“Goodbye!” the boy said solemnly, looking not at them but at the sky. “Please tell my parents that I’ve died. Although, I think they’ll also guess!”

Vicky began to squeal, but Kate squatted down and asked why he decided that he was dying.

“I cut myself,” the boy informed her.

“Cut what? A vein?”

“No. I ripped open my finger on this iron sheet. Of course, my parents will now throw it out, but it’s already useless! A person cut by a rusty object dies within a few hours. Tetanus starts in him.”

Kate disengaged the boy’s leg from the forked acacia and helped him up. The boy stood and swayed. He pressed his injured hand to his chest and would not show it to anyone. His t-shirt continued to stain.

“Anyone home?” Kate asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s go there! What’s your name?”

“Andrew! Andrew Mokhov,” the boy introduced himself.

Kate and Peter grabbed him by the elbows and led him away. Andrew Mokhov walked firmly, but only until he looked at his shirt. Then he began to pale and his knees buckled.

“Of course everything will be bad!” he said, making his way between the cage with bicycles and the cage with chickens. “That’s your car there? So big? I saw it from behind the fence. How many of you kids are there? Although you don’t have to answer. Already doesn’t matter to me now!”

“Seven,” Kate said.

“For some reason this would be valuable information!” Andrew admitted. “There are two of us. Nina and Seraphim.”

“Then why two? Aren’t you Andrew?”

“Correct. But when I die, only Nina and Seraphim will be left. I corrected the number, so as not to mislead you.”

“How old are Nina and Seraphim?”

“Nina’s fourteen, Seraphim’s eight. But he’s been lost since this morning, so Nina’ll probably remain alone.”

At the end of the yard, they saw a small house with cracked paint. It was entwined not with a grapevine but an ivy with a trunk the thickness of two human arms. In order that the roots of the ivy would not wreck the walls, pieces of wood were placed near them.

“Wow! Some house! Where did it come from?” Peter was surprised.

“It has always been here,” Andrew said with an air of importance. “Even before yours. Yours is sixty years old. Ours will soon be a hundred. See, what thick limestone.”

“Why didn’t we see your gate?”

Andrew sighed. “Because our gate isn’t here. There’s a wicket gate, but it’s far… it’s all very complicated in the city. A bunch of all kinds of side-streets and courtyards.”

“We already realized this when searching for our house,” Peter said.

“You realized nothing. The figure eight, it’s this here.” Andrew traced with a finger in the air. “And here’s one more lane, like a one. It turns out that it’s not 8 but 18. We’re on the 1 and you’re on the 8. In short, we’re closer over the fence. If you walk, then you have to go around everything in a circle.”

Andrew got up onto the porch and began to knock on the door with his forehead. No one answered, then Andrew pressed the handle with his elbow. “It’s open,” he said. “Come!”

They found themselves in an enclosed patio, where there was a gas boiler the same as the Gavrilovs’. Here was a large table in a kitchen area. Despite the bright day outside, the ivy shaded the window so much that the patio was lit by a chandelier with five dusty globes. A huge dried-up butterfly had hardened on one of the globes.

“We specifically did not take it off. For the sake of artistic shadows on the wall. Papa won’t allow it,” the boy explained.

“Your father’s an artist?”

“Photographer. Works on the sea front. And in schools too.”

Andrew sat quite calmly down on a chair, but looked by chance at his hand and, remembering that he was dying, started to slide from his chair onto the floor. Vicky looked at him with understanding. She loved to suffer when the appropriate occasion arose.

“Go and rinse out the wound!” Kate ordered.

“No way! I’m afraid!”

“Let me call your mama! Where is she?”

“Mustn’t disturb Mama! She was on the Internet all night and only just lay down. And Nina has gone for her guitar lesson…”

“Where’s your papa then? At work?”

“No. Papa’s searching for Seraphim. Seraphim is lost. He gets lost all the time…”

“First-aid kit?”

“In a white box!”

Kate began to look for a white box and discovered it to the right of the teapot. All its sides, the outside, and even the inside of the lid, were covered with many phone numbers. While Kate was looking for the box, she noticed many icons, including the Nursing Madonna^[7] and Our Lady of Kazan,^[8] on the patio walls. The stump of a candle stuck out of a candlestick by the window.

Kate looked at this with understanding. “You also go to church?”

“Mama, yes. Papa… well, probably also yes! But I’m an atheist!” Andrew said. “I don’t believe in God but in that when people die, they decompose to water and mineral elements.”

Peter looked at Andrew with great interest and scratched his nose. “And how do your parents feel about you being an atheist?” he asked.

“It’s alright. Mama says that atheism is a normal step towards faith and not a fear for God. Ouch, don’t pour iodine on the wound! Never iodine on the wound, only on the edges! Lord! That hurts!!!”

Using the fact that Andrew, blowing on the wound, involuntarily stopped grabbing her finger, Kate deftly put a bandage on his hand and wiped it with a wet towel. Then she forced Andrew to change his t-shirt. The spots of blood had barely disappeared, and Andrew immediately calmed down. Even his cheeks visibly turned pink.

“Well? Alive?”

Andrew was embarrassed to admit that he was alive. “My finger is throbbing!” he said, paying attention to his senses.

“A lot?”

“No, not a lot, but it’s throbbing. Come to my room! Just don’t yell! Mama’s sleeping behind the door!”

“Right now, no one to yell at here! No little ones!” Kate said and was mistaken. While they were busy, Alex managed to get over the fence and dragged Costa with him. No one dragged Rita over the fence, and she was screaming on the other side, demanding to join the team.

Andrew’s room turned out to be a real pirate’s nook with an upper deck supported by four wooden pillars. A rope ladder hung from the deck. True, it turned out that Andrew did not use it because he was lazy. On a littered table were textbooks for the fifth grade, a tablet, and a laptop without a single key. Only two or three elastics and some plastic parts were intact.

“Don’t pay attention to the keyboard!” Andrew said grimly. “Seraphim picked them off when I sat on his grasshopper. He didn’t believe that it was an accident.”

“A grasshopper?”

“Yes. He fed the grasshopper grass and it was all around the whole house. He deleted everything from my desktop. Now I have an eighteen-character password. I type it in front of Seraphim, but he can’t remember.”

“How do you enter the password?”

“On an external keyboard. I hide it just in case… Hey! Is this also your brother? Get my paper from him!”

“Also your brother” turned out to be Costa, who had pulled some paper off the table to draw on. They caught Costa and took the sheet of paper from him. Costa wanted to be indignant but felt that there was no sympathetic public near at hand, and he very quietly got busy examining a fishing bobber, which glowed when shaken.

“What’s this formula? You like chemistry?” Peter asked, looking at the sheet rescued from Costa’s hands.

Andrew hastily grabbed back the sheet written on with a wide marker. He listened, looked out the window, and whispered, “Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes!” Peter said.

“Then here it is! Do you know where to buy uranium?”

“What kind of uranium?”

“Enriched. I know how to make an atomic bomb, only I have no uranium!”

“At a drugstore?” Alex naively asked.

“Uranium? At a drugstore?” Peter laughed his signature laugh, but Andrew looked at Alex without irony, which Alex appreciated very much.

“You don’t understand! Such things aren’t in drugstores. They wouldn’t even sell me manganese! Said it’s forbidden to sell it.”

Next to Andrew’s table was a huge cookie box filled to the brim with all sorts of technical treasures: parts of phones, coils of wire, tools, batteries, electric toys, and constructor components. It was worthwhile for Alex to see all this, as he stuck to Andrew exactly like a boy from the Middle Ages to the Pied Piper.

Therefore, when Mama began to shout from behind the fence and call them to breakfast, the older children left immediately, but Alex stayed with Andrew. And Costa also stayed. He generally tagged after Alex all the time, and whatever Alex was interested in, he roughly determined that he had to take it away or steal it.

Alex and Andrew started to rummage in the box. From time to time Andrew groaned, trying to bend the cut finger. They made a catapult, which was to throw batteries with an ignition mechanism fastened to them. Andrew gutted ignition mechanisms from broken plastic lighters. According to the design, all this should explode and kill everyone on site, because Andrew read somewhere that batteries contain metal salts, but also discharge gas, which would certainly ignite with the mechanism. Costa was jostling near them, grabbing everything, and interfering. Then they climbed the rope ladder to the upper deck on the pillars. Costa could not climb up the ladder because of his left hand and was starting to get rowdy below. They paid him no attention. Then Costa went out into the yard, picked up clumps of dirt, returned and began to throw dirt at them.

“Are you nuts, kid? What do you want?” Andrew was mad when a piece of dirt hit him on the nose.

“It’s Costa,” Alex prompted.

“Costa! What do you want?”

Costa did not know what he wanted and pouted angrily. “Say ‘table’!” he demanded in a voice trembling with anger.

“Table!” Andrew repeated obediently.

“Table! Your grandma’s a boxer!” Costa shouted. “Ha-ha-ha! Say ‘nose’!”

“Nose!”

“Nose! Your grandma’s a boxer!”

Andrew shook his head. “No, doesn’t rhyme! You can’t say ‘your grandma’s a boxer’ there. Now say ‘sermon’!”

“Sermon!” Costa repeated.

“Sermon! Your mama loves German! Remember?”

Costa rushed ecstatically into the yard and began to shout for them to take him home. At first, no one heard him, and then Papa sent Peter, who passed Costa over the fence to Papa.

Costa was trembling with excitement. “Papa, Papa!” he yelled. “Say ‘sermon’!”

“Sermon!”

“Your grandma’s a boxer!” Costa said and laughed happily.