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eye, as though Niki were peering through a long, dark night directly at Alexei. The room rumbled as though something huge were approaching, though Alexei’s bed remained solid and still.
    He got up slowly, and the light went out and Niki vanished back into darkness. A moment later, the whining and rumbling died away, and only the soft clanks of machinery and voices, the smell of dirt and oil, came through the warm air to him. He peered out the window. Two wolves and a raccoon at the construction site, doing something at—he checked his phone—midnight. Whatever it was, he didn’t know and couldn’t hear. He closed the window and lay back on his bed.
    He’d never been woken up at night before, never seen a light come through the window so late. “Prababushka?” he whispered. “Niki?”
    His ears stayed perked straight up, but only the murmurs of night outside broke the silence.

Chapter 3
    In the morning, Alexei was no longer convinced that anything supernatural had happened. The painting looked the same as it had every morning, softly lit by the reflected glow of the sunlight from Alexei’s wall when Sol pulled the blinds up at six-thirty. He stared at the fox’s eye for a long moment and then, just as Sol looked about to ask him what he was doing, turned away and got dressed.
    They ate breakfast bars on the way to the transit center, changed busses, and rode the ten minutes to Alexei’s stop together. Sol had to ride another ten minutes to downtown where his store was. “You’ll come down after?” he asked as Alexei got up to get off.
    “Yes,” Alexei said with a smile. “Six o’clock, at the coffee shop at your bus stop.”
    “Thanks.” Sol’s tail wagged against the seat.
    Alexei’s work was dull, but he enjoyed the exercise of lifting boxes, and he felt safe and anonymous as one of a team of fifteen who sweated out the day shift in the warehouse. His supervisor Vlad, a second-generation Siberian tiger who smoked constantly, had told him that in a another month he would be eligible to move to the cooler evening shift, but this did not appeal to Alexei. For one thing, the heat of the day was no worse than the muggy Samorodka summers, and for another, he enjoyed spending his evenings with Sol and Meg, and the VLGA soccer games were also in the evening.
    Alexei had not told Vlad about the VLGA, even though he had gotten the job through Vlad’s friendship with outspoken lesbian Liza. He did not think Vlad would mind having a gay worker, but there was no call for his relationships to be part of the job, so he talked to the tiger about his hometown when he had a chance, and sometimes about Sol and Meg, and little else.
    The others on his shift barely even wanted to talk about that. They had families, most of them, but their conversations consisted of sports and their church activities, or about the nights they’d had at the topless club. Sometimes the same conversation would encompass all three topics, which had confused Alexei at first, but he just nodded and smiled, and over the first two weeks came to realize that though a fellow might be married with a lovely daughter and attend church on Sundays, still he liked to go out with the boys on Saturday and look at half-naked ladies.
    They had invited him to the club with them this week, and he’d declined politely, saying he and Sol and Meg had plans—he always included Meg even if she weren’t coming, because then it was “three friends” and not “two boys.” Alexei, of course, had never had an interest in looking at half-naked ladies, so he had never really thought much of it other than that it was a thing that the boys in his class liked to do on the shared school computer when the teacher was out of the room. He had rather vaguely supposed that the urge would pass once you were married and had a wife to look at, but his co-workers acted as if their fondest dream would be to walk out of the warehouse into a world where it was illegal for female