"Unbelievable," The Gnostic muttered, breaking a long silence that followed a bout of furious typing. He was sitting in front of my computer, and it looked like he was on an OpNet forum from what I could see of the screen over his shoulder.

"What's that?" I asked him from my recliner. I was relaxing with the print edition of the Tampa Tribune.

He replied without turning around. "A Chechen child has posted a plea for help on this novas-only forum and the only reply he's gotten so far is a bunch of infantile wankery from the rabble. So far as I can tell, nobody's doing a thing about it."

I folded my newspaper but didn't set it down yet. "Is that so?" I replied, "What's remarkable about that?"

"It's a novas-only forum," The Gnostic explained patiently. "The boy, Sascha, managed to get validated on a novas-only forum from the middle of a war zone. That's not a quick exploit. Either the most gifted hacker in Grozny just played an elaborate prank on the world or he's the real deal."

I set my newspaper down forlornly. I knew that it would be a while, one way or another, before I would get to finish it. I hate leaving the newspaper half-read. I got up and looked over The Gnostic's shoulder and scanned the message:

"Good afternoon, My name is Sascha and I am twelve years from Chechan but now departure to outside, I am needing greatly to leaving Chechan desperately for health and safety, I am seeing that novas here come to talk and no others are listening so i am asking you for help and aid, Am asking please for help swiftly for Sascha and Ivan deliver from death,
Please, help!, Am much fraid for life and health!,"

"Could be a hoax," I said, still skeptical.

"Unlikely," The Gnostic countered, shaking his head and tracing his finger down my monitor. It annoyed me when he did that. It leaves fingerprints on the screen. "The syntax is a hodgepodge of Russian and elementary English. Whoever wrote this knew a few words of English already, but probably used a Russian-to-English dictionary to do direct word replacements for the rest. A fake would leave telltale signs of advanced grammar construction. It's very hard to do this well."

I reached around the corner of my desk and took a stack of books and folders off of a broken office chair and wheeled it alongside The Gnostic's. It had no back, so I squatted on it.
"If it's legit, it'll have an OP address from Chechnya," I said. "Let me have that a minute, I want to pull the header from the message and run it."

The Gnostic rose from his chair, my chair really. "I'll be right back," he said. "I'm calling Backjack."

I didn't bother taking my chair back. I was already thinking about how I would approach the problem. "Sure," I said, already engrossed in the forum software. It had a seemingly idiot-proof front end, but I knew how to pull the unique header from "Sascha's" missive. Like a series of postmarks on an international letter, it too left a trail that could be followed.

After a few minutes of spirited hacking, I'd resolved a single OpNet protocol address from the end of the trail, and connected it to a real entity in Grozny, Chechnya. I was in the middle of overlaying the address data from the registry into a satellite map program when The Gnostic came back into the living room from the kitchen.

"Backjack's on his way over," he announced. He walked back to the desk and looked at the screen thoughtfully, his hand in his chin.

"What did you do that for?" I asked him, annoyed. Backjack and The Gnostic and I are friends, but it's not his place to invite people to my house. I looked up from what I was doing, but he didn't return my look. His eyes were on the monitor.

"Is this reliable?" He asked me.

"I think so," I said. "There is a war on in Chechnya, you know. Sometimes people and businesses move around in a war."

If he noticed my sarcasm, he didn't show it. The Gnostic leaned down and put his finger on my monitor again. "This registration is is only a few months old. I'm willing to bet it's current."

"We win at the OpNets," I said. "Great. Why'd you call Backjack?"

"He's taking us to Grozny," The Gnostic replied matter-of-factly. "Put some pants on, and your boots too."

I turned around and looked up at The Gnostic, and already I could tell that I was not going to change his mind. I had yet to win an argument with The Gnostic, so I dressed for Chechnya. By the time I'd put on an old pair of work jeans, my boots, and retrieved an old army-issue Winter coat from the attic, Backjack had arrived. As usual, he rapped once on the screen door in the kitchen and then walked in.

"Gnostic, King," he said, "What's kicking?" He opened my refrigerator and fished out a bottle of water.

"We're going to Chechnya to rescue an imperiled young nova and bring him to the United States," The Gnostic said from the living room. "Could you come look at this map, please?"

"Coo'," Backjack replied, uncapping the bottle and glancing at the map.

The Gnostic reached into my desk drawer and pulled out an envelope that contained ten $20 bills-- my CPU upgrade fund-- and tossed it to me. "Take this," he said, "cash is still king."
I stuffed the bills into my coat pocket.

"We're going now," Backjack announced abruptly. An instant later, my ears popped painfully from an abrupt change in air pressure, and a cold gust of wind tore at my coat. In the darkess, I zipped it up around my jaw and caught my bearings.

"Welcome to Grozny," Backjack muttered, scanning our surroundings, "Keep your mouth shut and don't move."

As my eyes became accustomed to the darness, I pieced together where we were. We stood in an abandoned-- wrecked, really-- warehouse. A canopy of stars told me that the roof was gone, and the surrounding neighborhood looked like hell. In the east, the first glimmers of the false dawn were barely visible.

"Charming," The Gnostic whispered. "I love what the Russians have done with the place."

"Settle in, quietly," Backjack said sitting down against a fragment of retaining wall. "There's nothing to learn this time of day. First thing in the morning, we'll go to your OpNet cafe."

"Internet," I corrected. "The OpNet hasn't made it here yet. Something about a war."

The look Backjack gave me told me that I didn't need to split any more hairs for a while. I pulled my hood over my head and stuffed my hands in my pockets and settled in for a long couple of hours.

The sunrise arrived on schedule, which made it unique among the public services in Grozny. Almost immediately thereafter, the city awakened and lurched into unsteady motion, the way a homeless bum lurches from his stoop and brushes the dust from his filthy rags. Before the sun had even completed its transit of the horizon, shops were opening, autos, trucks, and animal-drawn carts were rolling about the streets, and what passed for commerce in a city not so much shaken as beat to within an inch of its life by war got underway.

In the light, I could see that our overnight stoop was set back from a thoroughfare on its own rubble-choked alley.

"That's the main drag on this side of town," Backjack said, "your cafe is a block and a half down the right, on the right-hand side."

I arched my eyebrows appreciatively. "Good job dropping us in so close," I said. I started to walk toward the open doorway to the alley. The door was missing and the hinges were broken-- probably looted for firewood. Backjack put out his arm suddenly, clothesline-style, stopping me.

"Good way to get shot," he said crossly, "here." Backjack grabbed the front of my coat roughly, and for a moment I thought he was going to shove me. Instead, he yanked, tearing away the sewn-on fabric tape over my pocket which read "U.S. ARMY." He repeated the motion for the other one, removing my name. He tossed them into a nearby barrel filled with chunks of cement and gravel.

"That would have cut our expedition off quite abruptly," The Gnostic mused. "The holes help you to blend in, too."

For a minute we watched the mouth of the alleyway from the shadows, observing the people and vehicles as they passed.

"You know what I don't see?" The Gnostic asked.

"What's that?" Backjack replied.

"Fat people," The Gnostic said.

"War, remember?" I interjected, "They've been fighting here for a decade."

"Even so, this is much different than what I'm used to seeing in Tampa," The Gnostic continued. "You know, you could stand to lose some weight yourself."

"From where?" I asked. "This isn't fat. Novas lose fat when they erupt. This is muscle tissue."

"Call it what you will," The Gnostic carried on, undeterred. "You know what else I don't see? No, no, I'll answer it for you. I don't see new things. Everything here looks like it came off the trash heap behind the Salvation Army warehouse.

"You're going to stand out," Backjack cautioned. "Be ready for anything."

With that, he clambered down the alleyway, deftly making his way over, around, and sometimes under rubble to reach the street. The Gnostic and I followed, less surely. Without pausing we hooked to the right and walked down the sidewalk, as if we'd been walking down the street for blocks already.

As we walked, people on the sidewalks stared in curiosity, but never approached. When I looked back, they would avert their gaze and hurry along. From the doorways I imagined dozens of unseen watchers following our progress. To take my mind off those worries, I glanced around at the landmarks that mattered and built a mental map of our surroundings. From what I could figure, a highway of sorts was less than a half-kilometer away. If Sascha had sent his message from here, that highway would be his fastest escape route.

Once you've made yourself conspicuous, it's important to get away and dissapear again quickly.

We almost walked past the internet cafe, probably because the only sign of its presence was the hand-lettered name of the shop painted on the inner surface of the cracked windows. They were mostly covered in cardboard, either to cut down on outside light or to thwart casual thieves from seeing exactly what lay within.

"Their hardware will be worth a fortune in local terms," The Gnostic mused.

"Assume there's armed men watching us," Backjack warned as I pushed the door open. A sickly-sounding buzzer, probably salvaged from an automobile, buzzed to announce our entry. Four out-of-date computers were arranged at the back of the small shop, and there were mismatched tables to seat another dozen or so patrons. We were the first ones there this morning, it seemed.

A matronly-looking woman stood behind the display counter. She looked up from her notebooks as we entered and set down her pen.

"Hello," she said in Russian, "Internet or breakfast?" I could tell by her gaze that she was appraising me, and had decided that I likely carried enough money to merit basic courtesy.

"Probably not the owner," The Gnostic murmured under his breath.

"Tea, please," I replied in Russian, "and toast with spread if you have it."

Without a word she turned and went into the back of the shop. We sat at a table adjacent to the counter. Backjack kept watch on the door.

"What do you think?" The Gnostic asked.

"If he sent the message from here, he probably took the highway west, out of here," I said.

"Georgia is to the south," The Gnostic countered.

Backjack smiled like a predator, pleased to have the opportunity to show up The Gnostic. "That's what the map tells you," he said, "but you're wrong. He won't cross into Georgia from Chechnya. The border's too secure. He'll go west through Ingushetia into North Ossetia, and from there into Georgia."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"Because our little Sascha's a scrapper and a survivor," Backjack said, radiating cool, "and that's what I'd do, too."

The older woman returned with a cup of tea and two thick slices of irregularly-shaped toasted bread, annointed with a glob of greasy-looking oleo.

"Thank you," I said, setting one of my twenties on the table.

Without looking at the money, she kept her gaze on me. I could tell she was uncomfortable.

"You're not from around here," she said, "Why are you here?"

"I'm looking for a boy named Pyotir," I replied, laying it out. "He sent a message from here, looking for me."

The clock on the wall ticked loudly as she continued to look into my face, measuring me. Without changing her expression, she replied: "I don't know what you are talking about."

"That's a lie," The Gnostic whispered to me.

"He came in here yesterday, sent a message on the internet to an OpNet forum for novas, requesting help," I said. Her face was still a stony mask. "I'm here to help."

"The boy's name is not Pyotir," she shot back, testily.

The Gnostic smiled with unconcealed pleasure.

"So there has been a boy," I said. "I know his name is not Pyotir. It's Sascha. Did he say which way he was going?"

"He did not say," she replied. She glanced nervously at the door. "I'm sorry, please enjoy your tea and bread quickly." She turned and returned to her place behind the counter, and did not look our way again.

I looked down at my tea and toast and noticed that the twenty was gone. Backjack chuckled.

"Rule number one in a civil war, my man: never take your eye off what's yours."

For all the fantastic abilities which eruption had blessed me, necessity forced the three of us to track Sascha the old-fashioned way: on foot. As we trudged westward out of Grozny, we measured time and distance not in hours and kilometers, but in craters in the pavement and bombed-out checkpoints.

"We're making progress," I said, as I continued to walk along the edge of the east-west highway, scanning for unexploded ordinance.

"Why do you say that?" asked the Gnostic.

"The last blown-up checkpoint is way back there, just about to disappear over the horizon," I said without turning around, "and I can't see another one ahead."

"He'll pick up the pace out here," Backjack said, "we're getting into the boonies, such as they are, and there'll be fewer reasons for him to have to stop and hide, or sneak around."

"So we too need to pick up the pace," The Gnostic added, "right?"

"Yeah, pretty much," Backjack affirmed, "This walking business is getting us nowhere. I suggest we start teleporting from landmark to landmark, at least until we hit Nazran."

Two hours later:

Backjack rested on a seat improvised from a half-exposed granite boulder.

"No more teleporting for a while," he said, idly splitting a long blade of grass into stringy bits, "let's just wait here for a bit, and see what develops."

I turned in a circle, taking a good look around at the surrounding countryside, which had changed significantly since we'd set out. The highway, much less battered now that they were far from civilization, snaked uninterrupted to the horizon in both directions. Far-off mountains ringed the horizon on every side, and a few lonely clouds scudded through an otherwise clear sky.

"I feel like a bug on a plate," I complained. "Since we found that one set of tracks, very inconclusive ones I might add, an hour ago, we haven't seen a thing out here."

The Gnostic nodded. "This is pretty wide-open country," he mused, turning to Backjack, "It seems more likely to me that we'll encounter our lost lad at the fringes of civilization, someplace where a scavenger can find scraps of food and a hole for shelter."

"Yeah, very good show Sherlock," Backjack grumbled, "I seem to recall mentioning that at least once or twice today already."

The Gnostic quirked an eyebrow.

"Gimme an hour to charge, and I'll take us to the southern edge of Nazran," Backjack said. "It's a natural chokepoint. We'll camp there and let Sascha catch up to us."

"How will Sascha know that we're there?" I asked, sitting down on my folded-up coat. It had warmed enough that I could do without it, mostly.

"He won't," Backjack said. "But I'm willing to bet novas are a rare commodity out here in this shithole. I know that if I popped out here, the first thing I'd do is leave. While we wait there hidden from sight of the road, you keep watch and pop off a quantum ping at every car, truck, and yak-drawn wagon that goes by."

"For how long?" I asked, fearing the worst.

Backjack frowned. "Three days, I figure."

It was a few hours out of Nazran that the trouble had started. Staying within a half kilometre of the highway, the pair spotted a meager farmhouse in the distance, a single flood light atop a power pole illuminating a sparse and scrubby pen at the foot of a barn that was only half there, largely salvaged for firewood no doubt. But in the yard, Sascha and Ivan had spotted something marvelous; chickens. The two in sight were lean and walked erratic, retarded paths around the yard, pecking at nothing in particular, but to the man and his charge, even one such bird was a feast the likes of which they had not known for weeks. No words spoken between them, it was agreed that they must, peradventure, acquire one of the two birds.

They had mutually agreed that Sascha would be the one to go, but that he would leave his jacket and shoes behind. This poor farmer, whoever he was, would shoot Ivan on sight, and very likely the same to any lone soldier trying to steal a chicken on his land. A simple starved child, however, might merit some small mercy, to say nothing of how superior the boy was at hiding and sneaking. Ivan remained afield of the fence perimeter crouched behind a bush with his charge's clothes in a neat bundle, and Sascha, having removed even his soldier's boots, streaked to the fence without a stitch to shield him from the elements.
With feline stealth, he slipped through the two strands of barb wire that comprised the length of the fence and into the yard, and prepared to pounce on one of the birds.
The infiltration was flawless, the movement therein without peer. The boy, considering his youth, was arguably one of the most gifted intrusion agents alive at the time. It was the capture that went awrye, as from chickens, he knew not quite so much. As his hands deftly clasped cleanly round the bird's neck, it screamed aloud with a noise almost certainly loud enough to wake anybody within earshot. Sascha panicked, dropping the bird and instinctively breaking for the husked barn, followed too closely by a harsh-looking man in sackcloth half-pants and carrying an AK at the ready. He'd spotted the intruder. Bracing the rifle against his shoulder, he neared the barn and kicked the door open, roaring "Who's in there, you cocksucker! Come out, or I'll fill you full of fucking lead!!" before proceeding inside.
Had Sascha been thinking clearly, he may have abided the man. Starving, freezing, naked, he knew he posed no threat, and would probably not be shot on sight. Or such would be his hope, had he presence of mind to think. Instead, as if by rote, he had retreated to a darkened corner and remained perfectly still, shuddering and crying as he became lost in his memories. Paralyzing fear gripped him like the hand of God; while the tiniest little speck inside reminded himself that he could do things other than shivering and sobbing, it seemed to be all he could think to do, no matter what he told himself. Only terror abided within him now, and set its daggers firmly within his skin.

The man found and beat Sascha.
He plucked the boy up from where he crouched, tied his hands with rope and hung him over a rafter, and scourged his naked back until the blood ran down to his toes and pooled in the dirt below him. Sascha couldn't even cry out during the torment, to such depth had he crawled into the haven of his own mind. The placid, lakonic look on his face remained even as he was whipped, and the tears had stopped. He bore his beating like he was dead, so much so that the man suspected he might have killed the lad when his bladder loosed and he pissed himself. It was only then that the man hacked at the rope with a machete blade, letting the boy fall limply into a pool of his own piss and blood. He was barely conscious, wracked by blood loss and exposure. In the pale dark of the barn, his breath hadn't betrayed him, but now, as he slumped on the ground, the farmer could see the desperate, ragged whisps of breath choking out of the boy's mouth, and so he spat at him, yelling a curse and telling the boy to leave as he threw aside his knife and prepared to go back to bed.
It was at that moment that Ivan stormed in, and Sascha fell unconscious.
When he awoke, they were still in the barn. Ivan was smiling sadly, clearly happy that his charge was still alive. "Wake up, little soldier. You're not ready to leave us yet."
"I...van...?", the boy croaked out as the ghosts began to clear from his head.
The giant gently stroked the boy's filthy hair lovingly, helping him to sit up. "Yes, my boy. Do not worry. It's all okay. You'll be okay."
Sascha winced, the pain in his back rising commensurately as the haze in his senses abated. Ivan helped him to his feet, where he could see the farmer's bare feet protruding from a shadow cast by the light coming from outdoors. He didn't want to know what Ivan had done to the man, and was thankful that the pain in his body was momentarily keeping him from feeling anything else. Ivan warned him that they had better make an expeditious retreat, in case anybody had heard the gunshot and came to investigate. The Kalishnakov had broken in the assault and was useless, and no time could be spared to find the carelessly discarded knife or to prepare a chicken. Sascha's heart sank as the reality of their situation dawned on him, and he realized that for the wounds that striped his back, he had received nothing in return. At Ivan's prompting, they trudged out to the bush where sat Sascha's clothes and made haste down the road.

Twelve more hours of hiking along the road out of Nazran into Georgia, and not a lot of ground had been covered. It was bad enough that Sascha and Ivan had been traveling on foot almost literally, their soleworn boots allowing not so much as a pebble to pass under without announcing its presence, but to make matters drastically worse, the only liquid either had seen for ever half a day was the stinking piss whose vapor still clung to the inside of Sascha's thighs and the crimson, nearly gelatinous blood that would run down his back whenever the jacket he now wore out of necessity of warmth abraded his wounds open anew. The boy's face was pale and ashen, his eyes a bleary fog, his mouth hanging open and lacking even the energy to stay and remain closed. It was only force of will and discipline imparted by training that had nearly killed him when he was younger still that allowed him to persist, even in light of the fact that his stumbling, addled gait took him slower than if he was crippled.
As the sun peaked on the horizon and the full light of day shone in from the east through an uncharacteristically clear sky, there was no more that could be done. Ivan turned to his charge to announce that they would halt to sleep for the day, issuing his decision to the boy who stumbled worldlessly a metre or so behind him as something struck him. He halted, putting out an arm to halt the boy behind him, crouching slightly as if suddenly wary. "Hush, little soldier! Did you feel that?" An ache, like a tiny speck of warmth in his forehead, struck the boy, and he whimpered helplessly in assent. "It is familiar", Ivan remarked, snorting. "Come, let us move on, perhaps we c--" Ivan's words were cut short. His charge lying face down in the earth, his clothes flapping repetitively in the morning wind.

I rubbed at my chin, gauging the length of my stubble. It had grown long enough to be flexible instead of stubbly, but not long enough to consider growing a beard.

"Three days," I complained, "three days we've been freezing our asses off out here." Here was a dusty culvert which opened toward the highway out of Nazran. From it we could monitor passing vehicles from behind piled-up sticks and leaves.

"Here comes another one," Backjack said, "truck it looks like, military."

"Oh fuck that," I shot back, "You ping the fucking thing. Why would he be in a military truck anyway?" I sat down and leaned against the curved metal wall of the culvert, my arms crossed.

"Fine, I will," Backjack said with anger filling his voice, and I knew he was glaring at me, but I didn't look up.

"Hello!" The Gnostic said abruptly from where he was resting, further into the culvert. We'd been sleeping in shifts, and I'd thought he was doing so just then. He'd reacted to the same thing I had. Backjack's node ping had found a nova. More to the point, it had found a node, but since nodes generally accompany novas on a one-to-one ratio, it's a safe assumption to make.

"In the truck?" I asked, scrambling to the edge of our brushy camoflauge.

"No," Backjack said, shaking his head and pointing. "It's stationary. There." He pointed at a spot one hundred yards from the roadway, in the middle of a brushy field.

"How'd he get there?" The Gnostic asked.

"Probably on foot," I suggested, "it's a coincidence that we spotted him just now."

The truck had disappeared around the next bend in the road, and Backjack scrambled down the hillside toward where he'd pointed. The Gnostic and I followed gingerly. We didn't spot Sascha until we were almost on top of him, a filthy grey-olive lump laying in the knee-high dead brambles.

"Wow, he smells worse than you do," The Gnostic told Backjack as he knelt at the boy's side and checked his carotid artery for a pulse. "He's alive, but he's out cold."

Sascha looked like he'd just escaped from Hell, but only with great difficulty. The torn greatcoat he wore was matted with filth and blood, and his exposed hands and legs showed signs of frostbite-- in the places where the skin was not already ulcerous from exposure, that is.

"If he wasn't a nova, he'd be a corpse," Backjack said, "Still might end up dead anyway if he stays out here."

I looked at Sascha, and while his form was pitiful, I felt no pity. Pity is what you feel when something awful happens and there is nothing you can do about it. You look down at a dog that's been mortally wounded by a car, or you stand by a hospital bed where your friend lies dying of cancer, and there's nothing you can do but feel pity. I could do something about this.

"He's not staying out here," I said. "We came to get him out of Chechnya, and we're taking him to my house. Let's go." Admittedly, the idea of being back in my own home after three and a half days of living in the open in this hellhole was also a strong motivator.

Just like that, we were in my living room, afternoon light filtering in through the dusty windowshades. Backjack helped me carry him to the sofa-- more as a precaution than because of his weight. He felt as light as a pile of sticks, and I couldn't imagine he'd had a substantial meal of any kind in weeks, maybe months. He didn't stir as we laid him on his back on the sofa. The Gnostic returned from the hall closet with an old pillow and two blankets. He slipped the pillow under the boy's head, and we draped the blankets over him, leaving just his face peeking out.

Since we'd not bothered taking his lousy overcoat off of him, I made a mental note to haul my sofa to the dump later. It was secondhand anyway, and had a brick under one corner, but with a sheet draped over the top it had been good enough for my purposes. I looked around my living room and wondered what Sascha would think when he regained consciousness. The coffee table was piled high with newspapers and magazines, and the Wal-Mart computer desk was staggered under the weight of my PC and all of the documents I'd piled on it. Four more thrift-store bookshelves stood around the room, all of them groaning under the weight of my library of fiction and history books. I still hadn't gotten around to repainting the walls from the original faded green, or cleaned the grimy handprints from around the light switches.

When you're single, a nova, and obsessed, housekeeping takes a lower priority.

"You got this under control?" Backjack asked, "'cause I'd like to go home and take a shower now. Or have a beer. Or have a beer in the shower."

"Yeah, take off," I replied, still looking thoughtfully at Sascha. Do I have any clothes that will fit him? I thought. Probably not. "Call me tomorrow or something, we'll figure out what next."

"Yeah alright," Backjack called out from the kitchen. The bang of the screen door announced his departure.

"I'm going to go, too," The Gnostic said. He took my hand, and shook it warmly, using both of his. "If you need anything, just call, okay?"

"Sure thing," I replied, taken aback.

The Gnostic left by the front door. Through the diamond-shaped window in the door, I could see the light-colored haze that defined yet another afternoon sky in my run-down neighborhood in Tampa. I resisted the urge to shower or change my clothes or get something to eat, afraid to let the boy out of my sight for even a moment. I sat down heavily into my easy chair and removed my boots. It felt so good that I took off my socks, too, enjoying the way the carpet, worn as it was, felt under my toes.

The last thing Sascha remembered was Ivan telling him to get down. He did as he was told.

It was a good while before signs of real chest-deep breathing returned to his tiny body, and his rescuer could tell that he had gone from pain- and starvation-induced unconsciousness to simple sleeping. It'd been over twenty hours since the boy had slept last, so it was the natural course. He simply hadn't the energy to rouse himself to wake yet. Still, his condition was improving, that much was obvious. The man's tiny charge was a nova, after all, and one a bit tougher than most, by the look of it. A blush had risen in his cheeks, and already his skin was starting to look less damaged. There was no telling how his back looked, still.

Six hours of undisturbed sleep brought Sascha back to a hazy, bleary-eyed consciousness as he awoke on possibly the most comfortable bed he'd ever slept on. Vapors clouded his head. He had forgotten almost entirely the events of the last week, and half expected to find the Commander leering over him ready to thrash him or bugger him or do something even worse.
Instead, he awoke in a palace. Books were everywhere, more than he'd ever seen in his life. He wondered for a moment if he had been taken to some Elysian library, but no, it was like no library here. It almost appeared to be somebody's home, but he had never seen one so lavish. The walls had no holes, not even cracks. The room was warm and humid and smelled softly of the ocean. The ocean! It had been so long! His suspicion and curiosity abated as he felt the warm, unbearably soft bedding he'd been equipped with. The blankets had no lice! No holes! And the pillows! Oh, the pillows! They were a thousand thousand times softer than trail kit! He wanted desperately to simply curl back up and enjoy the provisions. He hadn't been so comfortable and in such a lovely place since--
Sascha froze, swallowing the lump in his throat. "Comfort". He cringed at the word. His ears, at this point, picked up the soft clack-clack-clack of a keyboard not far off from him, and his eyes beheld the man sitting at it. At that moment, he knew he hadn't been saved. He wondered, panicking, if the last few years of hell had all been a dream. No. The gunfire. The shattered bodies. The missing limbs. Crawling on their bellies like snakes through blood and muck. Killing grown men. Killing other children. Killing to live. The stink of cordite. He hadn't imagined it. It wasn't a dream. He knew he'd simply been plucked from one hell only to arrive in the bowels of another, both terrifyingly familiar.

His voice was a weak, impish croak of Russian that struggled to be bold and mean but sufficed to simply rasp. "Sir", he addressed the figure still typing away at the keyboard, "I am a soldier now. You may kill me. I will not be sold again."

While my work was absorbing, it was not so absorbing that I forgot that there was a young nova lying unconscious on my sofa. Every few minutes I stopped and looked at him again, if only to watch the rise and fall of his chest to confirm that he was still alive. Despite this, I was startled when he stirred into wakefulness and spoke. I had to replay what he'd said in my mind before I could understand and reply.

"Nobody will kill you, and nobody will sell you," I told him in Russian, as I swivelled my office chair to face him across my cluttered living room. "You are in the United States now, and you are free."

Panic had taken hold of the boy. For a moment, nothing his host said sunk in. In his mind, he was back in hell, and he had already resigned himself to it, mentally butressing his will for what events would surely soon follow. His nostrils flared with hyperventilation, his large, dark, wet eyes focused on the figure who sat across the room as if he was expecting an assault at any moment.

A few seconds passed in pregnant silence, and very slowly, the boy started to fully take in his surroundings. He looked outside through the window and didn't see snow, and it occured to him that there was no heater on, nothing heating the house aside from the ambient temperature outdoors. The stacks of newspapers on the table in front of him used roman letters, not cyrillic. The address on a magazine subscription indicated he was in a place called 'miami' or 'fl', but he couldn't be sure, and the people in these papers were smiling and happy. Children were shown on the cover of one, and they weren't sad or dirty or anything like that, but instead appeared to be dressed in bathing costumes and playing - playing! - in a spring of water set in a strip of verdant, green grass. It was like a portal into a fantasy world he'd only heard about in fairy tales. His heart leapt in his chest, hitting a ceiling of doubt. He couldn't allow himself to believe it was true. Not yet.

In Russian, his voice now a fraction more sure, he peeped out "Wh...who are you? Why have you done this? Am I...am I really in America? How?" His voice, while masking incredulity, fairly well begged, but brooked no tolerance for deception. His muscles went hard and tight, and he became aware of the pain that made his back feel like it was on fire. He was awake, and in America. Could it be?

After my beer in the shower and a quick nap, I went back to see how the kid was doing. As I strolled into King Felix's kitchen, I heard him talking to the kid in Russian. I was glad to hear he's awake. I skipped the usual pit stop at the fridge and leaned on the doorway that separates the kitchen from the living room. Sascha's sitting up, and he'd got a wild-eyed look that I'm not sure I like. I don't worry or anything like that, though. I mean, he's a half-dead stick-figure and I'm awesome. So, he's not going anywhere. I just don't like to see kids with that expression. It means something has gone assholes over elbows somewhere in the world, and I don't much like that at all. It fucks up my social schedule.

I looked back at the kid, and I felt pity. Probably scared as hell, I thought. For a second I even thought he was going to bolt, at least, it looked like he was definitely sorting his options. Even totally disoriented like he was, the kid's a survivor first, don't forget that. Be that as it may, he's going to need a decade of counseling right off the bat, I figure, and even with that he's going to be saddled with one bastard of a case of PTSD for the rest of his life.

For that alone, I should find the people who did this and kill all of them.

"King, Sascha," I said, "How's it going."

King Felix glanced at me.

"Hey Backjack," he said, then he turned right back to the kid. I'm okay with that. Right now the kid's more important anyway.

"My name's Harold," King Felix told the kid, "that'll do for now. You're in America because my friend The Gnostic saw your plea for help on the OpNet and the three of us came and got you. Can I get you a water?"

Yeah, King Felix is holding it together so far, but eventually his shithouse rat side is going to show through. It should be interesting.

Sascha remembered the plea he had put out over the internet several days before. He wondered which one it was that 'Harold' had found him on. Was it the Project Utopia server? The XWF Forum? The one set up by N!? He didn't care. He was out of Chechnya. Out of Chechnya, and in America, no less. He wanted to pinch himself.

Still, he was wary. He didn't know if the fantasy of America would live up to his ideal, or if this man, 'Harold', meant him harm. He wondered why he had addressed Sascha as "King". Isn't that English for a ruler of some kind? Sascha wasn't interested in questioning it too much. Water sounded really good. He realized his mouth was parched and sticky and his tongue felt like a piece of jerky. He felt sticky all over, in fact, with sweat when not with blood. He nodded, politely but hesitantly. "Yes, please." He gave a passing thought to what color the water would be.

I can't believe it didn't occur to me to have water already out for Sascha. I made my way to the kitchen, dodging a pile of books along way, and returned with a plastic liter bottle of water from the refrigerator. Yes, I still buy water. I know that Utopia's supposed to have fixed the world's water, but the most pure water in the world will still taste like cat piss after you pump it through the rotting Tampa municipal water system.

"Here you go," I said to Sascha as I proffered the bottle for him. "It's Aquafina. That's a good brand."

Up close, the stench of war and God knows what else surrounded him like a force field. I'm going to have to get this kid into the bathtub soon or I'll need to fumigate my house.

The boy accepted the bottle of water eagerly, his tiny fingers gingerly clutching it to himself as he unscrewed the cap and drowned himself in it. "They have different brands of water in America?", he thought as he eagerly let it cascade down his parched throat. It was sweet, very possibly sweeter than any water he'd ever tasted before in his life. Two equally distressing thoughts flashed upon him. The first, and more telling, was that people were made to pay for water in America. The water in Chechnya was not good, even the water for the grown soldiers and businessmen, but it could be had anywhere. He wondered how people bathed or washed clothes, and hoped he would be able to afford enough to drink. His second thought was to wonder if all water here was this sweet and clear. It was fresher than rain collected in a clean canteen. He wouldn't know it, but the water in King Felix's toilet was cleaner than any of the water he had recently had, and it hadn't been cleaned in a while, either.
The bottle left the boy's mouth, and he panted, trying to recapture his breath, his eyes and senses downcast as his body strugged to accept the renewed vigor that flowed through his waifish body. He looked up to the man opposite him and nodded slightly in appreciation. "Thank you, sir."

Sascha's placidity lasted only a second. No sooner had he seemed to calm than an alarm raised inside his mind, and he began to scan the room desperately, darting his gaze in all directions, searching for something. "Ivan?" he cried softly, as if trying to coax a childhood friend out of hiding. "Ivan?" His breathing labored. His eyes wouldn't blink.

Ivan hadn't made it.

"Sascha, who is Ivan?" I asked, surprised by this turn of events. I looked at Backjack, who was leaning on the doorway to the kitchen. "Did we miss anyone? I could have sworn he was alone. Oh, damn. Maybe we moved too hastily."

Backjack shrugged, his arms crossed. "Nu-uh," he said, "I didn't see any signs of a second person."

Crap. Only home six hours and already we might be going back.

"Sascha," I asked again, firmly but gently, "Who is Ivan?"

The little boy cast his glance nervously and erratically around the room, nearly in a state of panic. He was seconds away from bawling, which was something remarkable, considering what he'd been through. The desperation in his voice as he called out to this man as if he were a bird crying for its mother bled out plainly that there was still something resembling a heart left in him, one that could be potentially broken. He rocked back and forth like an autist, muttering to himself, lost in his own mind as it become finally apparent that Ivan, his guardian and protector, was not here. He wasn't just over his shoulder watching out for him or across the room reading the paper with a cigar. He was gone. This man had taken him from him.

The lights in the room dimmed and flickered. Shadows grew darker and took on their own life, clawing the barriers of light and penetrating it like ravenous smoke. The child's eyes went black, his pupils seeming to swallow up the sea of white and blue that caged them.

Darkness washed over the room. Somewhere an infant could be heard crying.

From fifty yards away, Backjack and I stood on stood on the sidewalk, watching my house. He and I had teleported outside as soon as Sascha's episode had begun. The weird anti-light show finally abated, and my house seemed eerily still.

"Think it's safe yet?" I asked.

"Probably," Backjack said.

The Gnostic came running down the sidewalk from the opposite direction. He has a knack for showing up at important times, and I see no reason to question how he's able to do this.

"What in the world is going on?" he asked breathlessly, pulling up short and joining us at the curb.

"Sascha freaked," Backjack said.

"Some kind of quantum tantrum," I clarified, "he lost it when we told him that we hadn't found anyone else with him."

"He was with someone named Ivan," The Gnostic mused, recalling Sascha's opnet message. "I don't think Ivan made it. Where is he?"

"Could be imaginary," Backjack suggested.

"He is only a child," I mused, "and in a situation like that, under such astonishing strain, maybe he needed an invisible buddy to help him through. Let's go back in there. With three of us it ought to be okay." I felt a lot better now that The Gnostic was here too. Three of us and one scared kid-- even a nova kid? Piece of cake. Besides, I wanted to make sure he wasn't destroying my living room.

We walked to my porch and entered through the front door. We saw no need to alarm him by materializing in the living room unexpectedly. Besides, someone might be watching.

I opened the door and looked into the living room.

"Sascha?" I asked.

The darkness had left him now, bled out. All that remained was pitiful, choking sobs that were softly muffled by the pillow the boy buried his face in. The living room was still intact. But the cascade of night still seemed to hang over the room like a pall. Was it a trick of the light, a trick of the brain, or did it still seem somehow darker in here?

Sascha's rescuer opened the door. The boy hadn't even noticed he'd left. He hadn't noticed much of anything after he realized Ivan wasn't there. "Sascha?", he asked.

A mop of black hair slowly rose from the arm of the couch, misery on a pale face with black ringed in blue ringed in white and now ringed in red from the sobbing. His eyes were normal again. No sooner had he recognized who was coming through the door than his features fell again, somehow making him look all the more wretched. He sniffled and struggled to speak, "I-I'm sorry...it's j-just that...h-he..." He tried to force the words, but they were slow to come, as if speaking them required of him an act of acknowledging the truth. He was alone again. Maybe forever, this time. He knew this man had meant only good for him in rescuing him from Chechnya and very probably his own death. But he simply could not believe that Ivan, who was so brave, so strong, had not made it where Sascha, who was so weak and small, had. It was impossible. Impossible.
But what was the alternative? That Ivan had left him? Of his own accord?

Either Ivan had died or he had abandoned him. Given the option between the two, the boy's heart decided instead to simply shatter. He stopped crying.

My living room was still intact, and Sascha had stopped crying, but he still looked like hell. He smelled like it, too, doused as he was in mud, sweat, blood, and God only knows what else.

In order to preserve the peace, I decided to sidestep the issue of Ivan for the moment. It would take time to work through his issues, and I'd rather not have a nosebleed from his stench the entire time.

"If you feel up to it, I imagine a hot bath and a meal would go a long way in helping you feel better," I suggested.

Sascha swallowed hard and nodded. It would be easy and poetic to say that losing Ivan was more than he could take, that the strain of losing his only friend would break his tiny spirit beyond bearing. But it wouldn't be true. The boy knew, down in his gut, that he could take it. His life story was proof that he could take anything; he just didn't know it himself, yet.

"Yes...that...would be nice. Thank you." The boy could barely process the concept of food, but he confessed to being aware of a gnawing ache in his gut that would not be attributed to sadness. A bath might even be nice, but he must have misheard Harold, because he thought he said "hot". Maybe that means something different in America. He didn't know. Could people here really bathe in hot water? He was past contemplation. The temperature of the water coming from whatever hose they sprayed him with wouldn't matter. He was numb, anyway.

Sascha slid off the edge of the couch, finding his footing uncertainly, pain shooting through his body anew. His face still looked only to the floor, which felt lavishly comfortable beneath his feet. Carpet. It had been years. The boy realized he was being a poor guest, and he knew he owed Harold much. "Thank you, sir" he squeaked at the lowest decibal he could muster on his emotional roller-coaster ride, and leaning forward, he hugged him.

"Hey, no problem," I replied. It was startling how much energy the kid still had in him. No wonder he'd survived. Clinging to my waist the way he did, I was chagrined to discover that as much as he was stinking up my living room, he smelled even worse up close.

"Okay, bath time," I announced, pivoting toward the hallway which led to the bathroom and the three bedrooms at that end of my single-level home. It's decorated in the same off-green that seemed to be a great idea to some genius architect in the mid-1950's, with a single vanity, toilet, and an all-in-one shower and bathtub with sliding glass doors. I never used the bathtub for an actual bath, so I had to retrieve the stopper from underneath the sink.

"Okay, watch and listen and learn," I explained in Russian. "This knob is hot water, and this knob is cold water. When the tub is about half full, turn them off so the tub doesn't overflow." I started the water and adjusted the knobs until it was reasonably hot. I grabbed a washcloth from the rack over the toilet and tossed it into the tub, and got a bar of soap and my bottle of Pert from the windowsill.

"This is soap; you may have heard of it," I explained, "And this is shampoo for your hair. Before I leave for about an hour to get you some new clothes and some food, do you have any questions?"

Sascha kept in step with Harold down the hallway to the bathroom, paying close attention in equal parts to the instructions he was being given and the lavish, homey charm of his savior's dwelling. The sheer opulence of how Harold lived was no less stunning, but he didn't feel the need at the moment to belabor himself with a laundry list of questions regarding the obvious manifold differences between life in America and life in Chechnya. In Grozny, Harold's lifestyle would have marked him a diplomat or a high-ranking professional, but it was slowly dawning on Sascha that in America, the way this man lived was common, if not a bit below average. Harold's plain, laconic demeanor spoke of a man unimpressed even with his own surroundings, as if this magesty represented a dream unfulfilled. Sascha was dumbstruck by it, but as Harold continued to educate the boy how best to bathe, his senses felt their way through their adjusting, and calmly, he nodded in understanding as Harold went on.

Sascha understood soap, not shampoo, though he divined its purpose easily enough. "Do you have any questions?", Harold asked him.
Shaking his head slowly side to side, Sascha peeped out another gaze-averting "Thank you" and began to unbutton his greatcoat, seemingly untroubled by the notion of removing his only article of clothing.

"Again, no problem," I replied. I quickly turned around as he began to disrobe. I don't think I could have handled seeing what those bastards had done to his body. If I had looked, I'm pretty sure that I and Backjack would have spent the next month in Grozny and points east, evening the score. As I closed the bathroom door behind me, I paused.

"I'll be back in about an hour," I said without turning around. "You'll be safe in my house. Nobody else can come in. When I get back, I'll make you some soup or something."

In the hallway I bumped into The Gnostic.

"How's he doing?" he asked.

"Not too bad, I guess," I replied, sticking my hands in my pockets. "He's civilized enough to understand bathtime. I think that he's got a good chance to turn things around."

The Gnostic nodded with an abstracted look on his face. "Good, good," he replied. He changed the subject slightly. "What will you do next?"

"Next is some clothes for Sascha and some groceries. I'm walking down to Wal-Mart. Wanna come with?"

The Gnostic rolled his eyes at me. "No," he said slowly, "I think I'll skip Wal-Mart. You know what I think of that place."

I had no interest in going through his five-point hypothesis which connected Wal-Mart to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, so I let it slide.

Only forty-five minutes later, I returned, laden with cheap consumer goods bundled indifferently into blue plastic sacks. I'd only spent three more of my twenties, so I called it a win. I fished out plastic packages of underwear, socks, and tee-shirts, a pair of new Wrangler jeans, and a pair of Keds sneakers.

I tapped on the hollow wooden bathroom door.

"Sascha?" I asked, "How are you doing in there?"

It was the first bath Sascha had taken since his mother bathed him as a child. He was probably four, or five. He hadn't even thought about his mother in years, and while he remembered with certainty the memory of sadness regarding losing her, the memory of the woman herself and any vestigial sadness about her being out of his life had long since vanished. So much trauma and blood and jism and cordite had come and passed since then that the loss of his mother was regarded as no more than a somewhat pitiful, academic fact.

The bathwater stung his back and joints as he submerged himself in it. It was a little too hot, but he didn't mind. Hot water was such a luxury that he would forgive a little sting to enjoy such a privelige in excess. He knew, anyway, that hot water would be best for his wounds. It would help to clean them.

He washed in silence, taking special care to gently but firmly scrub the lashmarks in his back, which had mercifully already begun to scab over. He rightly attributed this to his enhanced nova physiology, but remarked that it did little to dull the actual pain. Perhaps he'd just been beaten harder than he'd thought. He still remembered that man punching him, lashing his hands together, the feeling of the rough rope with their kisses still marking his wrists, and the horrid bite of the scourge as it tore his back until consciousness faded. Only the pain of the wounds remained; the mental scars were only the latest and among the least in a litany of torment that all seemed to bleed together into neasmic sea of pain.

A half hour or so passed, and the boy found himself sitting in a tub of water that had turned to a ghoulish soup of blood and dirt. When he at last stood up, the brown-red boullibase clung fast to his skin. He pulled the stopper on the tub and turned on the shower nozzle to an icy blast, rinsing himself as the soiled water drained out. The shower head hit the back and part of the walls of the tub, but still left it stained with a ring of burgundy that Sascha tried and failed to wipe away. Sighing, but with a renewed blush in his cheeks, he climbed out of the tub and toweled off, just as he heard the front door open and close. His instincts told him to take flight, but he remembered what Harold had told him, and was trying hard to show a little trust. There's no reason the man would rescue him from hell, bathe him, care for him, and feed him only to bring him harm now.

The boy was struggling to throw the wet towel over a rod to dry when he heard a knock at the bathroom door. His heart seized, and Harold spoke. "Sascha? How are you doing in there?"

Sascha went to the door and opened it. "I am fine. But...I...your tub, sir. I'm sorry." He hung his head, as if expecting retribution.