68°19'0.82 "N 59°40'52.1'' E – Khaypudyr Bay, Nenetsia

  29.05.2024 – 06.30 UTC +03.00

  Packed heavily with clothes, food, and new camping equipment, Valeriya and I headed to the port. She had now gotten used to riding on my motorcycle with me to the point that she no longer needed to hold on to me.

  After a day of shopping, more fireworks, and less vodka, I was also happy to leave the Bay. The other day, one of the Spanish blimps had left as well, accompanying half the fleet of the Eastern Republic.

  “There it is,” Valeriya pointed at one of the many piers of the port. A boat with one single rusty mast and a hull that seemed roughed up by sailing waters for long enough indicated either a decades-worth experienced captain, or a dangerous vessel. Possibly both.

  I slowed down.

  “Looks decrepit.”

  I stared at the three men sitting at the pier by the boat. All three of them seemed too young to be captains in these waters. Were they the men she had hired?

  “It is our only option,” she said right behind my right ear. I could hear hesitation in her whisper as well, as she realized that in a three-day trip like this, our lives depended on the experience of those men.

  “Does it look like a good option?”

  “I am a river witch. Wrong expertise,” she sighed.

  I turned right to approach our pier. The man wearing a cap and sitting to the left of the three stood up first and nodded to us from afar. I nodded back, and the other two men stood as well, revealing their broad build.

  “Are these your guys?”

  “The guy on the cap is the guy we pay. His name is Mitrey. The other two I don’t know,” Valeriya said. Here it was again: Valeriya’s perfect pronunciation of Komi names. Not Dmitri or Mitri: Mitrey – he was also Komi, he must have been. I looked at his face, which betrayed a mixed heritage. And Valeriya was somehow educated in our language. I made a mental note to address this eventually. I knew nothing about her, besides her connection to the river of the land.

  “Hello, Ms. Valeriya,” said Mitrey as we parked the motorcycle nearby, “and friend.”

  Walking on the pier, the waves had gotten louder, crashing against the concrete. I knew I would grow sick of that sound very quickly. I already felt seasick.

  “??galej,” I answered.

  “Pleasure, ??galej,” Mitrey rubbed his hands and smiled, as if waiting for us to kick this off. “Should we do business first?”

  “Half now, half once you get us there,” Valeriya said.

  “Of course, Miss! Iwan, Mikol, help them get on board. The motorcycle too?”

  I nodded. I walked up to Mitrey, the brief with the money in my hands.

  “No, no, no, let’s go inside. I need to put all that in the safe,” Mitrey said. Was that excitement or nervousness in his voice?

  Mitrey pointed at the small building a few meters down the pier. It looked like a fisherman’s lodge.

  “Sure,” I said, and I followed him, already walking fast there.

  I turned back and exchanged looks with Valeriya. She nodded, but I could sense her unease being left alone with the other men. Was she feigning that? I knew how deadly she was, firsthand.

  “Just a moment,” I said and ran to catch up with Mitrey.

  “We have no time to waste, friend, the sooner we get to the sea, the more we can cross in the first day,” he answered.

  “You sound like you have done this before?”

  “Plenty. Sometimes our fishing gets us as far as Vaygach, and then setting sail to Krasino is just easier than getting back here,” he explained.

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  “But we are getting a crossing to Belushya Guba. That’s further up north.”

  “Same Island, same sea,” Mitrey said.

  I did not respond. As Valeriya had said, he was our only option. And we could still make use of this option.

  Or not.

  He stepped into the building and looked right back at me.

  “What’s up, my friend? Come in,” Mitrey said, reaching his hand out to my brief full of the upfront payment.

  The lodge, a twenty-square-meter cabin built on the pier, that probably housed him and a mate or two when they had nowhere else to crash, had grown moss and barnacles to the side. I could smell the fish stench from the most recent batch.

  I could also smell the glamour on it. Some kind of malicious hex, which I could not discern. But I did not need to; the intention was clear.

  “Come on in,” Mitrey said, making one step closer to me. He thought I would not notice, but I was trained to: drops of sweat dripped on his forehead.

  “Sure,” I said, and pretended to take a step forward. He relaxed, and I immediately reached his hand and pulled him out of the house, and pinned him to the ground. My right hand strangled his neck just enough for him to be able to speak, but not shout. “Who are you working for?”

  “We – need - to – in,” he struggled to say.

  I kicked him in the groin and pushed his face into the wet cement of the pier.

  “Who are you working for?”

  “They paid me to get you in. I know nothing else! I promise, nothing else!”

  I let his neck go and then stepped on his face until I heard it crack. Before he could scream. I released him from my hold, and I trailed his left hand. Even in his last moments, he was trying to crawl his hand to the threshold of the door leading into the lodge.

  I unsheathed Lopt?? and started running back to the boat. Valeriya was alone with the two men, and the late Mitrey had a reason he wanted to be far from there.

  One of the two men was by my motorcycle, trying to figure out a way to retract the stand.

  “You have to kick it!” I shouted, axe in hand and charging at him. The man, horrified, started yelling as he fell on his back. Almost as if he crawled on four legs at the beginning, he ran frantically away from me.

  “Help! Somebody!” He shouted.

  I frowned. That was not the reaction of a man who had conspired against us.

  “Did your brain fucking expire?” Valeriya shouted at me. She was at the starboard of the boat, holding to the railing. “What are you doing?”

  “They are working for somebody,” I said, almost like a kid caught on stealing cookies.

  “Yes. Mitrey! Where is Mitrey?” Valeriya leaned over the railing to glance over the pier. “Is that…”

  “He is dead.”

  “Who is dead?” asked the third man, appearing on Valeriya’s side. He shot one look at Lopt?? and me, and he turned pale. He dropped the bag he was carrying and walked further away, “look, man, I have no money.”

  I made one step towards the boat, and the man dropped the bag and started running to the bow of the boat. He promptly dove into the sea to escape.

  “Fucking great,” Valeriya said, “you killed and scared our crew.”

  “Sh,” I said.

  “Don’t shush me.”

  “No, listen.”

  A persistent buzz could be heard even as the waves crashed against the pier. For a brief moment, the sun scorched my forehead, and this time it was my turn to sweat.

  “The bee,” Valeriya said, slowly catching on that something was off. She dug into her backpack and pulled the jam vase with the bee-spy out of it. The bee was buzzing around erratically, desperately. Unnaturally.

  A cloud covered the sun, if only for a moment. I gazed at Khaypudyr Bay, all its wooden and brown buildings somehow founded on top of the delta, hosting life so far away from the center of Nenetsia, so far away from civilization. And as I looked at it, a sense of impending doom grew in my bones. Trickled down from my spine.

  I was, too, Cursed in many ways. But I had never had my instincts warn me like that. I sheathed my axe and ran to Valeriya, on board the boat.

  “What is happening?” She asked. She knew I could sometimes sense things she could not. She did not trust me blindly.

  “Hold on to me,” I said, as I saw something glinting in my peripheral vision. A flare of light. A warning.

  “What are you doing?”

  I grabbed her, and for the first time, I felt her fragile in my hands. Weightless, as part of her trusted me. I held her tight, and ran with her at the edge of the boat, lunging as far away as we could.

  Just as the boat went up in a fireball. I felt the flame’s tongues erupt and almost reach us, as we landed in the waves. The sea was cold, but it was also alluring, pulling us down. Eventually, the weight of our dive was lifted, and I managed to pull us out to the surface. The boat was aflame, and as it

  This was Zaytsev. One of the Spark Hunters. He had found us.

  “Val this was…”

  Valeriya. All I was holding was her white coat. She was gone, almost as if she had turned to the whitecaps of the waves.

  “Valeriya!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.