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counting on a day when the worth of his land might remake his fortune again, shut down the farm. Out there, there had been nothing but the sound of the truck or tractor leaving, the thrum of crickets, sometimes their uncle’s old Yurlov Crower belting out his call, the long cry turned lonesome with all the bird’s brood gone. Someone had found Dyadya Avya’s old milch cow half-wild in the woods. Someone slew the swine. One by one the feral chickens were gathered up out of fields themselves gone wild. Cowbane and Gypsyweed and Rattle and Yarrow: the brothers still sometimes found a hen hunkered in the scrub. The only gun they had was Dyadya Avya’s old revolver, and neither could bring himself to use it, so they lured birds with rotted seed, set their uncle’s rusted traps, sat along the riverbanks angling for fish, cooked them over open fires, slept beneath the open sky.
    And if the day darkened, if the evening threatened rain, they went to the woods, hurried beneath wind-rattled branches, the rush of raindrops battering leaves, until, in the twilight between white birch trees they caught a burst of color and, crouching low, on hands and knees, crawled in. By then their older eyes had recognized the remains of a bench, a broken ladle, half a metal basin filled with rocks, and they knew it was nothing more than some forgotten bathhouse farmworkers must once have used. But still, the old banya ’s seclusion stirred their dreams, its darkness let them loose, and, lying there amid the scents of soil and each other, they would swear to one day make them real. Then they would go quiet, listening to the rain drum at the earth above, or two trees knocking at each other somewhere in the night, or sometimes the wo-hoo, woho-uhwo-ho of a Ural owl calling to its mate, before their breathing would fall in synch, the den filled with a sound steady as a single chest breathing peacefully in sleep.
    Now, Dima could barely make out his brother beneath the glass. It had been weeks since he’d seen Yarik, and he was working overtime with a pane-laying team when he caught a glimpse of him through the steel frame just before a sheet of glass was settled in. Through the pane the scene below was blurred soft, but he knew that tall, thin shape, the way that hard hat hung forward on that long neck, how Yarik’s legs bowed when he was carrying something heavy, that voice—he was sure he heard it—reedy barking, quick yelp of a laugh. Kneeling, he rapped with his knuckles. The glass hardly made a noise against his gloves. He smacked at it with the flat side of his ratchet. Across the pane from him, a worker tightening a bracket down glanced over without slowing the cranking of his elbows. The crane had laid the glass a little off its frame, and, like a man drinking water from a creek, Dima dropped his face close to the gap. “Yarik!” he shouted through it. If his brother heard him, he didn’t show it. “Yarik!” The backhoe rumbled alive, its shovel crashing into the bricks. Dima slid to his belly, his face turned so the cheekbones bruised against the surface.
    Down there, they were taking the top off an old farm building. “Sizing” the Consortium called it: everything that was in the Oranzheria’s way smashed or sawed or toppled low enough to build the glass panes over it. Later, the razing crews would finish the job. After, the extraction crews would clear the rubble from the fields. Then the tractors would come. Here, at the edge of the advance of the glass, two wrecking machines twice the size of bulldozers rolled slowly past it all, a heavy chain—the links thick as a forearm—stretched between at five meters height. It lopped off whatever it hit—silos, chimneys, canopies of ancient trees—like a trimmer on a hedge.
    Over the noise, Dima bellowed his brother’s name again. And there at last: Yarik looking up. The crack between the bracket and the pane was just wide enough for Dima to fit his fingers through. He shoved them