica.”
“Corsica.”
“That’s right.”
“How do we get there?”
“On a train, and then a plane, and maybe then a ship. There are many ways.”
“When will we go?”
“It’s up to us.”
He was afraid to lose this memory. He returned to it often, like a person checking their pockets to make sure their keys were still there. He had already lost so many memories of her. The further away he moved from the day of her death, the more she faded. So he had named this memory “Corsica” to give it a place in his mind. And he had given names to other memories of her, often associated with maps or with her talking about maps. He had memories of her named Astrakhan, Colchis, Wakhan, Gondwanaland, Ashgabat, Cyclades, Alkebulan, Thebes …
But he knew there were so many other memories lost. You could only remember what stood out, what was different. But most days lacked reference points. They were like the surface of water—undifferentiated, too mobile for the eye to rest upon. He’d forgotten almost everything already, and the face he remembered was nothing like her face had really been. The details were slipping away.
He woke to a vibration. Then he heard a man scream. He did not stand up—instinct kept him pinned to the grass. He crawled to a place where he could see the camp.
The shapes of the mammoths in the moonless dark were like holes torn in the sky—gaps where stars were missing. He saw the tent, mashed flat against the ground. One of the mammoths dragged it with its tusks. If anything still moved inside that crushed sack, he could not see it. Another mammoth walked across it, turned in a circle, mashing it further into the earth.
If Svyatoslav had ever been afraid before, it was nothing like this. This was the full weight of fear, pressing him into the earth. Pressing him so hard he felt he would sink beneath the soil forever.
Into the frozen underworld with Nga.
Something moaned from inside the crushed tent. He heard the mammoths’ feet coming down, heard sounds like tree branches breaking. He knew what the sounds were. He covered his head with his hands, his face pressed into the grass. He was silent, but still afraid the mammoths would be able to hear his heart beating, the rush of blood through his body. He heard them going for the drone mules, heard the sounds of metal twisting, joints snapping. Then the sounds of the mammoths themselves. Of the mammoths talking to one another. A rumble that came through the air but also up through the earth, through his blood and bone.
He lay a long time like that, after he knew they were gone. Even after he was certain they had left, no mental effort would unlock his joints and force them to move again. He must have been there for an hour before a night frost settled on him and he started to shiver.
It was the shivering that finally freed him, allowed him to move a hand, a finger, then the rest of his body. He wrapped the plastidown blanket around himself, got to his feet, and went down the hill.
With movement came thought. They were dead, but he was not. He had to gather things. He had to gather food from their stores, the shelter of the emergency tent, his sleeping bag. He had to find his way out of this place. It would be days of travel. He had to do it without the mammoths finding him. These thoughts drove death out of his head—the death of the men, of his father—even the possibility of his own death.
He was free.
The thought took him completely by surprise. It did not seem to come from inside him—it came down from the stars.
Free. When he walked out of this place, he would have nothing at all. No father, no mother, no home—not even a name, if he did not want it. Everything was destroyed. All of it. And that meant anything was possible now. All he had to do was survive this, move on from here.
He caught the death-smell of blood and feces, wafting from the mutilated tent, hammered flat and leaking gore onto the landscape. It knocked him to his knees.
Dead. His father. The others. Butchered.
“Get up, boy.”
He turned his head. He expected to see his father there, standing against the stars with that smirk of his on his face. And maybe then he would wake up from this.
It was Myusena. Behind him, Svyatoslav could see his tracks through the grass—dark holes in the thin layer of frost that had settled on the camp.
“Get up. We have a lot to do. We need to collect food, any weapons that survived. I need to see if any of the mules can be repaired, so we can get those tusks out of here and not have to carry them ourselves…”
Svyatoslav had forgotten about the tusks.
“This land does not wait for people to mourn. It simply carries them off to join the dead. I need you to move. The mammoths may return.”
The tent … the tent was steaming in the cold. Releasing the heat of the dead men inside.
“We need to help them. Maybe one of them is still…”
“No. None of them are alive, boy. And if one of them were, he would not be for long. But I need to get in there, and see what can be salvaged.” Myusena drew a knife from his belt, and started to the tent. He looked like a man about to gut a deer, nothing more. “You go and see if you can get that mule with the tusks on it upright. I think it’s less damaged than the rest. I’ll take care of this.”
“But how did you get away?”
“A sihirtia dug his way up from underground and woke me from my slumber. He told me to run into the darkness.”
Svyatoslav stared at him blankly.
“I’m kidding, kid. I just took the luckiest shit of my life.”