Nine Layers of Sky Read Free

grip, he pounced into the snow and thrust out a handful of dirty, glittering slush. The policeman stared.
    “Look what this bastard’s stolen! Watches! Money!
Teeth!
”
    Appalled, Elena saw that Atyrom was right. A single golden tooth rested in the snow in his gloved palm, its root still stained pink.
    “Stealing out of the mouths of the dead!” Atyrom roared.
    The ambulance driver, wiping blood from his face with his sleeve, began to protest, but the policeman snarled, “Shut up!”
    He swung the gun again. Elena reflexively ducked out of the way, but there was a hard, dull crack as the butt of the gun connected with the side of the driver’s head. The ambulance driver dropped as if poleaxed, and lay still. The policeman crouched in the snow, the pale eyes glaring up at Atyrom.
    “Well, what do you say, then?” he remarked quite calmly. “Half for you, half for me?”
    Atyrom, evidently mollified, shrugged. “
Ladna.
Why not?”
    Elena watched in horrified silence as the policeman began to pick through the driver’s pockets and placed a motley collection of objects into Atyrom’s waiting hands.
    “What about him?” she said angrily, pointing to the driver, but no one seemed to hear. Elena knelt down in the snow and examined the man’s head. The blood was already congealing, glazing like red frost across the driver’s skin. Was he dead? Elena groped inside the man’s sleeve. The skin felt cold and clammy. She could not feel a pulse. There was a shout from somewhere up the front of the line.
    “Hey! We’re moving!”
    Atyrom hauled himself to his feet and began to hurry back in the direction of the Sherpa.
    “Well, are you coming or what?” he said over his shoulder.
    Elena pointed down at the ambulance driver. “What about him?”
    “Leave him,” the policeman said. He spat into the snow. “Filth.”
    “No! We can’t just leave him,” Elena said. “I think he’s dead. And if he isn’t, he soon will be in this temperature. And what about the ambulance?”
    Atyrom looked momentarily puzzled. “So? If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do about it. Are you coming or not? If not, I’ll leave you behind.”
    Elena, rehearsing a dozen arguments, got to her feet, but as she rose she noticed something embedded in the snow, not far from the fallen driver. She bent to look more closely, and saw a small black sphere. Reaching down, she plucked it out of its icy bed. The sphere was around the size of a golf ball and looked as frail as a sugar shell, yet it was unaccountably heavy. Its matte surface seemed to swallow light. It must have fallen from the ambulance driver’s pockets, along with the rest of his loot.
    She remembered the dead man in the car at the head of the line: that dark, impenetrable gaze. Had the driver stolen it from that man, or from someone else? There was no way now of finding out.
    Bewildered, Elena put the thing in her pocket. It weighed down her coat; she could feel it dragging at the material as she hurried back to the Sherpa, but by the time she reached the vehicle she had forgotten all about it. With the light of battle in her eyes, she climbed back into the damaged van and began to tell Atyrom precisely what she thought of him.
    The argument, with Gulnara echoing Elena’s every pronouncement, lasted all the way down the long road to Tashkent.

Two
    ST. PETERSBURG, 21ST CENTURY
    Beyond the open door of the apartment block, the snow breathed a winter cold and lessened the ammonia reek of the stairwell so that Ilya Muromyets could smell his own blood. The hot, meaty odor filled the air as if the whole world were bleeding, rather than just one man. Ilya’s hand fumbled to his side; his shirt was sticky and stiff. He remembered, distantly, that the dealer had knifed him. The situation, so carefully engineered, had gone disastrously wrong.
    Think,
he whispered to himself.
You were a bogatyr,
a hero, a Son of the Sun . . . think.
Then the soft clutch of heroin took him, shutting