Day Watch

"This way, Alisa…"

We walked up to a small building. A veranda and open windows-with a faint light in one of them…

"This is a summer house," Pyotr told me. "The Azure section has four main dachas and eight summer houses. You know, I think in summer it's a lot more fun living here."

He seemed to be apologizing for the fact that I and my young charges would be living in the summer accommodation. I couldn't resist asking: "And what about in winter?"

"Nobody lives here in the winter," Pyotr said sternly. "Even though our winters are so warm, the conditions would be inadequate for children to stay here."

He made the transition to official bureaucratic language very easily too. It was as if he were giving a lecture intended to reassure someone's mom-"the temperature is pleasant, the living conditions are comfortable, the catering provides a balanced diet."

We stepped onto the terrace, and I felt a slight stirring of excitement.

I thought… I thought I could already feel it…

Nastya turned out to be small and swarthy-ski

"Hello, Alya…" She nodded to me as if I were an old friend. And in a certain sense, I was-they had obviously given her a false memory. "Look what's happened now…"

I stopped looking around at the room-there was nothing special about it anyway. A little, ordinary camp leader's room: a bed, a cupboard, a table, and a chair. The little Morozko refrigerator and the cheap black-and-white television looked like luxury items here.

But then, I'm not choosy…

"Nastya, everything will be all right," I promised her with false sympathy. The girl nodded wearily, the way she must have been doing all day long.

"It's good you were able to fly down so quickly." She picked up the bag that was already packed, but Pyotr immediately took hold of it. "Have you worked in Artek before?"

"No."

Nastya frowned. Maybe whoever implanted the false memory had got something confused, but she had no time to worry about that now.

"I'll be in time for the morning flight, Petya," she said. "Is the bus going to Simferopol?"

"In an hour," Pyotr said with a nod.

The former camp leader turned her attention to me again: "I've already said goodbye to the girls. So… no one will be surprised. Tell them I love them all very much and I'll definitely… I'll try to come back."

For an instant the tears glinted in her eyes-evidently at the thought of one of the possible reasons for a rapid return.

"Nastya," I said, putting my arm around her shoulders. "Everything's going to be all right, your mom will get better…"

Nastya's little face crumpled into a grimace of pain. "She's never been ill!" The words seemed to burst out of her. "Never."

Pyotr delicately cleared his throat. Nastya lowered her eyes and stopped talking.

Of course, there had been various different ways I could have been sent to work at the Artek camp. But Zabulon always prefers the simplest possible methods. Nastya's mother had suddenly suffered a massive heart attack, so now Nastya was flying back to Moscow, and another student had been sent from the university to replace her. It was elementary.

Most likely Nastya's mother would have suffered a heart attack anyway: maybe a year later, maybe five. Zabulon always calculates the balance of Power very thoroughly. To provoke a heart attack in someone who was perfectly healthy was a fourth-level intervention that automatically gave the Light Ones the right to reply with magic of the same Power.

Nastya's mother would almost certainly live. Zabulon is not given to senseless cruelty. Why kill the woman when the necessary effect can be produced simply by a serious illness?

And so I could have reassured my predecessor, except that I would have had to tell her too much.

"Here's a notebook I wrote a few things in…" Nastya held out a slim school exercise book with a gaily colored cover showing a popular singer gri

I nodded. Then Nastya suddenly waved her hand through the air and said, "I don't need to tell you all this. You'll manage just fine."

But she still spent another fifteen minutes introducing me to the subtle details of the camp regime and asked me to pay special attention to some girls who were flirting with the boys too precociously. She advised me not to demand silence after lights out: "Fifteen minutes is long enough for them to talk themselves out, half an hour at the most…"

Nastya only stopped talking when Pyotr pointed to his watch. She kissed me on the cheek, then picked up a small bag and cardboard box-maybe she was taking some fruit to her sick mother?

"All the best, Alisa…"

And at last I was left alone.

There was a pile of clean linen lying on the bed. The electric bulb glowed feebly under its simple glass shade. Pyotr and Nastya's steps and their simple conversation quickly faded away.

I was alone.

But not absolutely alone. On the other side of two thin walls, just five steps along the corridor, eighteen little girls aged ten or eleven were sleeping.

I suddenly started trembling-a rapid, nervous trembling, as if I were an apprentice again, trying for the first time to extract someone else's Power. Nabokov's character Humbert Humbert would probably have trembled the same way in my place.

But then, compared to what I was going to do now, his passion for nymphets was nothing but childish naughtiness…

I switched off the light and tiptoed out into the corridor. How I missed my Other powers!

I would just have to make do with the human powers I had left…

The corridor was long and the floorboards squeaked. The threadbare carpet ru

Simple, straightforward, uncomplicated children's dreams.

I opened the door and went into the dormitory. For some reason I'd been expecting some kind of state institution, halfway between a children's home and a hospital-iron bedsteads, the dull glow of a night lamp, depressing curtains, and children sleeping as if they were standing at attention…

But in fact it was all very nice. The only light came from the lantern on the pillar outside. The shadows swayed gently, a fresh sea breeze blew in at the open windows and I could smell the scent of wildflowers. The screen of the switched-off television glowed dully in the corner, and the walls were covered with drawings in colored pencil and watercolor paintings that looked bright and cheerful even in the semi-darkness.

The little girls were sleeping, sprawled out across their beds or tucked underneath the blankets, with all their things neatly arranged on their bedside lockers or scattered untidily on the headboards and the backs of the chairs-swimming costumes that were still wet, skirts, little pairs of jeans and socks. A good psychologist could have walked through that dormitory at night and composed a full character portrait of those girls…

But I didn't need one.

I walked slowly between the beds, adjusting blankets that had slid off, lifting up arms and legs that had slipped down to touch the floor. The girls were sleeping soundly. Soundly and with no dreams…

I only got lucky with the seventh girl. She was about eleven years old, plump with light hair. An ordinary little girl whimpering quietly in her sleep. Because she was having a bad dream…

I knelt down beside her bed, reached out my hand, and touched her forehead. Gently, with just the tips of my fingers.

I felt Power.

As I was now, without any Other powers, I couldn't have read an ordinary dream. But sensing the opportunity to nourish yourself is a different matter. It all takes place at the level of animal reactions, like an infant's sucking reflex.