Chapter 1

“...Singing for me is like breathing. If I stop singing, I'll suffocate…”

(from Rina's interview with the publication ‘Music In Our Life’)

“No, there's something wrong here…”

Yura ran his fingers into a pile of brown curls and even more disheveled hair, which neither a comb nor styling products could tame. Manya glanced disapprovingly at her brother but said nothing, only lowering the lid on the pan with an unnecessarily loud clunk and turning off the gas.

“Why did Rina do that? At the peak of her career? Suddenly?”

“She could have had a hundred reasons!” Manya couldn't stand it, because Yura had been talking about one topic for an hour. 

As he burst into the apartment at ten in the morning, plopped down on a stool that creaked under him, and so he chatted. Manya had already managed to cook soup, treat her brother to coffee with homemade cupcakes, and listen to a hundred and fifty ‘why?’, and he kept pouring out versions that he dismissed.

“Yura, should I fry potatoes as the second meal? Or is it better to boil?”

“Yeah. Do you think she…”

“So fry or boil?” Manya interrupted, deciding that it was time to stop this monologue full of rhetorical questions. In part, she understood Yura: if he lit up on some topic, it was a fiasco for everyone who tried to talk to him about something else. And then journalistic interest mixed with personal: her brother was a fan of the popular singer Rina, didn’t miss a single concert in Moscow, and was extremely proud that he once interviewed her for the magazine in which he worked. Manya also liked the talented singer, she even went to a concert with Yura one day instead of the girl he broke up with, so the news about the cancellation of the tour upset her. 

However, the brother, in his meticulous desire to get to the bottom of the reason for Rina's act, crossed all boundaries.

“So what to do with potatoes?” Manya reminded.

“Fry it!” Yura answered briefly, as if waving off, and started over again: “Rina suddenly canceled all concerts and unconditionally paid the penalty. Do you know what kind of money it is? But she paid and... disappeared. No one knows what happened or where she is.”

“Yura, she could get sick!”

“In this case, the concerts are not canceled, but postponed. Rina has repeatedly performed with a sore throat and a fever. One day she lost her voice right on stage. She was very worried about the postponement of concerts, personally appeared on social media, and responded to comments and messages. Now - complete silence. Just announced that it was possible to return tickets, and that's all.”

“Rina, first of all, is a young woman who could get bored with publicity. She could have secretly married…” Manya involuntarily got involved in the discussion, forgetting about the soup cooling on the stove. “Or maybe she's expecting a baby and that's why she went into the shadows.”

The upcoming wedding of the popular singer and famous businessman Dimitri Lebedev was trumpeted by all the tabloids. The paparazzi were chasing a young, beautiful couple, looking for something in their relationship that could make a sensation. However, neither Rina nor Dimitri gave reasons for the scandal, and the journalists themselves fanned the rumors. Therefore, when someone noticed a ring on Rina's finger, only an illiterate person didn’t write about it.

“She broke off the engagement!” Yura exclaimed, jumped up from his seat, and walked from the window to the table. Two steps there, two steps back. From the movement, the light colorful curtain swayed as if in the wind.

“Well, maybe their ‘parting’ is another fake! How many times have Lebedev and Rina been ‘divorced’ in the press?”

“Flore, you see, I didn’t read about this from competitors but received information from a trusted person. No one has yet had time to write that Rina and Lebedev broke up! Me first.”

Yura checked the magazine's website again through his smartphone and exclaimed triumphantly:

“Here! Already! Published! Well, now it will begin! Now our competitors will be bustling… But we're still the first! I'm the first.”

He smiled vainly, and Manya grimaced with displeasure. She loved her brother, who was eight years younger than her. But as an older sister, she used to pull back if it seemed to her that he was behaving ill-mannered.

“Yura, don't you think that…” Manya began, instantly ‘turning on’ the strict tone of the elder sister. 

But Yura interrupted her:

“I don't understand... already? So fast?”

“What's fast? Did competitors respond with the same news?”

Yura poked his finger at the smartphone screen, squinted, and then broke into a satisfied smile. 

“Awesome!Of course! The best confirmation that Rina and Lebedev broke up!”

“I don't understand, Yura.”

“The article was deleted! It didn't even hang for five minutes! What does that mean? So, Lebedev's people were bustling! And since they reacted so quickly, they were ready! Monitored! The break up of Rina and Lebedev is not fake!”

“You're so happy as if you're going to marry her yourself!” Manya couldn't resist sarcasm. But Yura, continuing to smile happily, shook his shaggy head:

“Nope. Not going to. Flore, don't you understand? It's all so strange! The situation with Rina is extraordinary!”

“Wait…” Manya stopped him, not because she wanted to put an end to the topic, but because of a guess that came to mind. “What if it was just Dimitri who parted with Rina, and she went into the shadows? Canceled all the concerts, took time out to get over the breakup?”

“Hm,” Yura pondered, patted his chin with his fingers �" on the same dimple that his sister had, and after a pause said: “A good version.”

He automatically updated the magazine's website from his phone and suddenly jumped on the spot.

“What t... the website is down! A coincidence? Or…”

“Yura, are you now even in the fact that the site was unavailable looking for a trick?” Manya grinned and put a frying pan on the stove to fry the promised potatoes.

“I want to know what happened! Why…”

He didn't have time to finish, because his mobile broke out with a sharp tinkling. Manya grimaced but said nothing.

“What?!” Yura exclaimed into the phone to someone so loudly that Manya almost dropped the knife from her hands, with which she was slicing potatoes. “Are you crazy?!” Yura shouted into the phone with unexpected desperation. “Hey? Hello?! That a*****e!”

Manya watched anxiously as her brother threw the phone on the table, and then collapsed on a stool and put his head in his hands.

“Yura, what happened?”

He just shook his head. Manya turned off the fire under the frying pan and quietly moved another stool to her brother.

“Yura?”

She gently touched his back with her palm, and stroked him carefully and fearfully, afraid to ask questions. But Yura finally raised his head, looked at Manya with a frustrated look, and smiled bitterly.

“I was fired. And as I understood, just because of this news.”

“So it happened twenty years ago?” Vika clarified and carefully stepped over a rusty sawn-off metal pipe lying in the young grass. Nikolai didn’t notice it and would have stumbled if not for Vika's involuntary ‘warning’.

“Yes. Or rather, twenty-two. I was seven at the time. Of course, I didn't understand much of what was happening. Parents suddenly decided to move. However, my father has been asking for a transfer closer to the capital for a long time and finally got it.”

Vika nodded, making it clear that she didn’t see anything strange in this. To Nikolai up to some point, his father's transfer didn’t seem suspicious either.

“I didn't want to leave this place. The town, though small, like many garrisons, is one street of several houses, a school, a shop, and a couple of offices, but it was close to this amusement park from us. My parents took me here almost every weekend.”

“It's hard to imagine that all this once worked,” Vika shivered, put her hands in her pockets, and frowned, becoming like an exotic bird.

A bright crimson strand stood up on the back of her head in a tuft, an ultra-short haircut resembling plumage. The skirts of Vika's black cloak flew apart like wings when walking. At the same time, trying not to stumble over stone blocks, rebar, and fragments of faded signs, she carefully rearranged her legs, thin and long, like a heron, wrapped in crimson tights, and her gait evoked associations with a bird even more.

“Yes, once the park was full of life…” Nikolai drawled thoughtfully and with regret squinted at the skeleton of a boat embedded in the ground �" the remains of attractions. He remembered that loved boating so much and, maybe, rocked this one, squinting with delight.

“Damn!” Vika cursed loudly because a branch of a dried tree that had fallen to the ground had left a puff on her tights. Vika stuck out her foot, pulled the fabric with her fingers, and cursed again when she saw that the puff had increased.

“Now it's just for throwing away!” she sighed.

Nikolai didn’t say that earlier during the period of total shortage in country, girls didn’t throw away tights, but darned them. He was born in the year when a huge and indestructible country was splitting into unequal fragments, the usual life was going to hell, and the new one seemed not so much bright as foggy. And even though they got out of the crisis, the habit of repairing torn tights remained with his mother for a long time.

“So, the end of the crimson period?” Nikolai couldn't resist teasing.

Vika glanced at him and smiled slyly:

“I have six more pairs. I usually buy seven at once.”

Nikolai already knew about Vika's inexplicable passion for colored tights. And everything would be fine, but every time she dyed her short hair to match the color. Purple tights - purple ‘plumage’, green - hair was dyed in the appropriate shade. Thank God, Vika wore every color for at least a couple of weeks, otherwise Nikolai would have gone mad from the daily ‘color music’. He had long been tempted to ask Vika what she did in the summer when it was impossible to wear tight tights because of the heat. Shaves her head? And even though every time he refrained from asking, he expected one day to see her with a bare skull - in the ‘tone’ of her bare legs.

“So, you say people started disappearing from houses on your street?” Vika brought the conversation back on track.

“Yes. This didn’t happen abruptly, but imperceptibly. It's just that one evening the windows of an apartment in the building opposite didn’t light up. Then another. At first, no one attached any importance to this. But then, every evening, there were more and more such dark windows, and they turned black not only in the house opposite but also in ours. We had a dog, a cross between a lapdog and a poodle. I walked with her during the day, and in the evening - one of the parents. One day I heard a mother telling my father that there were almost no lighted windows left in the apartments at the neighboring entrance. And there are fewer people on the streets. For example, my mother has not seen a familiar saleswoman in the market for several days. All this worried her so much.”

“But people could have moved somewhere? Maybe those houses were resettled en masse?”

“There were rumors that the unit was going to be disbanded. This fully explained the fact that the village began to empty. Besides, I could have misunderstood something from adult conversations and imagined God knows what. For example, this park seemed huge to me then, but in fact, it's not that big. When I was seven or eight years old, I, like any child, didn’t suffer from a lack of imagination and could imagine empty streets and houses.”

“And yet it wasn't your imagination,” Vika said.

The road from the broken asphalt, into the cracks of which the grass made its way, forked with a slingshot. One lane ended with a rickety wooden ticket booth. The other led to the racetrack. Once there was a noisy attraction, attracting music and light. But right now, this place was a pitiful sight. Rusty fence blocks faithfully guarded the perimeter of the circuit destroyed by time, bad weather, and vandals. The weed, strong in the thirst for life, boldly made its way to the light, ‘corroding’ the remnants of the metal coating. The wind in hooligan gusts tore off the roof of the pavilion long ago, leaving only the frame, to which the mummies of two colorless cars still clung with metal arcs. For some reason, Nikolai thought that despair had reached its peak right here, and not near the frozen Ferris wheel or the sine wave of the roller coaster. Maybe because this attraction was his favorite, although, for the sake of a few short minutes of delight, he had to stand endless minutes of tedious waiting in a long queue. But there was always music playing and it was noisy. And it also smelled deliciously of rubber and electricity, and it was the fragrance of happiness and childhood. Nikolai couldn't resist the temptation and jumped over the fence.

“Kolya?” Vika doubted, and her call brought him back to reality. He looked around and saw that Vika, having picked up the skirts of her coat, was trying on the height of the fence.

“You'll finally tear up the tights,” Nikolai grinned.

“Oh, throw it away anyway!” she responded nonchalantly and climbed over to him on the racetrack. She did it very cleverly - with her long legs.

“How scary it is here! It's like being in a cemetery.”

“You're right. We are in the cemetery,” he agreed, approaching one of the cars and casting a glance at the seat. The cheeky sprout of an unknown tree made its way even through the plastic. Death circled with life �" as it should be.

“I don't like this place,” said Vika and looked over her shoulder, as if she felt someone's gaze. It's strange, but before that, she behaved calmly, she even took a trip to an abandoned amusement park with enthusiasm. Nikolai didn’t torment her, especially since there was not much time left before the meeting, he climbed over the fence and helped Vika to get over.

“Let's get out of here,” he said, deciding that the walk in the park was over for today, but feeling that it would continue another day. “Gennadiy Sergeevich is about to arrive.”

“So you won't have time to tell me everything now.”

There was a flirtatious half-smile on her lips, but Nikolai didn't smile back. To tell her everything means to dive a run into the pool of a long-standing misfortune. Some questions will be followed by others, and certainly, those that he doesn’t want to answer either to her or to anyone else. But he still has to tell Vika something, since he dragged her into this case.

Nikolai was silent until he left the park. And when they passed a wide arch with broken light bulbs, he said softly, as if to himself:

“There were rumors that those who left the village were sometimes noticed there.”

“Did people come back?”

“Yes, they did,” Nikolai nodded. “But were there people?”

“What?” Vika recoiled and looked at him with a frightened look, expecting him to laugh, to say that he was deliberately scaring her. But Nikolai only winked conspiratorially and, seeing the heavy figure of a man walking slowly towards them at the end of the alley, waved a friendly hand.