Once a militiaman checked my papers. Twice I was pestered by crazy young guys who wanted to give me, absolutely free—that is, for only fifty bucks—a Chinese fan, a child's toy, and a dirt-cheap Korean telephone.

And again I couldn't control myself. I brushed aside the next sidewalk salesman who pestered me and performed a remoralization. Only a slight one, right on the very edge of what's allowed. Maybe the young guy would start looking for a different kind of work. Or maybe he wouldn't…

But that very instant someone grabbed hold of my elbows. One minute there was no one there—then the next suddenly there was a young couple: an attractive-looking young woman with red hair and a solid-looking guy with a surly expression on his face.

«Hold it,» said the girl. She was the leader, I could tell that right away. «Day Watch.»

Light and Darkness!

I shrugged and looked at them.

«Give your name,» the girl demanded.

There was no point in lying; they'd captured the image of my aura already, and after that, identifying the individual is only a matter of time.

«Anton Gorodetsky.»

They waited.

«Other,» I confessed. «Night Watch agent.»

They lifted their hands off my elbows, and even took a step back. But they didn't seem disappointed.

«Okay, let's enter the Twilight,» said the guy.

They didn't look like vampires. That was one good thing. At least I could hope for a certain degree of objectivity. I sighed and shifted from one reality into another.

The first surprise was that the couple turned out to be genuinely young. A witch about twenty-five years old and a warlock about thirty, roughly my age. I thought that if I needed to, I could probably even recall their names; there weren't that many witches and warlocks born in the late seventies.

The second surprise was that the owl wasn't there on my shoulder. Or rather, she was: I could feel her claws and I could see her, but only with a bit of an effort. It was as if the bird had shifted realities at the same time as I had and moved into a deeper level of the Twilight.

This was getting really interesting!

«Day Watch,» the girl repeated. «Alisa Donnikova, Other.»

«Pyotr Nesterov, Other,» the young guy muttered.

«You have some kind of problem?»

The girl drilled me with one of those specialty «witch's glances.» She started looking even more delightful and beguiling with every moment. Of course, I'm protected against direct influence; it's not possible to bewitch me, but it certainly was impressive.

«We're not the ones with the problem. Anton Gorodetsky, you have entered into unsanctioned contact with a human being.»

«Yes? And what was that?»

«Only a seventh-degree intervention,» the witch admitted reluctantly. «But a fact is a fact. And you also urged him toward the Light.»

«Are we going to draw up a charge report?» I suddenly found the entire situation amusing. Seventh degree was next to nothing—a level of influence on the borderline between magic and ordinary conversation.

«We are.»

«And what are we going to write? A Night Watch agent slightly increased one human being's aversion to deception?»

«Thereby disrupting the established balance,» the warlock rapped out.

«Really? And what harm does it do to the Darkness? If the guy stops working as a petty crook, his life is bound to get worse. He'll be more moral, but more unhappy too. Under the terms of the commentaries to the treaty on the balance of power, that's not regarded as a violation of the balance.»

«Sophistry,» the young woman said curtly. «You're a Night Watch agent. What might be pardonable for an ordinary Other is not acceptable from you.»

She was right. It was still a violation, even if it was petty.

«He was obstructing me. I have the right to use magical intervention in the course of conducting an investigation.»

«Are you on duty, Anton?»

«Yes.»

«Why during the day?»

«I have a special assignment. You can direct your inquiry to my superiors. Or rather, you have the right to address your inquiry to your superiors.»

The witch and the warlock exchanged glances. No matter how opposed our goals and our moralities might be, the two hierarchies had to collaborate.

Only, to be quite frank about it, nobody really likes to get the bosses involved.

«Very well,» the witch agreed reluctantly. «Anton, we can limit ourselves to a verbal warning.»

I looked around. All around me there were people moving slowly through the gray gloom. Ordinary people, incapable of moving out of their own little world. We were Others, and though I stood on the side of Light and the other two were on the side of Darkness, we had far more in common with each other than with any of those ordinary human beings.

«On what terms?»

You must never try to second-guess the Darkness. You must never make any concessions. And it's even more dangerous to accept any gifts from it. But rules are made only in order to be broken.

«No terms.»

Well, that was a surprise!

I looked at Alisa, trying to figure out the catch in what she'd said. Pyotr was obviously indignant at his partner's behavior; he was angry, he wanted to expose an adept of the Light as a criminal. That meant I didn't have to worry about him.

Where was the trap?

«That's not acceptable to me,» I said, with a sigh of relief—I'd spotted the catch. «Alisa, thank you for your offer of a peaceful resolution. I can accept it, but in a similar situation I promise to forgive you a minor magical intervention, up to and including the seventh degree.»

«Very well, Other,» Alisa agreed readily. She held out her hand and I automatically shook it. «We have a personal agreement.»

The owl on my shoulder flapped its wings. There was a furious screech right in my ear. And a moment later the bird materialized in the Twilight world.

Alisa took a step back and the pupils of her eyes rapidly extended into vertical slits. The young warlock took up a defensive posture.

«We have an agreement,» the witch repeated sullenly.

What was going on?

I realized too late that I shouldn't have entered into an agreement with Olga there. But then—what was so terrible about what had happened? As if I hadn't been there when other guys from the Watch had concluded alliances like this, made concessions, agreed to terms for cooperating with the Dark Ones; even the boss himself had done it! Sure, it's undesirable, but sometimes you have to do it!

Our goal is not to exterminate the Dark Ones. Our goal is to maintain the balance. The Dark Ones will disappear only when human beings conquer the Evil in themselves. Or we'll disappear, if they decide they like the Darkness better than the Light.

«The agreement's been made,» I told the owl. «Cool it. It's no big deal. Just standard collaboration.»

Alisa smiled and gave me a wave. She took the warlock by the elbow, and they moved away. A couple of moments later they were out of the Twilight and setting off along the sidewalk. An ordinary young couple.

«What's eating you?» I asked. «Well? Field work has always been built on compromises!»

«You made a mistake.»

Olga's voice was strange; it didn't match her appearance. It was soft, velvety, musical. The way werecats talk, not birds.

«Oho! So you can talk now?»

«Yes.»

«Then why didn't you say anything before?»

«Everything was okay before.»

I laughed, remembering the old joke about the child who didn't speak for years.

«I'll leave the Twilight, okay? And meanwhile you can explain what mistake I've made. Minor compromises with the Dark Ones ate inevitable in this line of work.»

«You're not well-enough qualified to make compromises.»

The world around me turned colored. It was like switching modes in a video camera, when you change from «sepia» or «old movie» to the standard view. The comparison is really quite apt in some ways: The Twilight is an «old movie,» a really old one that humankind has managed to forget. It finds it easier to live that way.

I set off toward the steps down into the metro, snarling to my invisible companion on the way:

«And just what have qualifications got to do with it?»

«A high-ranking Watch member is able to foresee the consequences of a compromise. Whether it's no more than just a minor bilateral trade-off and the effects will be self-neutralizing, or a trap, a trick—and you'll lose out.»

«I doubt if a seventh-grade intervention's likely to lead to disaster!»

A man walking along beside me glanced at me in surprise. I was just about to tell him something like: «I'm harmless, the non-violent kind of psycho.» It's a great way of curing excessive curiosity. But the man had already sped up; he must have come to a similar conclusion himself.

«Anton, you can't anticipate the consequences. You over-reacted to a minor annoyance. Your little piece of magic led to intervention by the Dark Ones. You agreed to a compromise with them. But the saddest thing of all is that there was no need for magical intervention in the first place.»

«Okay, okay, I admit it. So now what?»

The bird's voice was sounding more lifelike now, developing more expression.

I supposed it must have been a long time since she'd last spoken.

«Now—nothing. We'll have to hope for the best.»

«Are you going to tell the boss what happened?»

«No. At least, not yet. We're partners, after all.»

I felt a warm glow in my heart. This sudden improvement in relations with my partner would have made any mistakes worthwhile.

«Thanks. What do you advise?»

«You're doing everything right. Look for the trail.»

I'd have preferred rather less predictable advice…

«Let's go.»

By two o'clock, as well as the circle line, I'd combed the entire gray line too. Maybe I am a lousy operational agent, but there was no way I could have failed to spot the trail from yesterday, when I'd captured the image myself. The girl with the black vortex spinning over her head hadn't gotten out here. I'd have to go back and start again from the point where we'd met.

At Kurskaya I went up on the escalator and out of the metro and bought a plastic tub of salad and a coffee from a van right there on the street. The very sight of the hamburgers and sausages made me start feeling sick, even though the amount of meat in them was strictly symbolic.

«Will you have something?» I asked my invisible companion.

«No, thank you.»

Standing there with the fine snow falling on me, I picked at my Olivier salad with a tiny plastic fork and sipped the hot coffee. A bum who'd been counting on me buying beer, so that he could have the empty bottle, hung about for a bit and then took off into the metro to get warm. Nobody else paid any attention to me. The girl behind the counter served the hungry passersby; faceless streams of people flooded away from the station and back toward it. The salesman at a bookstall was trying wearily and unenthusiastically to foist some book or other on a customer. The customer didn't like the price.