The next thing I remember is opening my eyes, sticky with sleep. I tried to bring my hands up to rub them clear and couldn’t.

My wrists were bound behind my back, rope fibers stabbing into my skin. My vision was still dark: a blindfold. A gag cut into the corners of my mouth. I felt grit under the side of my face.

I tried to say, “What the fuck?” because I was an idiot, but it came out, “Whaafuh.”

I should have stopped to listen before I spoke, but when had I ever done that?

“He’s awake,” a voice whispered.

“Shh,” another voice responded, and I heard scuttling close to me, felt the vibrations under my body.

Well, if they wanted quiet.

I started screaming through the gag, but I barely got a note out before a body hit me and a hand clamped over my mouth and nose. I thrashed in the grip, but without the use of my hands or feet, it did about as much good as a fish flopping on dry land, and with the hand covering my nose and mouth, I could neither make noise nor breathe.

Still, I kept fighting, because of course I did, and I must have fought myself into unconsciousness, because the next thing I knew, I was propped up with my back to a man’s chest and something cold and sharp pressing against my throat.

He must have felt me move because his knees tightened around me and the knife dug into my skin. “Try anything again, and I’ll open your throat before you can get an ounce of that death magic out.”

My hands, the position we were in, I probably could’ve blasted his cock off before he had a chance to “open my throat.” Maybe I could’ve given myself enough strength to break the ropes around my wrists. But it would be one or the other. I wouldn’t be able to get away. I was stupid and reckless back then, but I wasn’t entirely without self-preservation instincts.

I relaxed, took a few breaths, and the knife eased off my neck.

“Good. I guess you have some sense after all.”

I heard three different quiet chuckles answer him.

I found that offensive, and, as though I wanted to prove them wrong, I opened my mouth to make some garbled noise, but as soon as my Adam’s apple bobbed, the knife dug into it.

“What do we do now?” One of the voices, which sounded so young I could not immediately determine whether its owner was male or female, said.

“We wait,” a feminine voice said. She sounded young, too.

“We’ve been waiting,” the young, genderless voice complained.

“Yes, and we’ll wait much longer, so you’d better get comfortable and be quiet.” That was the man holding me. I couldn’t judge his age perfectly from his voice, but he felt a little narrow in the chest to be fully grown, a little gangly. Like me. I could feel his sternum against my spine.

“Will they leave without him?” This was the third voice, the last laugh. Another young man, I thought. “Who is he, anyway?”

“Stiva, I just told Misha to be quiet.”

“Yeah, cause he’s a kid. And what are you saying our names for?”

“Just be quiet,” the man holding me repeated. It sounded like he was in charge.

I tried to ask if they could just knock me out again if this was all we were going to do. This time, I got a few unintelligible syllables out before the knife bore down.

I should have been scared, I’m sure, but it never even occurred to me to be anything but irritated. I was no good at sitting in silence, at waiting in general. I’d been ambushed by a bunch of kids, which was humiliating, but surely it would be over soon. As soon as they moved, as soon as I was in any situation other than this precise one, I could overpower them. They were miryanins; they didn’t have any magic or they would have used it already. They called myortva “death magic,” and they said the words like they were poisonous.

After a bit of sitting in that horrible silence and getting jabbed with a knife every time I squirmed (which was often—everything itched, and I couldn’t do anything but twist and scratch at my own fingers and the rope around my wrists), I struggled through several more jabs trying to get through an approximation of, “I need to piss.”

“I think he needs to piss,” the girl’s voice said, finally.

“Oh. Well he can just piss himself, then.” The man holding me said, then laughed quietly.

I was going to blast his cock off. Soon as I got the chance. He’d have to put that knife down sooner or later. And when I did need to piss, I was going to piss all over him.

I didn’t know what time it was, but the girl was right. They weren’t going to leave without me. If Aksana was mad when they got Yelena, she was going to be frothing at the mouth now. When she got her hands on me, she was going to throttle me. And Semchik! He wouldn’t make it out alive. Oh, I’d never make it up to him for this, and he was already mad at me all the time. I’d have to do something really big, get him laid or something. What a disgusting thought. I’d tell him that; when they found me—when I got away, I’d tell him I was going to get him laid and watch his face screw up in horror and revulsion. I would get away.

But we already searched the whole town, and we hadn’t found this, had we?

I heard some scuffling overhead, and everything in the cellar froze. There’d been a dull, orange glow I could see through the blindfold, but now it was snuffed out. The trapdoor creaked, and I felt a little snaking tickle roll down to my collarbone. The bastard drew blood.

I took a deep breath, but before I could scream and get my throat slit, a voice from above said, “They’ve gone.”

“Petya!” the one called Stiva said. “You didn’t knock like we showed you.”

“Sorry,” the voice from above said, and it was a very small voice.

I was surrounded by children.

“Finally,” the girl groaned, and I heard and felt the others getting up and stretching.

The man behind me shifted, grabbing my arm with one hand, keeping the knife on me with the other. “All right, time to get up. Nadya, will you cut his ankles loose?”

“Why?” Nadya said.

“Do you want to carry him up the ladder?”

Nadya apparently did not, because soon something was pulling on the rope around my ankles and then it fell away. As soon as the rope was off, the man in charge—the only one whose name had not been said yet—yanked my arm nearly out of socket pulling me to my numb feet.

They still struggled to get me up the ladder because they refused to untie my hands, and they also refused to take the knife off me for even a second, which, admittedly, was wise of them. The moment that blade left my skin—

Well, it didn’t matter because they managed it somehow, and I wasn’t two steps out of the hatch before: “All right, they’ve searched the town and they think he’s run off somewhere. Now, you have to get rid of him.”

I didn’t immediately recognize the voice, but context clues told me that this was the khozyain. Son-of-a-bitch.

“We’re not gonna kill him. Unless he tries something stupid.” The man shook my arm. “We’re gonna use him.”

“You have to kill him. If he tells those people you were in my house—”

“He wouldn’t have known you knew anything if you hadn’t just said so.”

“Who is he?” the voice I thought was Stiva asked.

“His name is Iyu,” the khozyain said. “He’s Aksana Moryakov’s son or nephew, I don’t remember which. Must be the nephew with a name like that. If he tells her he was here, she’ll burn the whole town to the ground. Just do me this one favor and kill him. Please, Anton Pavlovich, you owe me that.”

“We don’t owe you shit,” the man holding my arm said. “Now get the fuck out of my way.”

At least they were pretty hard-line against killing me for the time being, but I knew that. If they wanted to kill me, I’d be dead. They probably wanted ransom (though they hadn’t yet demanded one for Yelena, something we’d all found strange and maddening).

The patronymic Pavlovich did not escape me, either. Not that Pavel was so rare a name, but it was worth noticing that the name we’d gotten for the leader was Pavel. Pavel Viktorovich Polunin.

“You know if you don’t kill him, he’s going to kill you. You should’ve seen what they did to your friend yesterday. As soon as you let your guard down, you’re all dead.”

“We’ll just have to keep our guard up then. Right?” He didn’t wait for a response before he pushed past the khozyain, dragging me with him.

“Tell your father what I did! Tell your father what happened here!” the khozyain called after us.