‘Can you see any pursuers?’
‘No!’
The boy beside me suddenly broke into merry laughter. There’s just no understanding children – they start bawling or laughing at the strangest of times.
‘I’ll have to customise your car a little bit,’ I told the woman. ‘Did you deliberately buy the model without a sunroof?’
‘It’s cheaper,’ the woman muttered. Her eyes were completely wild at this stage.
‘We’ll fix that right now,’ I said.
I raised my hand and pictured an invisible blade growing out of my fingers. Just a little bit of pure Power…
Then I traced out a circle above my head.
The woman started howling when I punched out a section of the roof with a single blow. The young boy cheered: ‘Hooray!’
I pulled myself up and stuck my head out through the hole, raising the Shield above me. The wind lashed at my face with all its might, but it was often worse on the second level of the Twilight.
We were driving along a different street, but there was still almost nobody around. Even though the weather was nice – for St Petersburg. Even though we were almost in the centre of the city. I thought I saw some people hurrying away from us in a small side street that we passed. The few cars that we encountered hurtled past us, gathering speed, and turned off at the first opportunity.
‘They’re somewhere nearby,’ I said. ‘They’re keeping this lousy petrol drizzle falling on us, and frightening the people away.’
‘Well, at least they’re doing that,’ Svetlana replied. ‘Forgive us in the name of all that’s holy,’ she said to the woman, ‘but they’re trying to kill us and we’re hiding. There’s no way we can stop right now and let you out. You can see what’s going on.’
‘Yes,’ the woman replied. ‘Some kind of mystical nonsense… No, I don’t want to know anything, I don’t want to hear it. I’ve got children! Just let us out!’
‘As soon as possible,’ said Svetlana.
‘Fine, as soon as possible,’ the woman agreed meekly.
As I listened to this surreal dialogue I gazed around. The Two-in-One was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t chasing after the car, he wasn’t running along the pavement beside it.
‘Dad, check the roofs,’ my daughter suddenly said.
It wasn’t the most beautiful or touristy area of St Petersburg, but the buildings weren’t new either. They were old, dating back at least to the early twentieth century. They were all of different heights, with a variety of weird and whimsical roofs – some were almost flat, some were steep mansard roofs with dormer windows and some had little towers and ornamental gables.
‘No…’ I said. ‘They’re not chasing us.’
‘That’s not possible!’ Svetlana exclaimed, making another sharp turn into a narrow side street. ‘They’re here, they must be here!’
I agreed with that completely. The Two-in-One was somewhere close by. But he wasn’t chasing us.
Was he moving ahead of us, luring us on somewhere?
Was he influencing Svetlana, making her go in the direction he wanted?
That was possible too.
Anything was possible, but if you discarded the improbable, the answer was obvious.
I dived back into the car and rubbed my finger over the leather surface under one of the child seats with my finger. I smiled at the boy, who was following my actions closely.
And then I flung out my arms – the doors flew open and my little neighbours went flying out of the car, together with their seats.
The side street we were driving along really was very, very narrow and both seats slammed into the walls of the buildings.
‘Dad!’ Nadya yelled in horror.
Svetlana braked sharply and stared blankly at me.
I looked at the woman. She was frowning and rubbing her forehead with two fingers. It didn’t look at all like the behaviour of a mother whose two children have just been thrown out of a moving car.
‘The car’s not new, and neither are the child seats,’ I said. ‘But there aren’t any marks from the seats on the leather – they’ve only just been put in. Step on it!’
Svetlana shook her head, looking in horror from me to the scene behind us and back. I looked back too – the seats were lying in the snow and a red patch was spreading out beside one of them.
‘Anton… Anton, I think you made a mistake,’ Svetlana said quietly.
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Are those your children?’ I asked the woman.
Her chin dropped and she slumped against the dashboard.
‘She’s passed out!’ Svetlana exclaimed.
‘It’s the shock of the control being broken off!’ I replied. ‘She’s a puppet! They were controlling her!’
‘Who?’ Svetlana shouted.
‘Those… children!’ I said, with a nod towards the car seats in the road. ‘It’s them, the Two-in-One!’
Svetlana killed the engine.
‘I can’t leave it like this! I’ve got to check!’
‘The fiery rain has stopped,’ Nadya said pensively.
‘The petrol could just have run out,’ said Svetlana, getting out of the car. ‘I’ll check…’
‘Stop!’ I shouted, jumping out after her and grabbing her hand.
We stood beside the car that blocked off the entire side street. Behind the car, two child seats lay at the sides of the road, with a motionless little arm protruding from one of them.
‘You killed those children,’ Svetlana said in a low voice. ‘You…’
I raised my hand and a wave of Power surged down the street. Crude, untargeted energy. The very simplest spelclass="underline" the Press.
And the most important thing was that it could only be stopped by the same simple method. By a discharge of pure Power.
Svetlana looked at me, biting her lip. I could tell that she didn’t believe me. That she desperately wanted to stop the Press and go dashing to those child seats, to see how the children were, to try to help them…
She didn’t believe me.
But she waited.
The Press crept along the side street in a hazy, murky tidal wave – it’s quite a sluggish spell, not too spectacular. The snow it had passed over was left shiny and glittering, polished to mirror-smoothness. Flattened beer cans lay here and there, looking like line drawings. After a slight crunch, the two-dimensional projection of a litter bin appeared on the surface of the pavement, pressed down into the asphalt.
I thought in an abstract kind of way that if I really had made a mistake, in a moment the street would look like a horror movie. And this was my last chance to stop the Press.
But I realised that I wasn’t going to stop it.
And at the very second when the Press was about to grind down the seats and the children’s bodies, a vague form suddenly shot up in front of the wave of Power, changing its shape and dimensions as it rose. There was a sudden, opposing impulse of Power – and my spell disappeared.
And so did the seats with the children in them. Standing in their place were the Light Magician Denis and the Dark Magician Alexei.
Or would it be more correct to say their shells?
‘How did you guess?’ Denis asked. His voice was the same as it always used to be. He used to say ‘Hello, Anton’ to me in exactly the same tone at the office. He was a polite young man, but he preferred to address everyone by their first name.
‘From a whole set of things!’ I shouted.
I could see my breath in the cold puffs of vapour. Nothing came out of Denis’s mouth.
‘Denis, if you can hear me,’ I said. ‘If you’re still alive somewhere inside there… try to resist! It’s the Twilight. It’s another of its manifestations. You can fight it…’