Revealing the old woman's face.

"Fireblast! He's... It's a woman."

Despite the deep, dirt-crusted furrows, and the straggling downy mustache, it was unmistakably a woman's face, staring beseechingly up at Ryan.

"Doesn't make no difference," J.B. said calmly. "Get her up and find out about a ville and food. If she won't tell us, then we chill her. It doesn't make no difference."

Ryan stood back, gesturing with the barrel of his pistol for the woman to get to her feet. Hesitatingly, slowly, she obeyed him, eyes locked on his face. Her left hand tremblingly brushed snow from her lined face.

She looked totally pathetic, abject and defeated. She shuffled her ragged boots and edged a little closer to Ryan, who half turned to J.B. to help him question their prisoner.

His eye caught Jak.

The face of the albino was a distorted mask, lips pulled back, sharp teeth grating. The teenager's red eyes were wide, staring past Ryan. His white hair was caught in the cold wind, floating around the angular head like mist beneath a high waterfall. The Magnum dropped from the boy's fist, landing silently in the soft snow.

"What?" Ryan began, shaken by the boy's horrific expression. Jak reached behind his neck and withdrew a bone-hilted, leaf-bladed throwing-knife. His wrist whipped the feathered steel toward Ryan's throat.

"Don't move!" Jak yelped.

Then Ryan knew. Despite the warning, he started to turn toward the Russian woman, knowing he would be too late, too slow, a last curse bursting to his lips.

He heard the whirring of the knife as it missed his carotid artery by a couple of inches, heard the unforgettable thunk of steel finding its mark in flesh and bone.

Their prisoner had drawn an old walnut-hafted straight razor from somewhere under the furs and layers of rags, and she was slicing it through the frosty morning air toward the back of his neck.

Jak's aim was true.

Ryan had seen the ruby-eyed boy at his daily practice with his hidden knives, and marveled at his almost blasphemous accuracy. He'd seen him put three blades into a space the size of a man's hand at twenty paces, all three knives seemingly spinning in the air at once.

He realized, as he began to turn to defend himself, that his own bulk had shielded the old woman, leaving Jak the smallest of targets — a part of her face and one eye.

One eye.

The left, he realized with a momentary pang of sympathetic revulsion.

As she staggered, the white hilt bobbled like the body of some obscene insect that had attacked her, launching itself with a venomous accuracy into the gleaming orb of her left eye. There was little blood, but the force of the throw had driven the sharp point deep through cornea, iris and lens, clear into the central retinal artery, piercing the brain.

Her mouth opened and closed like a stranded fish, her hands waving, becoming claws. She was crying, a piteous, feeble sound.

"Done." J.B. holstered his own blaster and turned away, no longer interested in the old woman, knowing that she was down and dying.

Ryan also turned away, ignoring the moaning, kicking thing that thrashed around in the trampled snow and dirt. There were more important things to worry about now.

"Get knife," Jak said, stooping and plucking the blade from the Russian woman's eyeball, sliding it out with a sickening, sucking sound. He wiped it clean on the wadded fur cloak she was wearing. "Could use warm clothes," he added.

"Let's find where she came from. Could be furs, and could be drink and food." Ryan climbed a few paces out of the narrow draw and looked in the direction that the old woman had been heading. Very faint, like a smudge of gray against the blue, he could make out smoke. "That way."

Chapter Eight

They drew nearer, following the meandering draw as it widened. They could see clearly the tracks of the old woman's boots, marking her outward journey. The large house was now far out of sight behind them, partly concealed by a dip in the land and by the trees that grew in random, scattered clumps.

Jak stopped dead and sniffed at the air, catching the taint from the smear of gray smoke that the breeze carried in toward them. "Cooking meat."

"Sounds good." Ryan nodded. His own sense of smell wasn't subtle enough to distinguish the scent of roasting meat at a distance of half a mile.

They crossed the rippled remnants of an old blacktop, its surface molded like corrugated paper by the shock waves of the massive nukings that had touched every country of the world, back in 2001.

"Glad to see our folks hit some good licks," Ryan said, rubbing at the highway with the toe of his combat boot, seeing the way the snow lay evenly in the shallow hollows.

J.B. was blowing on his hands, trying to warm them. "Yeah. Doc told me all about the Totality Concept, the thing he was on the edge of. Sounded real simple. They hit you and you hit them back." His breath feathered out around him as he spoke. "Worked even if they got in a sneak attack. It'd trigger your buried nukes, launch them at the Russkies, even after..."

"After our side was all chilled," Ryan finished for him.

Now Ryan could taste meat cooking over a smoky open fire.

The smell brought a beading of saliva to his lips, and he wondered what price they might have to pay for food. In a barren, wild place like this, he knew that the price could well be blood.

"There. Beyond bushes." Jak was lying flat on his belly, wriggling through a grove of stunted larches until he was close enough to be able to spy on the small hut.

Ryan and the Armorer joined him. The sky was clouding over, and the air tasted like cold iron. It was a feeling that Ryan associated with the threat of snow, remembered from his time in the Darks and up in what had once been Alaska.

"Anyone?"

Jak shook his head at the question. "No." There was a tumbledown shed behind the hut and a pen with a broken gate where animals might once have been kept. The place was silent and looked deserted, but the trail of the old woman led to the front door. And if there was meat roasting, someone must be there to watch over it.

Ryan whistled quietly through his teeth. The cold was biting at the small cavity that had appeared in one of his back molars.

"What's wrong?" J.B. asked.

"Nothing. Just that... You and me both seen lots of old books and vids about Russia and the dangers of the Commies. Now we're here. Unless there's some real weird mistake, we're here. In the middle of Russia!"

They followed the usual plan of attack. Ryan and J.B. crept cautiously, keeping low, around either side of the clearing, settling into their positions. There was still no sign of life.

A tattered nightshirt in faded pink danced on a line at the rear of the building. Ryan, from his side, could make out what looked like a path that wound away toward the northeast, vanishing over a rise in the land.

As they moved, each of the three companions had been counting on a slow, rhythmic beat, something that they'd synchronized before parting. They agreed to begin closing in when their individual count reached one hundred and twenty.

Blaster firmly in his hand, Ryan finished his count and broke cover. There appeared to be two windows in the hovel, on opposite sides. The rear of the cabin had only a ramshackle door that hung crookedly off a single leather hinge. There was a narrow gap at the top where a man could be sighting at him along the barrel of a rifle.

He glimpsed J.B. making his own move, darting in at an angle, crouched, pistol probing in front of him, glasses reflecting what little sunlight remained.

Out at the front, white hair streaming behind him like a crazed bridal veil, Jak would be now be flattened against the wall by the door, his own cannon filling his hand.