ONE OF THE drivers had been crushed to death beneath a Burlak the mammoths pushed over. Vladimir hoped that the keys to their own vehicle were not in the lower half of that man’s body. He did not want to contemplate what he would need to do to retrieve them.
The man’s head was tilted up to the sky in a scream. The flies had found him. They crawled lazily across his open eyes.
Think of something else.
Vladimir went through the pockets of the man’s coat carefully. The sun was down behind the mountains now. The shadow of mountain twilight, added to the thickening clouds, left little light. But he was working by feel, anyway. And maybe it was a mercy that there was little light: he did not, after all, want to see any of this in detail.
Nothing here.
The second driver had been caught in the open, twenty meters or so from the Burlaks. Vladimir tried not to look at what had been trampled into the earth. At some point he realized he was making a strange whimpering sound, and he willed himself to stop it.
Just go through the pockets. Mechanically. Think of something else, or don’t think at all.
Okay. He just went through the pockets. And yes, there was a set of keys. He felt it.
There was nothing identifiable left of the driver.
He threw up in the grass, and wiped his mouth.
Think of something else.
But there was nothing else. He just had to keep moving.
Only one key on the ring looked like it could belong to the vehicles. Return and try it? Or look for more? How much time did they have before the mammoths returned?
The sun had gone down completely now, and the color of the grass on the steppe was unnamable, the mountains humped and crooked against the sky. He saw Anthony’s pacing silhouette atop their Burlak.
Was Anthony watching him?
It’s you, Dima, who are my guest here. Not the other way around.
No. Anthony wasn’t watching him. He wasn’t interested in Vladimir at all. He was up there watching the horizon. Waiting. He was waiting for them to come back.
He wanted them to come back, Vladimir realized. Wanted that confrontation.
The third driver was farther away. He had curled himself into a fetal position.
Nowhere to hide, on this almost featureless expanse. Nowhere to escape to. The mammoths must have pushed them away from the vehicles, panicked them before they could get inside. Or had they been …
Yes. Here was a football, crushed into the earth. They had been away from the vehicles when the mammoths came. That had doomed them.
Vladimir got down on his knees.
Was there even a bone left unbroken?
This, too, is power. Overwhelming force. Overwhelming mass.
Vladimir felt his stomach rise. He caught himself before he vomited again.
Yes. Here. He found the ring of keys. But what he had to do to draw it from the pulp that once had been a man was unspeakable.
“I know she must think,” Dr. Aslanov had said, “that I have abandoned her, out here. But nothing could be further from the truth. I think of her every day. Without her, there is none of this. Without her, I don’t think they could have lived through another season. She saved us. But what I wonder, every day, is what she is feeling, out here on the steppe, in this new shape. What she is experiencing. I will do anything to save this place. If only she could understand that—if I could speak to her, and make her understand. But I am not sure she would understand anything anymore. She has been out here for years. How much can be left of her humanity?”
Vladimir wiped the gore from the key ring in the grass, smearing blood in arcs on the colorless plant matter. He had pushed the thought of what he was doing so far away that it was as if someone else was doing it. He did not know who this “Damira” was that Dr. Aslanov kept talking about. A park ranger? The man was half out of his mind—at least.
In this new shape.
None of it made sense.
Vladimir looked up at Anthony, pacing like a guard on the walls of an ancient fortress, watching the horizon. Waiting for conflict—wanting it. Needing it.
After all, the fee he had paid—the enormous, unimaginable sum—was non-refundable. And he hadn’t gotten what he came for, yet. He hadn’t claimed the life he’d purchased.
How much could be left of her humanity?
“What use would humanity be anyway, in a place like this?” Vladimir had not said it to Dr. Aslanov then, but he said it now, to no one. “What possible use would something like that be?”