Siberian Light [antikvár]

CHAPTERIt's the night of April twenty-eighth and the temperature hovers near the freezing mark. In Moscow it might as well be summer, but seven time zones to the east it's the first warm night of the year. Icicles weep, crack, and fall into heaps of wet snow. A flickering aurora drapes a web of violent energy over Markovo, casting cold light across dark streets.Markovo emerges from its winter armor slowly, like a developing photograph; first the walls, next the roofs, the streets. Finally the tangle of water, steam, and sewer pipes that run exposed along the sidewalks appear like artifacts from a lost civilization. The buildings hold the heat of the day, but it's colder down by the river.The Mat Lena, the Mother Lena, flows through town between high concrete embankments. It rises in the ring of mountains that surround Lake Baikal. Its mouth opens to the Arctic. Tonight, the ice that has stood so firm and reliable since last September is breaking. Tonight it's a heaving sludge of ice under fog, where air blurs to water, liquid to solid, where solids dissolve and the sky shifts in patterns of light and dark.A mustard-yellow militia jeep sputtered and fumed as it sat parked in front of Medical Sobering Facility #3.