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thing in the world. I couldn’t leave without him.
    “Where are you going?” He lowered the carrots and stood there with his legs slightly apart, one hand on his hip, his boots reaching up to his thighs. For a moment he looked like one of those old posters, the sort they had printed to get the peasants to work in the fields. He gave me a crooked smile. “What’s the matter, Yasha? What’s wrong?”
    “My dad’s dead,” I said.
    “What?”
    Hadn’t he understood anything? Hadn’t he realized that something was wrong? But that was Leo for you. Gunshots, explosions, alarms . . . and he would just carry on weeding.
    “He’s been shot,” I said. “That was what the siren was about. It was him. They tried to stop him from leaving. But he told me I have to go away and hide. Something terrible has happened at the factory.” I was pleading with him. “Please, Leo. Come with me.”
    “I can’t . . .”
    He was going to argue. No matter what I told him, he would never have abandoned his family. But just then we became aware of a sound, something that neither of us had ever heard before. At the same time, we felt a slight pulsing in the air, beating against our skin. We looked around and saw five black dots in the sky, swooping low over the hills, heading toward the village. They were military helicopters, just like the ones in the pictures in my room. They were still too far away to see properly, but they were lined up in precise battle formation. It was that exactness that made them so menacing. Somehow I was certain that they weren’t going to land. They weren’t going to disgorge doctors and technicians who had come to help us. My parents had warned me that people were coming to Estrov to kill me, and I had no doubt at all that they had arrived.
    “Leo! Come on! Now!”
    There must have been something in my voice, or perhaps it was the sight of the helicopters themselves. But this time Leo dropped his carrots and obeyed. Together, without a single thought, we began to run up the slope, away from the village. The edge of the forest, an endless line of thick trunks, branches, pine needles, and shadows, stretched out before us. We were still about fifty meters away and now I found that my legs wouldn’t work, that the soft mud was deliberately dragging me down. Behind me, the sound of the helicopters was getting louder. I didn’t dare turn around but I could feel them getting closer and closer. And then—another shock—the bells of St. Nicholas began to ring, the sound echoing over the rooftops. We had no priest in the village. The church was empty. I had never heard the bells before.
    I was sweating. My whole body felt as if it were trapped inside an oven. Something hit me on the shoulder and for a crazy moment I thought one of the helicopters had fired a bullet. But it was nothing more than a fat raindrop. The storm was about to break.
    “Yasha!”
    We stopped on the very edge of the forest and turned around just in time to see the helicopters deliver their first payload. They fired five missiles, one after the other. But they didn’t hit anything, not like in an old war film. The pilots hadn’t actually been aiming at any particular buildings. The missiles exploded randomly—in lanes, in peoples’ gardens—but the destruction was much, much worse than anything I could have imagined. Huge fireballs erupted at the point of impact, spreading out instantly so that they joined up with one another, wiping out everything they touched. The flames were a brilliant orange, fiercer and more intense that any fire I had ever seen. They devoured my entire world, burning up the houses, the walls, the trees, the roads, the very soil. Nothing that touched those flames could possibly survive. The first five missiles wiped out almost the entire village, but they were followed by five more and then another five. We could feel the heat reaching out to us, so intense that even though we were some distance away, our