"I had no choice," I said. "He had no choice, and I didn't either."

Semyon nodded.

"And it's a shame about the Fuaran…"

Kostya had burned up in the atmosphere twenty-four hours after his leap into space. He hadn't calculated his orbit all that precisely after all.

And the briefcase had burned up with him. They'd kept a radar fix on them to the very last moment. The Inquisition had demanded a space shuttle launch to collect the book, but there hadn't been enough time for that.

And as far as I'm concerned, it's just great that there wasn't enough time.

Maybe he was still alive when the fiery kisses of the atmosphere started burning up his spacesuit hundreds of miles above the earth. After all, he was a vampire, and lack of oxygen might not have affected him as badly as an ordinary Other-like the overheating and overcooling and other delights of outer space lying in wait for a cosmonaut in a light flight suit. I don't know, and I'm not going to go rummaging through the reference books to find out. If only because nobody can tell which is the more terrible-death by suffocation or death by fire. After all, nobody dies twice-not even vampires.

"Look, I'm a terrible immortal vampire! I can turn into a wolf and a bat! I can fly!"

Semyon went out without saying another word, and I sat there for a long time, looking out the window.

The sky's not for us.

We weren't meant to fly.

All we can do is try not to fall.

July 2002-July 2003 Moscow