Chapter 4 (p.5)
Shadow helped Zorya Vechernyaya to take the plates and dishes into the little kitchen. To his surprise there was an elderly dishwashing machine beneath the sink, and he filled it. Zorya Vechernyaya looked over his shoulder, tutted, and removed the wooden borscht bowls.
“Those, in the sink,” she told him.
“Sorry.”
“Is not to worry. Now, back in there, we have pie,” she said, and she took the pie from the oven.
The pie—it was an apple pie—had been bought in a store and oven-warmed, and was very, very good indeed. The four of them ate it with ice cream, and then Zorya Vechernyaya made everyone go out of the sitting room, and made up a very fine-looking bed on the sofa for Shadow.
Wednesday spoke to Shadow as they stood in the corridor.
“What you did in there, with the checkers game,” he said.
“Yes?”
“That was good. Very, very stupid of you. But good. Sleep safe.”
Shadow brushed his teeth and washed his face in the cold water of the little bathroom, and then walked back down the hall to the sitting room, turned out the light, and was asleep before his head touched the pillow.
There were explosions in Shadow's dream: he was driving a truck through a minefield, and bombs were going off on each side of him. The windshield shattered and he felt warm blood running down his face.
Someone was shooting at him.
A bullet punctured his lung, a bullet shattered his spine, another hit his shoulder. He felt each bullet strike. He collapsed across the steering wheel.
The last explosion ended in darkness.
I must be dreaming, thought Shadow, alone in the darkness. I think I just died. He remembered hearing and believing, as a child, that if you died in your dreams, you would die in real life. He did not feel dead. He opened his eyes, experimentally.
There was a woman in the little sitting room, standing against the window, with her back to him. His heart missed a half-beat, and he said, “Laura?”
She turned, framed by the moonlight. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I did not mean to wake you.” She had a soft, Eastern European accent. “I will go.”
“No, it's okay,” said Shadow. “You didn't wake me. I had a dream.”
“Yes,” she said. “You were crying out, and moaning. Part of me wanted to wake you, but I thought, no, I should leave him.”
Her hair was pale and colorless in the moon's thin light. She wore a thin white cotton nightgown, with a high, lace neck, and a hem that swept the ground. Shadow sat up, entirely awake. “You are Zorya Polu…” He hesitated. “The sister who was asleep.”
“I am Zorya Polunochnaya, yes. And you are called Shadow, yes? That was what Zorya Vechernyaya told me, when I woke.”
“Yes. What were you looking at, out there?”
She looked at him, then she beckoned him to join her by the window. She turned her back while he pulled on his jeans. He walked over to her. It seemed a long walk, for such a small room.
He could not tell her age. Her skin was unlined, her eyes were dark, her lashes were long, her hair was to her waist, and white. The moonlight drained colors into ghosts of themselves. She was taller than either of her sisters.
She pointed up into the night sky. “I was looking at that,” she said, pointing to the Big Dipper. “See?”
“Ursa Major,” he said. “The Great Bear.”
“That is one way of looking at it,” she said. “But it is not the way from where I come from. I am going to sit on the roof. Would you like to come with me?”
“I guess,” said Shadow.
“Is good,” she said.
She lifted the window and clambered, barefoot, out onto the fire escape. A freezing wind blew through the window. Something was bothering Shadow, but he did not know what it was; he hesitated, then pulled on his sweater, socks, and shoes and followed her out onto the rusting fire escape. She was waiting for him. His breath steamed in the chilly air. He watched her bare feet pad up the icy metal steps, and followed her up to the roof.
The wind gusted cold, flattening her nightgown against her body, and Shadow became uncomfortably aware that Zorya Polunochnaya was wearing nothing at all underneath.
“You don't mind the cold?” he said, as they reached the top of the fire escape, and the wind whipped his words away.
“Sorry?”
She bent her face close to his. Her breath was sweet.
“I said, doesn't the cold bother you?”
In reply, she held up a finger: Wait. She stepped, lightly, over the side of the building and onto the flat roof. Shadow stepped over a little more clumsily, and followed her across the roof, to the shadow of the water-tower. There was a wooden bench waiting for them there, and she sat down on it, and he sat down beside her.
The water-tower acted as a windbreak, for which Shadow was grateful. The lights of the city smudged the sky with yellow, swallowing half the stars he had been able to see from the open country. Still, he could see the Big Dipper and the North Star, and he found the three stars of Orion's belt, which allowed him to see Orion, which he always saw as a man running to kick a football—
“No,” she said. “The cold does not bother me. This time is my time: I could no more feel uncomfortable in the night than a fish could feel uncomfortable in the deep water.”
“You must like the night,” said Shadow, wishing that he had said something wiser, more profound.
“My sisters are of their times. Zorya Utrennyaya is of the dawn. In the old country she would wake to open the gates, and let our father drive his—um, I forget the word, like a car but with horses?”
“Chariot?”
“His chariot. Our father would ride it out. And Zorya Vechernyaya, she would open the gates for him at dusk, when he returned to us.”
“And you?”
She paused. Her lips were full, but very pale. “I never saw our father. I was asleep.”
“Is it a medical condition?”
She did not answer. The shrug, if she shrugged, was imperceptible. “So. You wanted to know what I was looking at.”
“The Big Dipper.”
She raised an arm to point to it, and the wind flattened her nightgown against her body. Her nipples, every goose-bump on the areolae, were visible momentarily, dark against the white cotton. Shadow shivered.
“Odin's Wain, they call it. And the Great Bear. Where we come from, we believe that is a, a thing, a, not a god, but like a god, a bad thing, chained up in those stars. If it escapes, it will eat the whole of everything. And there are three sisters who must watch the sky, all the day, all the night. If he escapes, the thing in the stars, the world is over. Pf!, like that.”
“And people believe that?”
“They did. A long time ago.”
“And you were looking to see if you could see the monster in the stars?”
“Something like that. Yes.”
He smiled. If it were not for the cold, he decided, he would have thought he was dreaming. Everything felt so much like a dream.
