angelologists. It is unbelievably effective.” She ran her hand over the surface of the wound, as if to
prove her point.
“Effective or not, we need this angelologist,” Yana said, unable to conceal her impatience. “How
long does he need to rest?”
The doctor held Verlaine’s wrist and took his pulse. “Your heartbeat is normal,” she said. “How
do you feel?”
Verlaine wiggled his toes and then moved his ankles. The ringing in his ears and the searing pain
across his chest were gone. “Tip-top,” he said.
As she took the tray and headed for the door, she said, “Then he should be able to leave the train at
your scheduled stop. Tyumen is about thirty-five hours from here. I would suggest taking it easy until
then.” Glancing at Verlaine, she said, “That means: no more dates with the devil. Although I doubt
you’ll take that advice. Agents like you never do.”
Verlaine threw his legs over the side of the bed. He steadied himself and stood. He was with Yana
on this: There was no way he was going to stay in some godforsaken hospital cot.
After the doctor left the room, Bruno said, “There’s some good news in all of this. We managed get
the egg back. And, most important, to capture Eno.”
“Where is she?” Verlaine asked.
“In a safe place,” Yana said, her gaze boring into him as if daring him to ask more.
Bruno winked at Verlaine and said, “Yana insisted that we take her to a specialized prison in
Siberia.”
Verlaine said, “Leave it to the Russians to have an angel gulag.”
“We are taking her for observation,” Yana said. “You’re lucky I agreed to allow you to accompany
me.”
“And you think that you’re capable of getting information out of Eno?” Verlaine asked.
“There’s no other way,” Yana said. “Once Eno is taken into custody in Siberia, she’ll be forced to
talk.”
“Have you witnessed such questioning before?” Verlaine asked Yana.
“The specialists at the prison have very particular methods of extracting information from their
prisoners,” Yana replied, her voice quiet.
Verlaine moved through a mental list of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours, trying to
shake the feeling that he’d landed in an alternate universe, a kind of strange, lifelike game that was
both real and unreal at the same time. He was on a train moving through the vast and frozen Siberian
tundra in pursuit of a half-human, half-angel creature that he now knew—after ten years of doubt—he
loved. After all that he’d seen he had thought he couldn’t be surprised anymore. He’d been wrong.
Things just kept getting stranger and stranger.
St. Ivan Island, Black Sea, Bulgaria
Azov’s chopper embodied just the sort of mixture of cultural references that inspired scholars like
Vera to go to work every day. According to Sveti, the Vietnam-era machine had been lost by the
Americans—abandoned by a crew after it crash-landed in Cambodia—and ended up in Azov’s
possession by dint of various trades and handshakes over the past three decades. It had been
confiscated by Communists, repaired in the USSR, and sent on to their Bulgarian allies during the
seventies. By the time Azov got his hands on it, the cold war had ended and Bulgaria had joined
NATO. Now, watching Sveti grip the cyclic control between her knees, Vera wondered what kind of
realigned world children born today would grow up to live in.
Azov gave a nod and Sveti flipped switches, checking the monitors on the dash before taking them
into the air. They lifted away from the earth, shouldering the wind. Vera watched the land recede as
they climbed higher, the contours of the lighthouse losing verticality, the sea growing uniform until the
water below seemed little more than an adamantine sheet against the muted shoreline. The sun was
setting, casting the world in a darkening purple light. She strained to see the fishing villages nestled
into the cove, the squat gray shacks like rocks basking in the rarefied light. The beaches were
deserted—no umbrellas blooming from the sand, not a boat floating in the bay, only endless stretches
of rocky coastline. Vera tried to imagine the settlements buried under cubic tons of dark water, the
remnants of ancient civilizations frozen in the suffocating chill of a lightless underworld.
The helicopter tipped as Sveti flew them over a stretch of shoreline and then cut inland, the blades
overhead banging their slow and steady rhythm. They swooped over baked clay rooftops, narrow
highways, and empty fields, leaving the Black Sea behind.
Suddenly, from the corner of her eye, Vera saw something else flying in the distance. For a moment