The wind - the only tireless traveler upon the Siberian plain - swept violently across the outpost, carrying with it the scent of rust, diesel, and the stale breath of things long unrotten in the depths of permafrost. It tore at the drooping, lead-colored clouds, lashed the rust-stained corrugated roofs of the barracks, and gave out a hollow, unending moan. At the edge of the compound, a few bare birch trees shivered spasmodically in the wind, their branches like the withered hands of the dying, reaching in vain for a sky they could never grasp whole.

Nikto leaned against the cold concrete wall of the barracks; the chill pierced his thick uniform and seeped into his marrow. At the end of his line of sight, a familiar door - Unit 214, part of the officers' family quarters - stood shut. Beside the door, a half-dead little tree trembled softly in the wind, yet remained motionless, as if its roots had long since been swallowed by this hard, life-denying land. A figure in a dark wool coat had just vanished behind the door, like a thread of smoke that could be scattered by the wind at any moment. The door shut, sealing off a smaller, equally frozen world.

He recognized. It was her.

That name - or rather, that codename - rose within Nikto's frostbound consciousness: a symbol. A military officer's wife. An accessory, carefully mounted and displayed under the architecture of a particular system.

A few days earlier, in the corridor of the infirmary, heavy with the stench of cheap tobacco, sweat, and sharp disinfectant, Nikto had seen her. He had just had a shallow wound on his arm tended to and was preparing to leave. At the end of the corridor, her husband - a lieutenant colonel, epaulettes gleaming, full of self-importance - was standing close beside a nurse at the window. The nurse was young, her cheeks flushed from the cold, her eyes bright, looking up at the colonel with an almost childlike adoration. The colonel's hand rested on her waist with a naturalness, even an entitled ease, his fingers idly toying with the pleats beneath the hem of her white uniform. Their heads were close together, whispering in tones too faint to discern, yet weaving an invisible web of intimacy, nauseating in its intimacy.

She stood nearby, in a shadowed corner cluttered with cleaning supplies. When Nikto saw her, she was watching them. Her body seemed nailed in place, stiff like the icicles that lined the roadside. Her scarf was wound tightly, covering nearly all her face, only her eyes left exposed. There was no fire in those eyes, no tears, not even the faintest ripple, only a vast, unfathomable desolation. A deathly stillness that had frozen solid, colder than the Siberian permafrost. Nikto could feel the weight that settled in that silence, ashes of despair long since burned out. She made no sound, asked no questions, shed no tears, just stood there, in the shadows, like a forgotten statue of stone. Only when the colonel turned and left with the nurse, their footsteps fading down another corridor, did she begin, with an agonizing slowness, like rusted joints grinding into motion, to move. She stepped silently from the shadows and disappeared into the cold depths of the hallway.

The image had seared itself into his frostbitten retina. It would not leave.

And now, that blurred figure behind the window overlapped with the statue of shadow burned into his memory.

Nikto, almost unconsciously, moved his fingers inside the black tactical gloves; his fingertips scraped against the rough cement wall, producing a faint rustling sound. His gaze fell on his own hand, the black fabric of the glove covered every inch of skin. He had long grown used to this separation, just as he had grown used to the cold, lifeless mask upon his face. The skin beneath was a warped battlefield relic, and the mask itself was the casing of what he had chosen to become - a pure, efficient, war-bound component stripped of every unnecessary sense. Pain, temperature, and even the horror or pity in others' eyes were all blocked by the composite shell and its padded lining. The meaning of existence had been distilled to its essence: deployment, command, objective, survival.

The camp loudspeakers suddenly crackled to life, static tore through the wind's wailing, and then a flat male voice began coldly announcing routine training directives. The words were instantly shredded and scattered by the gusts. That voice was the extension of a system's frozen throat, the enormous shadow cast by an iron curtain stretched across all things. Nikto's eyes, unbidden, returned once more to the closed door of Unit 214. The woman behind that door was another being shackled in place by the system's invisible chains. Her status was a golden cage of honor, and a shackle from which no escape was possible. He had, by chance, overheard the camp's crude whispers, of the lieutenant colonel and a young nurse from the military hospital, their liaison unhidden, even flaunted. The rumors clung like moss in the drainage ditches of the compound - damp, slippery, everywhere. The colonel's wedding band, and the far heavier ring upon her finger, were, to Nikto, simply differing forms of the same shackle, both gleaming with the same hollow sheen under the cold light of power. Arranged marriage? A chasm of years? Or some darker, untouchable rule? It no longer mattered. What mattered was the result: She knew, she suffered, and she could not escape. She was a silent rivet, welded into place on the surface of a vast, steel machine.

A few days later, on an equally overcast afternoon, the wind had somewhat subsided, leaving behind a heavy, lingering dampness in the air. Nikto walked across a relatively open expanse, an asphalted training ground used for small formations. The empty ground held nothing but specks of dust stirred into miniature whirlwinds by the wind.

Then, at the edge of his vision, that dark silhouette appeared without warning. She was crossing the other side of the grounds, walking quickly, clutching several books tightly to her chest. Nikto's steps did not falter, but behind the mask, his gaze was drawn to her, as if pulled by invisible thread. He saw her head bowed, her neck bent into a curve that was at once fragile and defiant, as though she bore some great unseen weight. She moved too fast, as though trying to flee from a gaze that came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

The mishap came in an instant. Perhaps it was a shallow dip in the pavement, perhaps it was a patch of cement slick with oil, perhaps it was simply the invisible weight upon her shoulders, at last tipping the balance. Her left foot slipped abruptly; her body lurched forward, violently. A cry caught, strangled in her throat. Only a short gasp escaped, snatched away by the wind. Instinctively, she tightened her arms around the books, but her whole body pitched helplessly toward the hard, frigid ground.

In the moment of her fall, the books broke free from her grasp and scattered. Several heavy volumes struck the ground with dull thuds, kicking up dust. One of them - a deep blue clothbound book - somersaulted through the air, its pages flapping wildly open and shut, before slapping down, with a final wet slap, into a muddy puddle just a few steps in front of Nikto. Muck splattered across its cover and inner pages at once. The book lay open in the filth, soaked, like a bird shot out of the sky.

Nikto's body moved before thought could catch up. He strode to the book in several long steps, dropped to a crouch without hesitation. His black-gloved hand reached into the puddle with unwavering precision, as if retrieving critical gear on a battlefield. He grasped the spine where the mud had not yet reached, lifting it carefully from the sludge. The pages were soaked and clinging, reeking faintly of soil. The deep blue cloth cover had darkened into a sullied brown. He saw the title on the open page, its type blurred, yet still legible - The Cherry Orchard. The mud was greedily swallowing the words of lost estates, of irreversible loss, of lives crushed beneath the wheels of time. The imagery of bygone grace and futile preservation now soaked silently in the muck of a Far Eastern Russian outpost, bleeding out without a sound.

He rose, holding the heavy, dripping book, and took a step toward her. He said nothing, simply held the book out to her. The wet spine smeared mud across his glove.