Mr. Kovalchyk was standing center stage in a rime of spotlight, dabbing at his forehead with the same damp handkerchief as last night. There were four men gathered around him, day laborers by the look of their lean faces, and a spate of dancers lingering back. I searched and searched, but Aleksei was not among them, and I did not see Derkach either. When Mr. Kovalchyk noticed Sevas and me standing there, he turned quite lithely on his heel, half like a dancer himself, eyes growing huge.
“Sevastyan—” he started.
“You can take the money from the mirrors from what was my salary,” Sevas cut in. “I quit.”
Mr. Kovalchyk only gaped at him, mouth opening and closing and opening again, like a windup toy stuck on its stupid loop. “I will pretend I did not just hear those words leave your lips, Sevas. You can speak with Mr. Derkach about that when he gets here. For now I have more urgent problems to attend.”
He did not appear to even notice me, despite all the grief he’d given Sevas about my presence last night. The dancers began to whisper, voices as soft and low as wind through willow fronds, and one of them pointed up. I drew my gaze toward the ceiling, and Sevas did too. The rafters were dark and I had to squint through whorls of dust, but then I saw it: crammed up among the metal beams, limbs splayed out like a four-pointed star, was the corpse of a man whose eyes had been ripped from his skull.
In one hot rush, all the breath went out of me.
And then my eyes were missing, some haze falling across my vision that removed me from the room in small, agonizing increments, like a slow and throbbing exorcism. I watched through the film as the day laborers got the body down with an elaborate rope-and-pulley system, dancers looking on and tittering in their tights. A hard swallow ticked in Sevas’s throat. The body crashed onto the stage like a big dead bird, and the smell that billowed up from it nearly made me retch.
“He must have been dead for near a week, perhaps longer,” one of the day laborers said, pinching his nose shut. “Look how rotted it is.”
A week. What had I been doing a week ago? My days blurred together, rote and near-identical. I had been pouring Papa tea or grinding meat into filling while someone, something, picked off the men of Oblya like a hawk snatching up its quarry. While this man’s flesh was curdling off his bones.
The memory of Papa’s voice struck me suddenly: Oblya will not miss a single day laborer. If anything, it means more work for the rest.
“How could we have gone so long without noticing it?” Mr. Kovalchyk demanded, covering his own nose with his handkerchief.
The day laborer shrugged. “Too high up to smell. Too bright when all the lights are on.”
Where the man’s eyes had been there were only two small pits, opening to an oily darkness. His chest had been flayed open almost precisely, rib cage and sternum split down their centers like the bodice of a dress torn in a moment of great ecstasy, and under it there was the pink of flesh and muscle. But inside his sternum there was nothing, no red withering heart, and his rib cage was absent of gristle and blood, looking as white as taxidermy tusks mounted above some conqueror’s mantel. The liver was absent, the slick garland of intestines gone, and even the stomach had been slit open and emptied. Everything was scraped as clean as a white porcelain bowl.
It reminded me of how I had flayed the monster, carving out its entrails. It had come to me so easily, as if such butchery were as natural as breathing. I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath until I was dizzy, until when I opened them again my vision was blinkering with false stars.
Two neat wounds grinned above the dead man’s knees, as if someone had used a knife to hobble him so he could not get away. At least, that was what the Grand Inspector said when he arrived, with six of his black-clad men in tow.
“A week or more,” he proclaimed, nudging the body with the toe of his boot. “It’s hard to tell at this stage, before we can get it to our mortician. Sir, I am going to need a list of everyone who has been inside this theater in the past two weeks—dancers, workers, managers. And I’m going to need to see the log of ticket purchases.”
“But who was he?” I pressed, even though a part of me already knew. Papa’s voice returned to me again. If anything, it means more work for the rest. He was any man. He was a man no one would miss.
“Oh,” Mr. Kovalchyk said, blinking from under his sweaty brow. “Some day laborer or another. We hire them at market rate to mop the floors.”
The Grand Inspector nodded grimly and asked if the man had any family, but I could not hear Mr. Kovalchyk’s response over the rushing of blood in my ears. I only heard him laugh, and what an absurd question it was. Men like Niko and Fedir and even Sevas had no family but one another. The Grand Inspector took down some notes on his pad. I watched him through that ghostly haze as Sevas’s hand pressed against the small of my back, thinking of everything Papa had told me about the man before me and his black-clad enforcers.