Zhiva blasted out of my palm like a tornado, so fast and strong it almost glowed. I chased it across the hillside, but fast as I was, it was faster. Those pearly uniforms burst with red and flew apart, pink haze rising in the air.

I didn’t hear it until it was in echoes against the face of the hill: the boom.

Before me, as the sound dispersed across the lonely landscape and the haze settled, the hills returned to silent stillness. I panted, scanning the mouth of the caves. None of the volshebniks outside moved, not even the ones who still had limbs attached to their bodies.

I pushed through the wreckage to the entrance. The lean-to had collapsed, whether in that burst of zhiva or prior to it. I didn’t get inside before another volshebnik appeared there, shooting myortva at me. I slapped it away like I had Nadya’s arrows with one hand and sent zhiva through his chest with the other.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness inside. In that moment, a concentrated burst of myortva hit me just above the elbow. It was almost funny how weak it seemed now, the myortva. I saw the blood gush from my arm—dark blood, deep blood—but I didn’t feel it. It didn’t slow me down.

The volshebnik who sent it ducked behind an upturned table, but the next second both volshebnik and table were splinters.

A scream penetrated my ears—every sound came to me as though from underwater, muffled and vaguely unreal—and I belatedly recognized sounds of chaos from the big chamber where we slept and had classes.

As I hurtled through the chamber’s entryway, a blast of myortva exploded inches from my face, showering me with sharp little shards of rock and dust.

I started to shoot in the direction from which the dust came, but when I looked up, there stood Nadya, face blanched, luminescent in the dim, streaked with red.

“Watch out!” she shrieked, just as something hit me from the side.

Before we hit the ground, there were hands around my neck, myortva-strong fingers digging into my throat.

I broke his grip, crushed his hand, and threw him off of me. He flew across the room and landed in another cloud of dust. I followed him, but before I reached the lump of pearl on the ground, something yanked on me from behind. I shook it off once, twice, was about to uncurl my fingers and open my palm behind me when I finally heard Nadya’s voice: “Yusha, I need help. I can’t—”

“Are there more of them?” 

“Not in here. Come on.” She dragged on my arm, but I was fixated on the volshebnik. I was out of zhiva now, if he surprised me—

“It’s Pasha, Iyu, you’ve—”

I snapped to attention, saw the whites all around her eyes, blood streaming down from her hairline. “Where?” I let her drag me.

The floor was littered with the bodies of my students. I didn’t look before, and I tried not to, now. None of them could have lasted a minute with a fully trained volshebnik. None of them but Nadya.

She hauled me around the corner at the back of the chamber to a narrow cavern and there, propped against the wall, was Pavel. Two of the kids, a brother and sister, were huddled behind him, and their mother’s body lay feet away, arms up over her head like she’d been dragged there.

I’d taught those kids. They flinched when they saw me, the older boy pulling his little sister in closer.

Pavel’s eyes were open, and he was staring straight ahead. He looked okay at first, but then my eyes traveled down to where his hand was half-clutched, half-rested on his stomach. His fist and forearm were stained red, and blood pooled under him.

“Do something,” Nadya said, voice pleading, nudging me between the shoulders. “I don’t know how to heal that.”

I crouched down to move his arm from his torso. I met with no resistance. The hole was inches in diameter, a deep black spring to the left of his navel, blood pulsing from it.

“Do it now!” Nadya said. “It’s gonna be too late!”

“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where the fuck are you going?” she screamed, her voice echoing in the narrow cavern as I went down it, past the kids and their mother, to the little storeroom and the locked box where we kept the returner. “You fucking bastard!”

Back in the classroom, the last volshebnik was stirring, and I breathed a sigh of relief. He was dazed, and there was a bloody lump rising on his forehead where his face hit the ground, but he wasn’t dead.

When he saw me, he tried to raise his arm, but he was disoriented and slow, and even without zhiva I had no trouble overpowering him.

He didn’t understand what I was doing when I ripped his uniform open, poured the returner on his chest, my own blood dripping down, skittering off the oily substance. He tried to struggle, but I was straddling his hips and had him pinned by the throat. I pushed the returner in, and before he knew what was happening, I was pulling his life out.

I think I saw the moment it dawned on him. The way his eyes widened even as they began to dim.

I pulled, and he dimmed and shriveled, his chest went concave under my palm, his body shrank, his hip bones sharpening on the insides of my knees. He thrashed but grew weaker as we went, until it was like wrestling a kitten.

It was sudden, the last of it. I didn’t expect I’d be able to drain all of it, but maybe he was nearer death than I’d imagined. The tail of his zhiva leaving him felt like slurping up a noodle, the way it slaps your lips on the way in.

The light went out. He was a husk.

When I rose, my bloody handprint remained in the middle of his lifeless chest.

I’d never held this much zhiva before, but I didn’t feel it.

Nadya knelt in front of Pavel, her hands over his wound, muttering under her breath. I pulled her away. She didn’t know how to heal. The most she was going to do now was accidentally blast a new hole in him.

I took her place and opened his shirt. His staring eyes were as dim as that Ivanovich’s had been, right before the last of him disappeared into me. When my palm hit his chest, I didn’t feel anything.

I let that volshebnik’s life flow out of me, whether it would find a vessel or not, I let it all go, and I watched his eyes.