The decontamination fog tasted like medicine and old rain. It clung to my mask, stung my eyes, and left the inside of my mouth metallic.

  A soldier stamped our papers without looking at our faces and waved us through a turnstile that had been welded out of three different turnstiles.

  The tracker around my wrist ticked once.

  “Stop scratching. You’ll make a rash. Rashes are for peasants and for people who drink tap water.”

  “Right, right.” I dropped my hand. “Hey… I just realised I can finally ask your skincare routine.”

  “That’s top-secret information, piggie. But you definitely need it.”

  She laughed, bright and cruel in the same breath.

  New Moscow didn’t look new. A cathedral’s blown dome had been plated over with dull sheets of steel. Apartment blocks wore scaffolding like bones on the outside. Neon scrawled along cracked fa?ades in colors you only see when a bruise is almost healed.

  Half-frozen canals lay like black tongues between streets, the ice slick and sickly under a powder of grey snow.

  People moved with their eyes first. Quick glances, away again.

  I caught myself staring at the ground and forced my head up. Voronina had said: predators hate eye contact. I didn’t want to learn whether Moscow was a city of predators or prey.

  A woman sold masks: paper, rubber, and something that had probably been a glove once. Bǎo veered over.

  “How much,” she asked, tapping a rubber mask with one nail, “for this tragedy?”

  The woman considered Bǎo’s hair, my jacket, the sword, our escorts pretending not to escort us.

  “Ten,” she said, “for you, twelve.”

  Bǎo pressed a hand to her heart. “Robbery! Do I look like a tourist?”

  “Yes,” the woman said, and didn’t smile.

  Bǎo bought nothing.

  We walked past a canteen serving soup from a drum. A queue of laborers hunched in the cold, their bowls balanced in work-gloved hands. The smell was… edible.

  My stomach folded in on itself anyway. One-armed, I tried to imagine ladling, carrying, eating without dropping everything. The thought made me tired.

  “Stop thinking about it,” Bǎo murmured, not unkindly. “You’re going to manifest a spill with that face.”

  We shared a bowl at the edge of a steam vent. I held, she fed. It would have been humiliating if she’d let it be.

  She made it a bit, a performance, rolling her eyes and stage-whispering, “Open wide, piggie,” before spooning broth I didn’t taste.

  A child watched us solemnly from behind a rail. When I looked up, she darted away, skates clacking over ice.

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  The tracker itched again. Tiny. Precise.

  “Feel that?” I said.

  Bǎo tilted her head. “Mmm. I feel… an audience.”

  Soldiers pretended to be bored. Above us, a drone buzzed like a lazy wasp.

  We followed a street that had been laid over rubble and built again at a slight angle. Chalk marks dotted the corners—arrows, circles, cross-hatches. At first I thought they were for repairs.

  Then I noticed how recent the white was. Fresh, not rain-worn. The arrows pointed not to doorways but to sightlines.

  “Someone’s mapping routes,” I said.

  “Someone always is,” Bǎo said, fluffing her hair with her free hand. “Try smiling. You look kidnappable.”

  I tried. It felt like a grimace. We found the market inside a crater. Stalls clung to the iron ribs, stacked up the walls. You could climb rung by rung and buy a different kind of disaster at every level.

  Vendors shouted in Russian, in English, in a third language whose consonants felt like stones.

  A man sold fish that gleamed faintly under the lamps. A woman in a leaded veil hawked icons painted on old circuit boards—saints burnt into copper traces, haloes etched from solder.

  Bǎo zeroed in on a cosmetics stall like a missile.

  Cracked mirrors, half-used compacts, tins of greasepaint, scavenged bottles with their labels worn off. She held up a circular compact, popped it open, and peered.

  “This?” She barked a laugh. “This lighting? I look like a corpse in drag.”

  The vendor, a man with hands like rope, said, “You always look like that,” in Russian, then, to me in English: “Strong girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my—” I started.

  “I’m his stylist and trauma coach,” Bǎo said sweetly. “Two roubles for the mirror and you get a review on my show.”

  He blinked. “Three.”

  She gasped theatrically, returned the compact as if it had burned her. “Canceled.”

  Across from us, a boy about my sister’s age—no, I refused that thought—hammered copper wire into a coil with a stone. He glanced up at Bǎo’s sword, at my empty sleeve, and then back to his work.

  The soldiers at the rim scanned the crowd with their rifles not quite raised.

  A siren bleated twice. The market froze. Then, in a move that had the smoothness of practice, everyone drifted under the scaffolds, under arches, into doorframes… out of the open.

  A woman grabbed the boy by his collar and tucked him under a table.

  The drone overhead slid to a higher circle.

  “Drill?” I asked.

  Bǎo rolled her eyes, but her knuckles were white on the sword hilt. “This city is obsessed with my nerves.”

  We slid beneath an arch. The wall there held a poster: “Prime Moscow,” edges burned and taped back together with reverent care. St. Basil’s domes were unbroken and ridiculous in their colors. People smiled in old sunlight.

  I tried to remember whether I had ever been in a place like that and came up blank.

  An older woman near us, face half-hidden by a leaded veil, followed my gaze.

  “Keep your eyes up in this city,” she said in Russian, then again in thin English, “Eyes up.”

  I did. For once, it felt like obedience and not pride.

  The siren didn’t return. The crowd loosened. The old woman crossed herself. One of the soldiers did, too, quick and ashamed of it.

  When we stepped out, I caught a figure in a reflection. Peacoat in a broken window, head tilted like a man listening to rain behind a wall.

  The chalk arrows pointed down the exit ramp we were about to take.

  Bǎo nudged me with an elbow. “We have fans.”

  “Just one,” I said, and hated the way my voice tried to shake. “Stay close to me.”

  “Please. I’ve dealt with stalkers so many times I could run a museum,” she said cheerfully. “I keep all their marriage proposals in a little pink file.”

  We climbed out of the crater, the scaffolds creaking under our boots. The sun was trying to set but the clouds wouldn’t let it. Light came on in strips along catwalks.

  I was glad to see we passed time.

  “Forty-eight hours,” I said, to hear the number. “Then what? Can we even escape this? Or do we keep running… until we just run out?”

  I asked, more to the air than to Bǎo.

  “Then we slay,” Bǎo said, and didn’t make it sound like a joke this time.

  A gust of wind flipped a row of rusted kiosk shutters, and one of them opened long enough for me to see it, my own face, printed in cheap monochrome, half-peeled and nailed to the metal.

  WANTED – INTERNATIONAL BOUNTY: RETURN ALIVE TO THE ISLAND

  The reward had been doubled in red ink. Someone had drawn little devil horns over my head. Cute.

  Bǎo caught me staring and laughed under her breath.

  “Oh, those? Moscow’s government pretends they’re cracking down on crime, but they’re basically on the assassin association’s payroll. It’s marketing.”

  She tapped the poster with one sharp fingernail. “You know you’re worth more dead than most flats in this city? If they catch you, I’m taking a cut.”

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