"It's not a tattoo,” she whispered back through a mouthful of meat and cilantro. “It's a burn."

"How do you know?"

She shrugged, chewing with great energy. “Looks… like… it.” She didn't eat her bread, but instead stuffed bits of it up her sleeves, where they disappeared with alacrity. The rats were hungry too. She passed Fyodor a slice, and he offered it to the rats that settled like a warm, breathing shroud around his middle, concealed by the coat but giving him a paunchy appearance.

The thugs ate in silence now, hurried along by the impatient glances and sighs of their leader.

Oksana whispered into her sleeve, and one of the smaller rats plopped to the floor, apparently climbing out of her boot.

Fyodor looked around, worried, but no one but him had noticed the brown streak of fur crossing the linoleum floor decorated with puddles of melted snow and dirt, and darting under the thug's table. Fyodor held his breath as the little rat, following Oksana's instructions, climbed up the chair leg and slid into the seat next to Slava. He seemed too preoccupied to notice the pink twitching nose and two small, strangely human hands examining the contents of his pocket. The rat had to duck as he opened his jacket and extracted a wallet from the inner pocket.

The thugs paid and exited, still talking about the relative advantages of sugar over raisins. Fyodor and Oksana waited for the door to slam closed, before paying for their meal. The rat had darted back, its head held high and something glistening in its mouth.

Oksana bent down to collect the reconnaissance rat onto her palm. She plucked the small round object from its mouth, and gave it to Fyodor.

A small sphere of green lunar glass rolled in his palm, warm and a bit wet. He thought he felt it pulsing with a suppressed breath and heaving of life, and he shuddered trying to imagine what it would be like, having one's soul encased in a tiny glass cocoon like a fly in amber.

They returned to Kolomenskoe. The traffic must've been bad-the thugs barely overtook them. Fyodor saw them from across the street of the park's central entrance, exiting the maroon Merc that matched their jackets, and stretching their legs.

"There's just no point in driving in Moscow,” Fyodor said.

"It's not about speed,” Oksana said. “It's about being able to afford not to take the subway."

At this moment, Fyodor acutely missed the good old Soviet days, when everyone was poor enough for the subway, except a few apparatchiks with government-issued black shiny Volgas. He remembered his stepfather being keenly suspicious of everyone who had a car, assuming that it was ill-gotten, through bribery or theft; he was usually right, Fyodor thought, as much as he disliked agreeing with his stepfather.

He despised him a little too, for being such a working drudge, for wasting his life in gloomy joyless labor at one factory or another, never actively hating his job but not liking it either-as if there wasn't enough life left in him, oppressed by the routine and boredom, to summon even a shred of enthusiasm for either. As unenviable as Fyodor's life was, he comforted himself by saying that at least it wasn't as bleak as his stepfather's. He had no notion of where his actual father might be, but hoped for the sake of the man he had never met that it was not dreary.

"We need to find out whose soul this is,” Oksana said.

"How do we do that?"

She nodded at the pack of jackdaws industriously pecking at the snow.

"Do you think it'd work?” Fyodor said.

"It worked with Sergey and that rook,” she said. “We can try it."

"How do we catch one?"

Oksana glanced around to make sure there was no one watching them; Fyodor thought that to the passersby they were invisible, too ordinary to draw attention. When she was content that there was no one paying them any mind, she shook several rats out of her sleeves, and pointed them toward the birds.

Fyodor was skeptical at first, but the rats were faster and more organized than he expected. They broke into two groups, outflanking one of the birds and cutting it off from the rest of the flock. Just as the bird noticed that it was surrounded and raised its wings, ready to fly, the rats pounced all at once, like a pride of tiny, well-coordinated lions. The bird squawked once and was overwhelmed, buried under the shifting mass of fur and agile tails.

"Don't you eat it,” Oksana called to the rats in a scolding voice. The snow crunched under her boots as she approached the fallen bird, still pinned under its attackers. She picked it up, ruffled but unharmed, and stuck the glass granule into the wide-open beak quivering in distress.

The bird swallowed hard, working the round foreign object into its crop. Then the bird spoke.

His name was Vladimir, and he used to be a businessman-the real kind, not one of those thugs and racketeers who only called themselves businessmen but had never done an honest day's work. Vladimir was among the brave few who were the first to open co-ops; his manufactured carpets and pseudo-Persian rugs, and business was good. His story was sad in its familiarity: at first, there were several gangs extorting and threatening, and he did what everyone else had to do-he chose the lesser of the many evils that beset him to rob him blind. Even ‘lesser’ was a relative term. He couldn't quite distinguish between them, coming and going, robbing and threatening, brandishing electric irons and pliers, their favored instruments of persuasion and extraction of assets, confessions and on occasion teeth. They even looked the same: back in the day before maroon jackets, they all wore their hair short, their torsos clad in leather jackets. For comfort and freedom of movement they wore track pants, just like back in the days when their favorite occupation was forcible shearing of hippies. Vladimir wished that they had remained on the fringe and never even entered the consciousness of the budding entrepreneurs, but there they were, fully in view and menacing from every corner.

He went with Slava because he had the appearance of a member of the intelligentsia, with his thin fingers and tired but kind eyes, with his habit of nodding thoughtfully along with the pleadings of his extortees. He was a reader too, given to quoting from John Stuart Mill and Jonathan Swift; he was fond of Thomas Mann and Remarque. Vladimir chose him as his protection-his roof, in the vernacular with which had become disconcertingly familiar-because if he had to be subordinate to someone, he wanted that someone to be an educated man. Just a small vanity, he thought.

But there was danger in being under protection of a man who liked to consider whether personal experience was the limit for one's imagination, and whether it was possible to invent a truly alien creature, for example, not just an amalgam of familiar beasts. There was danger in being subject to someone who wondered whether the dragon on the city's crest was related to the Komodo dragon it so closely resembled, and if so, when St Georgiy had a chance to travel to Komodo. The man with imagination could notice the magic that was seeping into the world, cast for him to notice, like round shining lures.

"You know about magic?” Oksana said.

The jackdaw flapped its wings. “Of course I do; I did from the time he first started thinking about it. He borrowed some books from me-books on Kabbala. My grandmother was a Jewish mystic of some sort. The books were old though; valuable. I knew nothing about that crap, just had no interest in it at all."

"But now you do,” Fyodor said. He glanced around, making sure that no one eavesdropped on his conversation with the bird. “Tell me, why do they come here?"

"That I don't know,” Vladimir said. “But if you want to follow them, now's the time.” He pointed his wing at the three men who finished their stretching, smoking and leisurely conversation, and headed down the freshly plowed path.