THE DRONE FOUND the triangle of Burlaks, huddled together against the night. At the center, two men sat at a fire. The drone circled, as if asking a question. Considering. Then it came down with a whisper of blades no louder than a bat’s wings and settled on the roof rail of one of the Burlaks, from where it had a clear view of the two men.
The men spoke in low tones, in Russian.
“I don’t know if she thinks of me, anymore. But I certainly think of her, out there on the steppe, living in that shape we put her in. All of these years now, and she is still out there. I’ve stayed away. I don’t want to be a bad memory, a source of trauma. But sometimes I imagine finding her.”
“What would you say?”
“Yes—that is why I never do it. What do you say to the person you brought back from the dead, then made into a monster?”
“Monster hardly seems like the right word.”
“No—but I don’t mean it in that way. I mean something singular, something outside of everything we have ever known. Something—someone—entirely new. We made her into a creature that has never walked this earth. But that was just a start. What has she become, out there, after all of these seasons of being what she is now? Of leading them? Saving them? Because that is what has happened—she has saved them. They were dying, a dwindling herd, a failed experiment. Now there are three herds. Now I am growing older, and I feel like there might finally be a future to this place, beyond me, because of her. I remember we asked the question, when all of this was failing…”
“What does it take to get a mammoth to be a mammoth? I remember.”
“Yes. What does it take to get a mammoth to be a mammoth, and not just some hairy elephant swaying in despair in its refrigerated enclosure? What does it take to get them to know what they are, to understand how to live where they were made to live? And we have the answer, now. It takes someone who knows—or at least can imagine—what being a mammoth was like.”
“It takes an expert.”
“Yes—and we thought all the experts were dead. Just bones and mummies in the permafrost.”
“But we found a way forward.”
“No—we found Damira, and she found a way forward.”
It was quiet for a moment. Then:
“Do you think she would forgive you?”
In answer, the other man drew a terminal from his anorak. He turned the screen to his companion, and showed him a number. “Kommodifi has that as the price per gram, today, of what it is calling ‘New Mammoth Ivory.’ NMI, for short, on the speculative index. What does that price mean to you?”
“I’m going to be honest—after months every year on horseback, wandering this wasteland, that price just means ‘French Riviera’ or ‘Private Castle on the Dalmatian Coast.’ I’m getting tired.”
“Understandable. What it means to me is a future for this place. The herds are growing. Their browsing and grazing are extending the steppe, pushing the forests back, protecting the permafrost. We have wooly rhino in captivity now, steppe wolves, four short-faced bear cubs. None of those animals are identical to what once roamed here. All of them are cut-and-paste, genetic chimeras built from a scaffolding of modern animals, gestated in modern wombs, fostered by distant cousins—but they are close enough. We are rebuilding a world, here. A healthy world. A world where the permafrost stays, and the giants have returned. What that price per gram of tusk means to me is a future for all of that. What it means is a return on Moscow’s investment. It means they will keep sponsoring this place, stay interested. Fund us. That price, and the money these rich idiots will spend, once a year at most, to hunt something in secret that they can never speak of to anyone else—to live out some fantasy and bring down a prize they aren’t even allowed to keep—it’s enough to make this place permanent.”
“And you think Damira would see it that way? After what she went through when she was…” The man struggled for a word. “Back in her first life?”
Another long silence.
“I am glad I will never have to explain it to her.”
“You had better hope not.”
The drone rose up into the air slowly, pulling out of the fire-lit triangle and making a wide circle before it arced off into the night.
SVYATOSLAV HELD OUT his hand, and the drone dropped down into it. He placed it in its charging slot on the control headset, slid the headset back into its shock-cushioned, waterproof bag.
Myusena was forty meters away, asleep or at least prone on the ground, a shadow near the stamp of dying embers that had been their fire. The rifle was near him. Beyond him stood the mule with its load of tusks, worth more than any substance on earth. Past the mule, the stump of the tree they had hacked down and burned as fuel to stay warm for a few hours.
Svyatoslav pulled the quilted plastidown blanket tighter around his shoulders, and thought. There were rumors. Rumors that the president—that, in fact, much of the government—were dead minds, brought back in bodies the secret services grew in laboratories underground. Rumors that some of the scientists involved in the experiments were, themselves, the returned.
That was what they called them, in the stories. The returned. Minds brought back by some state experiment, minds copied and stored, then placed in new bodies. But it was not something Svyatoslav had ever considered could be true. It was the kind of thing people made clips about—those paranoid clips you could tell were pieced together in basements, with images thieved from science fiction websites, old film footage, comic books. Clips where the narrators talked too fast in some affected voice, trying to sound certain of things they couldn’t possibly know.
Could it be true? Was there someone called Damira, out there on the steppe among the mammoths? A mind that had once been in a human body, now … changed into one of them? The men had talked about it with certainty.
Yes, you could tell by the way they had spoken of it. It was true. It was a thing they had spoken about like any other fact. It was true, but he couldn’t yet assimilate it into this world.
He looked at Myusena again. Asleep, probably. But maybe just lying there, waiting. Svyatoslav knew—the sum of money the tusks might bring was so enormous that Myusena would never be able to divide it between them. Even half of it was more than a person could need in a lifetime—but that made it even more unlikely that anyone would give half of it away. But there was something else that Svyatoslav knew—and he knew it because he had watched his father come home penniless over and over, smelling of sweat and drink: Myusena would never sell the tusks, and live. Somewhere along the way, they would be taken from him. He would be swindled. Killed, even. Men like Svyatoslav’s father and Myusena did not get rich. They did not go and live on private islands, or send their children to university in London. No—they fulfilled their purpose: they retrieved things for others. They did the work, and were thrown away. Things like the tusks weren’t just for rich people to have, or buy—the rich already owned them. They just needed to be handed over to their rightful owners.
There was something to the Nenets stories about how the creatures were cursed—about how they spread sickness and death. He thought of the bulls, of the sound like a sob that the younger one had made when it sank to the earth. It was not the animal, but the act that was cursed. The act of killing an animal in order to take something that was a part of them—and turn it into something you merely sold. It was the act of digging in and disturbing the earth that was cursed. The act of tearing the banks from streams to gouge out Ice Age corpses. Svyatoslav had seen the way the streams afterward were thick with silt and dying fish. The traces of greed swirling in the current.
Greed. This was what Svyatoslav had been thinking about after the embers of the fire died down. He could walk away. He could get away from Myusena. Even if he did not own the tusks, he could use them to buy his own life, simply by walking away from them. He could walk away from all of that wealth. Leave it. And Myusena would have to make a choice: go after him, or stay with the mule. His greed would get the best of him. It would tie him to the tusks. He would choose to stay with the mule, which would slow him down. By the time Svyatoslav had reached the ATVs where they were hidden outside the park, Myusena would be far behind. From there—free of Myusena and with transportation—Svyatoslav could go anywhere. He would have nothing, but many had started from nothing.
That was why he had been sitting here, operating the drone: he’d been surveying the terrain ahead, looking for the best route to the mountains.
And looking for the mammoths. Yes, he’d been doing that, too. Looking to see if they were in their path. If they were nearby, or moving toward them. That was when the drone had picked out that triangle of light, the three massive Burlaks parked in the middle of all of this nothing. The Burlaks were almost directly in their path. They would have come across them the next day.
The pack on the ground beside him held several days’ rations, a multitool, the axe, and now his drone and control headset. It was enough to get him through. Once he had the ATV and the group’s terminals, he could drive out of the taiga and then sell what he could. From that bit of money, he could buy a ticket on a train.
He saw it again—the map of connectivity, like the one his mother had shown him of the Mediterranean, the trading routes.
He could leave here, get to another place. He could follow opportunity from there to yet another place. Eventually, he would get to somewhere that was connected more widely—that had rays leading farther and farther from here.
There must be a way out into that other world.
Then he saw them.
His mind would not accept them at first—cutout shapes against the horizon, moving. Impossible.
They were already there—only twenty, thirty meters from Myusena. And despite himself, despite the fact he knew it was the worst thing he could do, that it would likely kill him, Svyatoslav cried out in warning.
He saw Myusena start, sit up. Saw him scramble like a crab through the fire, scattering its embers, trying to get to his feet. Saw the shapes closing. He saw the tusks, white in the dark, as the first mammoth reached Myusena and, with a shake of its head, caught him across the body with a tusk and threw him into the air.
Myusena hit the ground, rolled. Again, he tried to get to his feet. The mammoth bellowed. It lowered its head, and charged. It strode straight across Myusena, and when it had passed there was nothing on the ground that looked like a man anymore.
But it did not stop. It made an arcing turn, and came at Svyatoslav.
Fast. They were so fast. He had seen it before, when their hunting party had killed the two bulls. It seemed impossible something so enormous could move so quickly.
It was crossing the space between them faster than any man could run.
And he understood.
“Have you ever heard of mammoths doing that … attacking people like that? It was like they hunted us.”
“Mammoths are extinct, boy. Nobody knows anything about what they might have done when they were around. And these things are not mammoths…”
She was crossing the space between them.
“Damira!” Svyatoslav shouted. “Damira! Stop!”
He dropped to his knees. He curled into a ball, his hands laced instinctively over his head as if that might somehow save him, and he waited to die.