“You can call when we get there.”
Fingers empty, she was wild. “Please give it back.”
“I will when we’re there.”
The seatbelt was too tight on her. It might as well have been wrapped around her lungs. She couldn’t take in enough air. She was silent. Concentrating. Then she lunged in his direction, reaching for the door. The belt snapped her backward.
“Alyona!” Sophia said.
She went to unfasten the seatbelt but the man moved fast again, clamping his hand over hers, forcing the buckle in place. “Stop,” he said.
Alyona said, “Give it back!”
“Sit and wait and I will. I promise.” Under his hand, her knuckles were bent almost to cracking. If they popped in his grip, Alyona believed she would vomit. Her mouth was already wet with it. Sophia leaned forward and the man said, “Sit down.”
Sophia sat back. Her breath was quick.
He would have to lift his hand sometime. Alyona had never wanted anything in her life, ever, as badly as she wanted her phone. Its black back, its grease-marked face, the ivory bird charm dangling off its top corner. She had never hated anybody as much as him. She was sick with it. She swallowed.
“I have a rule,” the man said. They were already at the tenth kilometer, passing the bus station that marked Petropavlovsk’s northern border. “No phones while I’m driving. But when we get there, if you can both behave that long, I will give it back, and I will take you home, and you’ll be eating dinner with your mother tonight. Understand?” He squeezed her fingers.
“Yes,” Alyona said.
“Then we’re agreed.” He let her go.
She tucked her hands, one sore, under her thighs, and sat up straight. She inhaled through an open mouth to dry her tongue. The tenth kilometer. Before it, buses stopped at the eighth for the library, the sixth for the cinema, the fourth for the church, the second for the university. Beyond the tenth kilometer were limited settlements, scattered villages, tourist bases, and then nothing. Nowhere. Their mother used to travel for work, so she told them what waited outside the city: pipelines, power stations, helipads, hot springs, geysers, mountains, and tundra. Thousands of kilometers of open tundra. Nothing else. North.
“Where do you live?” Alyona asked.
“You’re going to see.”
Behind her she heard Sophia, breath in-out, in-out, quick as a little dog’s. Alyona stared at the man. She was going to memorize him. Then she turned around to her sister. “We’re having an adventure,” she said.
Sophia’s elfin face was overexposed in the sunlight. Her eyes were bright, wide. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Are you scared?” Sophia shook her head no. Her teeth showed. “Good.”
“Good girl,” the man said. One of his hands was off the wheel and hidden in his car door. Alyona heard the falling chime of her phone shutting off.
He kept watching them in the mirror. Blue eyes. Dark lashes. He didn’t have any tattoos on his arms—he wasn’t a criminal. How was Alyona only noticing his arms now? When they got back, their mother was going to kill them.
Twisted around, Alyona pressed her chest to the passenger seat. A pair of work gloves, palms coated red with latex, was tucked into a cup holder in the car’s center console. The gloves were dirty. Alyona forced herself to look at Sophia. “Want another story?”
“No,” her sister said.
Alyona couldn’t think of a new one anyway. She turned back around.
Gravel popped under the tires. Fields of clumped grass flashed by. The sun made shadows short on the road. They passed the sign, dark metal, marking the turnoff for the city airport, and kept going.
The car shook under them as the pavement got worse. The door handle on her side was jittering. For an instant, she tried to picture herself taking hold of it, pulling the latch, tumbling out, but then—it was picturing dying. The speed, the ground, the tires. And Sophia. What would Alyona do, leave Sophia?
If only Alyona had been allowed to be alone today. Their mother always made her take Sophia along. Now—if something happened.
Sophia couldn’t take care of herself. The other day she asked if elephants actually existed—she thought they’d gone extinct with the dinosaurs. What a baby.
Alyona jammed her fists against her thighs. Don’t think about elephants. The leather under her was still hot, her lungs were tight, and inside her mind was all shimmery, the air waving up off fresh-pressed tar. She had told her sister that stupid thing about the wave. The piece of earth that disappeared. She wished she’d thought of something else. But now she couldn’t undo it—she had to focus. They were in this car. They were headed somewhere. They’d be home soon. She had to be strong for Sophia.
“Alyona?” her sister asked.
She made her face happy and turned. The muscles in her cheeks were trembling. “Uh-huh?”
“Yeah,” Sophia said. Alyona looked at her. Not remembering. “Yes, a story.”
“Right,” she said. The road was dusty and empty, lined by skinny trees. Leaning forward, rushing them along. On the horizon, the cones of the city’s three closest volcanoes were exposed. The mountains were a line of sawteeth. No more buildings stood in their way. Alyona thought again of the tsunami. Its sudden weight. “A story,” she said. “I will.”
SEPTEMBER
Olya came home to an apartment that smelled the way it always did when her mother was gone: a little sweet, a little rotten. Maybe Olya didn’t empty the trash enough. She opened the windows in the living room, so a breeze could clean the place while she changed out of her school clothes. Then she lay on her back on the futon. From that angle, she could see nothing but sky.
Blue bleeding up to heaven. Forget the news reports, the stricter curfews, the posters of the missing girls—today was a perfect day to spend outside with someone. After the last school bell rang this afternoon, Olya had tried to get Diana to hang out in Petropavlovsk’s city center, but Diana said she couldn’t, that her parents were still worried, that they wanted her home. “It isn’t safe,” Diana said, with her voice high and cold in an imitation of adulthood. Diana’s mother’s voice oozing out of Diana’s mouth.
Besides, best friends, Diana reminded Olya, didn’t need to see each other constantly. This had been Diana’s refrain for the month since the sisters’ kidnapping. Olya couldn’t tell from Diana’s intonation, which these days gave every pronouncement a grown-up spin, whether this was Diana’s idea or her mother’s, but Diana certainly stood behind it. After those girls got lost, Olya and Diana saw each other just about never. Even now that the school year had started, Diana insisted: best friends had to put hangouts on hold, understand if there were sudden foolish rules in place, and bite their tongues instead of getting into another looping argument about danger.
Olya’s own mother was not worried. She trusted Olya to look after herself. An interpreter, she was up north with a tourist group from Tokyo, turning their official guide’s speech from Russian to Japanese so the peninsula’s rich visitors could learn how to spot brown bears, pick late-season berries, and bathe in thermal springs. Whenever Olya’s mother left, there was less music, less perfume, no lipstick-marked mugs in the apartment. Before the sisters vanished, Diana would come by Olya’s during solo weeks like this one to waste away their afternoons together, but now summer vacation was over and everyone had become paranoid. Olya had no one to make noise with until her mother came back on Sunday with foreign candies as secondhand gifts.