He guided Eva left to backtrack along the route he’d taken with Luo. The buhanka was waiting for them. They’d figure out where they were going once they got there.
A spotlight shone directly in their path. Bobby pulled to a stop. Eva slid past him but hung onto his hand and came to a halt. The voices from the Swallow’s Nest became animated.
A gunshot sounded. It came from the castle but could have been fired in any direction, Bobby thought. Then he heard the clunk in the ice around them.
Someone was shooting at them.
Lights to the left, castle to the right, the center of the lake was the only escape. Bobby turned toward the center of the lake and pulled Eva with him.
Light shone on the ice ahead. The spotlight had been moved.
Another gunshot.
Bobby and Eva ducked. Bobby changed direction a bit to avoid the spotlight but it moved accordingly.
Bursts of gunfire followed.
Then silence. Bobby thought he heard someone shout his name—
The ice trembled beneath his feet. At first he suspected his nerves were making him shake. But then a cracking noise sounded, like a thousand trees being split in half. The ice began to shake. Eva squeezed his hand harder. Bobby glanced at her, saw the terror in her eyes. The cracking noise rose to a thunderous crescendo. The ice buckled under Bobby’s legs.
He fell.
A force pulled Eva’s hand from his hand. Adrenaline shot through his body. Don’t let go. Don’t let go. Whatever you do, don’t let go of her hand—
Eva’s fingers slipped through his grasp.
“Eva,” he shouted, hand stretched to the side, grasping at the cold air as he completed his fall.
Bobby landed hard on his hip. He glanced in Eva’s direction.
She was gone. The ice where she’d been standing had vanished. It was impossible. She’d just been there three seconds ago, but now she was gone.
Bobby screamed her name. No one answered. Bobby remembered what Luo had told him during the drive. Baikal sat on the deepest continental fissure on Earth. They were almost as active as the ones in the seas of Japan. For that reason, the lake experienced earthquakes. Bobby wondered if the shooting had caused this one.
He crawled to the precipice of the ice. A six-foot-wide fissure had formed in the lake. Ice shimmered beyond the chasm. Bobby hung his head over the ice and looked into the hole. He screamed her name again. Still, no one answered. At first the hole looked black, but then an image formed under the glint of the moonlight. At first it looked like a multi-spoke wheel, but then some of the lines disappeared. The image became clearer.
It was a Ferris wheel in black and white.
Bobby thought he was dreaming. He batted his eyes twice rapidly to clear his head and looked again. The Ferris wheel was still there. The image reminded Bobby of something else Luo had said. That fishermen swore they saw trains, castles, and ships at the bottom of the lake. Just as he was seeing an amusement park now.
Cars sat suspended in midair atop iron cross beams. A ladder appeared. It was attached to one of the beams. It looked exactly like the ladder he and Eva had used to climb to the top of the Ferris wheel in Pripyat. Roofing, they’d called it. They’d climbed together to the rooftops of the Cultural Center, the hotel, and the abandoned apartment buildings, too.
And as his eyes followed the ladder toward the highest car, Bobby saw her one last time, resting at the top, looking down at the wasteland where they used to scavenge.
The ice moved.
Bobby raised his head. The two big blocks of ice were sliding toward each other. The hole into which Eva had fallen was closing.
Bobby lay helpless. He looked down into the narrowing chasm and screamed Eva’s name over and over.
The fissure disappeared. The lake became one again.
Eva was gone.
Only then was Bobby aware of voices, people shouting at him from the Swallow’s Nest. He rose to his skates. His first three strides were uneasy. Part of him feared the earth would open up again and swallow him. The other part of him wished it would do just that. His instincts guided him away from the Swallow’s Nest and the shore. Instead he headed toward the middle of the lake where four miles of ice awaited him.
He vaguely remembered the promise of biological experiments. They would hunt him. Even if Eva was dead they would hunt him forever just to assure themselves his blood didn’t contain further clues about the formula. He would miss Nadia and his hockey career, but he could never go back to America. He could never return to civilization.
Exactly where he would go and what he would do he did not know and did not care. His sorrow had extinguished all his ambition, and in his moment of despair Bobby knew to do only one thing.
Skate.
CHAPTER 57
As Bobby rose to his feet, Nadia screamed his name. When he didn’t acknowledge her, she continued shouting it repeatedly.
Simmy’s men overpowered Milanovich’s bodyguards. Afterwards, one of them found a grapple secured to the bottom of the guardrail. Nadia and Simmy rushed up the stairs. They arrived on the deck of the Swallow’s Nest to find Bobby and Eva skating away from shore. Then the ground began to shake beneath them.
Nadia held onto the guardrail with both hands and prayed the castle would not collapse. Her concern for her own safety proved fleeting. A thunderous cracking sound filled the air. The ice parted and Eva disappeared. Nadia stood helpless beside Simmy. She tried to imagine Bobby’s anguish.
The ice moved. The chasm disappeared and the lake became one. As Bobby rose to his feet, the spotlight from the Swallow’s Nest caught the blade of his skate. It cast a ray of light that shimmied up his clothes and face, and for a split second, Bobby appeared to glow in the dark.
And then, in a flash, he skated away into the darkness and he was gone.
“We have to do something,” Nadia said.
Simmy put his arm around her. “What would you have us do? I’m sure there are some skates around here. Which one of us is going to find him, let alone catch up to him?”
A premonition gripped Nadia. She would not see Bobby again. Ever. She tried to banish the thought, but it wouldn’t go away. He’d probably heard Milanovich’s promise to conduct biological experiments. Bobby was no fool. He would assume he’d be hunted for the rest of his life, regardless of whether Eva was dead or alive. Bobby would rather disappear from civilization or die. Toss in his anguish from Eva’s death, and he was probably ambivalent between the two alternatives at this point.
“He has the other man’s mobile phone, does he not?” Simmy said.
“I think so,” Nadia said.
“Then he will call.”
“Yes. He will call.”
She could hear the lie in her own voice. He wouldn’t call. Not for a long time, if ever. Not until the Milanoviches of the world had forgotten about him. Not until the world had given up on a formula that mesmerized even the richest of men and left bodies in its wake. A formula that seemed so real and valuable to Nadia up until five minutes ago. Now, faced with the reality that she might never see Bobby again, she couldn’t have cared less about it. For in the end life was about people, and the vanishing of a loved one rendered all material pursuits immediately irrelevant, faster than they’d become a compulsion in the first place.
Where would he go? What would he eat? Who would give him shelter? Nadia knew these questions would consume her, but for now she took comfort in what she knew with certainty. That Bobby was no ordinary boy. He was Adam Tesla, a boy from Ukraine, a country of survivors used to fighting adversity on a daily basis. He was smart, clever, and resilient.