After five hours in the air, the Boeing 767 seemed to come to a halt. Brunk didn’t want it to land. He wished the Atlantic Ocean would stay beneath them forever, that this star outside the window would remain exactly where it was. Strange that it wasn’t moving, as if he were sitting in a room, not a plane.

  Brunk stood and glanced around the sleeping cabin. The engine hum had frozen into a single tone; nothing seemed to move. He jumped a little—just enough to feel the faintest sway of the aircraft. He walked toward the exit and stepped into something like a vestibule.

  In the glowing doorway, two figures stood with their backs to him...

  ***

  Just five minutes earlier, he’d been in despair. The journey was coming to an end... Dirty snow on the roadside, crows instead of squirrels, and a hostile crowd in place of those ever-smiling humanoids.

  Brunk slipped on his headphones and started flipping through Delta’s music channels. A Kurt Cobain song reminded him of where he’d been just three days ago. That’s when it hit him—he didn’t want the plane to land. Not ever.

  Absentmindedly switching channels, from Nirvana he stumbled into Nirvana Radio. The music gradually melted into a loop of mantras. And right at that moment, he saw the motionless star—and the world simply stopped.

  ***

  “What happened?” Brunk asked the people standing over the abyss.

  They turned, and he saw two elderly men in wrinkled clothes.

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  “They took our wheels off. The axle cracked,” one of them said, and they leaned over again, peering at the ground far below.

  Brunk didn’t want to look back. He still stood in the vestibule's doorway. Ahead were the grimy doors of a decrepit train car and a group of unkempt passengers. Behind him—Delta's high-tech interior, full of smart people and expensive things.

  He approached the open door and looked down. Four meters below, workers in helmets moved about. A compressor hummed, welding sparks flew. He recoiled and grabbed one of the passengers beside him.

  “Careful, it's a long way down!” warned a man in a faded military shirt tucked into saggy-kneed blue sweatpants.

  “Can you believe it? We almost crashed!” the man went on. “If it had happened earlier, before we reached the city, we'd be lying in a ravine now.”

  “Is this Siberia?” Brunk asked them. They exchanged puzzled glances.

  “Has been for a long while,” one of them replied.

  Brunk returned to the carriage, found his seat, and sat at the table. His fellow passengers stared blankly out the window. No one was drinking, eating, laughing, or talking. Their faces seemed familiar.

  That old woman in the knit sweater—she’d been sitting to his right. She wore a plaid wool shirt and jeans. Her expression had been calmly businesslike. She’d been tinkering with a pocket computer, ordering whiskey and cigarettes from the in-flight duty free. Now her face was tense, confused—and instead of a computer, she held a tabloid full of Russian TV personalities.

  Time had sunk to some murky bottom and froze there, coiling itself into a spring. An hour, two, three. Brunk waited for movement.

  And then—a fly crawled across the windowpane. Perfect. Once it started to buzz against the glass, everything would start moving again.

  The fly reached the center of the window and began to clean its legs. He stared at it, unblinking. His eyes grew heavy. Brunk closed them for just a second.

  And then—a terrifying jolt shattered the force that held time captive!

  Through the thunder of collapsing worlds, he saw the old woman looming over him, rolling up her newspaper. A bloody blotch was spreading across the image of Ksenia Sobchak.

  The train jolted once, then again—and suddenly began to accelerate. The vast steppe blurred past the windows.

  Where was the taiga? Where were the trees?