We stood in the farmhouse’s wreckage, a soot-black scar on the empty fields now gone back to nature. The grass was tall enough I didn’t see our well. Even the scar was fading, delicate shoots nosing up out of the ash. It had been more than two years, but I was shocked to see that time had passed.

Pavel Viktorovich hadn’t been back since it happened. I didn’t ask him why.

I didn’t need to wander the area to pick out where it happened. I knew the spot like I was a fish on a line.

There were weeds growing up through his skull. The sprouts germinated under his upper mandible and grew up through the sheered-off crown of his head. His jawbone lay a foot away. His teeth were mostly gone. The rest of his bones were scattered, some in the former bounds of the room where we slept, some outside, some still tangled in the scraps that remained of his clothes, some mingled with Fedya’s by the door, some carried off altogether.

We arranged as many of his bones as neatly as we could, and his father handed me a bottle of returner. His father lay down next to him and opened his shirt at the neck.

I knelt down beside his father and pushed the returner into his chest. He shivered when it passed through his skin, and the sun peeking out from the clouds lit his wide eyes, making the fibers of his irises shine gold.

My hand pulled back, hovering over the sparse, graying hairs on his father’s chest. My hand came back down on his weathered skin. I pulled. More than I wanted. Less than he wanted.

My hand came away on fire. It flowed up my arm, consumed me from head to toe, the world went bright white.

I came back shaking, braced on his father’s body, pulse racing in my fingertips on a shallowly rising ribcage. I crawled over his father, knelt amongst his bones, cradled his broken skull in my hands, the sharp edges where the myortva cleaved it biting into my fingers.

I pushed. Nothing came out. There was no vessel for it to enter. I prayed. I felt for Tajna. I asked for favor. I asked for a favor. I begged. I pleaded. I pleaded with Tajna. I pleaded with him. I pushed until I couldn’t feel my hands. Nothing came.

I saw him, across from me, eyes closed, tiny body in his cupped palms. I felt the mouse’s soft fur, the last vestiges of a life just extinguished still clinging to it, tingling. I drew back from it. Emptied. Nothing. Nothing. Feel nothing. Feel nothing, and then you can feel him. You have to know what it feels like to be empty before you can feel full.

The weight of his skull was nothing in my hands. It was almost warm in the wan sunlight. My palms molded to its peaks and valleys, the ridges in my fingertips snagged on its seams.

Antosha. Antosha. Antosha!

He wasn’t there. Not a whisper on the wind. Not a hint of his breath when he laughed or the quirk at the corner of his lips. No vestige was left in this skull, no tingle of a life extinguished long ago. He was gone.

No zhiva was going to bring him back. There was nothing to bring.

I put his skull back where it rested among the weeds.

I needed to put Pavel’s zhiva back in him. He lay there, next to his son, breathing so shallowly, chin tipped back so his throat was exposed, the whole long expanse of it.

I dragged myself to his other side and lay next to him. I curled up on my side, put my chin on his shoulder, smelled his peculiar scent, so like his son’s, and the yasno I never saw him drink.

I lay there with my hand on his chest, shaking with his zhiva, for as long as I could stand it, until the sky turned the colors of a ripe peach.

***

When I woke him up, I felt none of the relief usually associated with releasing zhiva.

He woke with a jerk and a gasp, and the brightness of his startled face dimmed as soon as reality set in.

“Try it again,” he said.

“It won’t work.”

“Try it again, Iyu.” He lay back down.

“It’s not… He’s gone.”

“It takes one a long time to learn to use myortva. Stands to reason this would be the same. You just need to keep trying.”

“You lose some of it every time. It won’t work, and we’ll use all the returner, and it’s going to hurt you—”

“I don’t care if you have to kill me to do it, just bring him back!” he snapped, eyes going sharp as shattered glass.

I rocked back on my heels. My shoulders slumped.

Even with my gaze downcast, I felt his eyes on me as the peach sky bruised.

Then, eventually, his skewering stare softened, and I felt his body sag. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Okay, Yusha.”

We dug graves for Antosha and Fedya. Buried their bones where they died. I was happy to give his broken skull a proper resting place, happy to cover it with dirt and let him return to the land. I took a fingerbone with me. The smallest knuckle from his smallest finger. I didn’t tell Pavel about it. I dropped it in my pocket and felt its weight like the bottle of returner I had treasured and worried. When I slipped my hand in after it, it nestled next to my pinky.

***

The new house was in deep west Veliko, almost to Gorakino. It was hilly there, rocky soil where not much grew but ropy brush with sparse foliage and many twisted, knotty branches.

The house was not so much a house as a network of caves with a lean-to on the front. The caves had been widened by human hands, but that must have been hundreds of years ago. The floors were worn smooth as an iced-over pond.

Shortly after we got there, Pavel felt myortva.

Once he did it, the floodgates opened. I had students, people who traveled to us just to learn. I taught classes in the caves, in the big room where we all slept. I tried to remember how Nikita Aksanevich had done it, to make the environment conducive to learning. The hills, with their loose, slippery rocks, were again not the best place to learn speed, but it quickly became apparent that the most sought-after use for myortva was in the sending of messages.

Getting the myortva was a problem, especially as the number of students grew. Lots of animals live in the woods, but in the hill country we had chipmunks and armadillos and deer and coyotes and of course all manner of birds, but they were all thin on the ground and harder to trap than the animals in the woods had been. It was a desolate, hard-scrabble place. Water was almost as hard to come by. We had to go miles to bring it back from the nearest stream. We hadn’t been there a month, I hadn’t even gotten Zhenya and Seryozha to feel myortva yet by the time they started talking about using it to divert streams uphill our way. Build more structures in the hill faces. We could improve irrigation all over Veliko. Could you use myortva to control the weather? Could we do something to the animals’ brains, make them want to stay close to us? (We tried to build enclosures for the chipmunks and armadillos to breed them, but we either couldn’t keep them pent up or couldn’t keep them alive.)

Reports from the outside world were up and down. Anyone who had any livestock became either a petty tyrant or an instant target for roving gangs (or their hungry neighbors). But some places were coming together. Pooling their resources. Sometimes a visit with some of the weapons Tsura supplied back the beginning of all this was all it took to make those petty tyrants into good neighbors. We culled as many of the bandits as we could.

But the volshebniks weren’t content to let us tire ourselves out and move in to clean up once we’d all killed each other off or starved to death anymore. They were back in Veliko. We heard reports of mostly miryanin units but some volshebniks, too, from Tsura and Gorakino. I didn’t hear of any from Akassiya or Khorizova, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were there. They were coming down from the north again, too, setting up camps and taking towns back, but it was hard to find a khozyain who’d agree to stay without a permanently installed garrison.

This, I learned, was what the rebels were good at. Plenty of them had military backgrounds. We set traps for animals. They set traps for people. They set fire to camps. They could blend in with soldiers when they needed to. There were camps like ours all over Veliko, many of them much better armed than we were, and we weren’t exactly out here sharpening sticks (well, we did, literally, sometimes. Traps). From where I sat, it seemed impossible that this little ragtag group of children and farmers could have ever fought a single volshebnik, but well, what was it Aksana said? We were like bed bugs, and that was true in more ways than one. If you saw one, there were thousands more you didn’t see.