For the length of this weekend, though, it would not matter. The smoke from their fire mixed with the steam off the hidden springs, making the night dense. Charred wood, rich sulfur, and cold earth: the smells of nostalgia. Her family had loved this place. After the USSR collapsed, there were no longer any restrictions on travel, no stop to movement; the Soviet military bases that had constrained the entire peninsula were shuttered, so Kamchatka’s residents could finally explore their own land. Katya’s family had gone as far north as Esso to meet the natives with their reindeer herds, west to see steaming craters, and south to pull caviar out of what had become unpatrolled lakes. She spent her youth in the brief reckless period between the Communists’ rigidity and Putin’s strength, and though she had grown into a boundary enforcer, inspecting imports and issuing citations, within herself there remained a post-Soviet child. Some part of her did crave the wild.
Katya allowed herself to blend with the darkness. “My parents used to take us camping every weekend,” she said to Max.
“Yeah?”
“Practically.” She took her last bite of fish and he passed her a soft slice of cheese. “As soon as the snow melted, we were out in the woods. They would give me and my brothers projects—following animal tracks, or finding different types of trees.”
He touched her waist. “They were probably giving themselves some time to be alone.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Probably, though, right?”
When she was ten years old, her parents were…She had to count it. Her mother had only been thirty-two. Younger than Katya was now. She pictured them then, their long limbs colliding, and shivered. “Stop,” she said, batting Max’s chest.
“I’m joking,” Max said. “I’m sure their intentions were completely educational. How’d you do with the projects? Find all your trees?”
“Of course we did,” she said. “I was the oldest. I told them we weren’t coming back without a full catalog of leaves.”
Over soft potatoes and seared sausage, they told each other stories. How Oksana had said she’d discovered texts to yet another woman on her husband’s phone—“Everyone in the office is talking about it. He’s an asshole,” Max said with his mouth full.
“They need to end it already.”
“Good luck giving that advice,” Max said. “I try as much as possible to avoid telling Oksana what to do.” Katya put her plate down and rested her hands on Max’s pant leg as he ate. Under her palms, the swell of his thigh.
Through the woods came the drunk rise and fall of people at a neighboring campsite singing. The trees made a black wall. Those voices, the ash in the air, and the chattering night put Katya in mind of their first weekend together. “Any updates from the search?” she asked.
Max shook his head. “And there won’t be any more volunteers going out after it snows. Lieutenant Ryakhovsky says now that the girls may have been taken off Kamchatka.”
“Come on,” Katya said. “In what, a passenger plane?”
“I don’t know. A ship.”
“A cruise ship? To Sapporo?” If so, Katya’s colleagues would have found them. Customs inspected every vessel leaving by air or sea.
And air and sea were the sole options for leaving. Though Kamchatka was no longer a closed territory by law, the region was cut off from the rest of the world by geography. To the south, east, and west was only ocean. To the north, walling off the Russian mainland, were hundreds of kilometers of mountains and tundra. Impassable. Roads within Kamchatka were few and broken: some, to the lower and central villages, were made of dirt, washed out for most of the year; others, to the upper villages, only existed in winter, when they were pounded out of ice. No roads connected the peninsula to the rest of the continent. No one could come or go over land.
“A cargo ship,” he said. “Maybe.”
Katya had to laugh. “Aha,” she said. The campfire flickered over Max’s face.
“I’m only repeating what the detective told all of us. It’s possible, isn’t it? Because we looked everywhere else. We found nothing.”
Everywhere else, he said, as though Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s borders marked the edges of existence. “Those girls didn’t leave the peninsula,” she said. “Couldn’t he have hidden their bodies? In a garage, a construction site, the woods?”
“We searched those places,” he said. “For weeks. Covered every neighborhood.”
“Outside Petropavlovsk, then,” Katya said. “You don’t think he took them along the road to the western coast? Or north?”
Max set his plate down. “Maybe he hid them in a national park. Threw them into a geyser.”
“Maybe so,” Katya said. He grimaced. “He could’ve done anything, that’s my point,” she said. “Driven them six hours away and enrolled them as his own children in some village school.”
“Well, yes. There’s no limit to the possibilities. So the police asked us only to focus on what was most likely,” Max said. “This was someone from Petropavlovsk. Oksana described a white man.”
“Did she?”
“Normal-looking, she said.”
Katya did not disagree with that. Instead, she said, “She barely saw him. Anyway, it’s not all natives out there.”
“She saw his car,” Max said. “A shiny dark car, she told us. No one comes down unpaved roads from the villages without getting covered in dust. So think: how would this person, living in the city, desperate, maybe crazy, most likely leave? He would know ships come and go daily. The detective says he could have bribed his way into a shipping container.”
“Or maybe this person does what is unlikely,” she said. “Went to a geyser after all. This is a man who preys on children. Who knows what he might be capable of?” She was talking like a tabloid reporter, she knew, but that post-kidnapping touchiness had crept back on her. If the police had solved the case already, she would not have to speak about such things. She did her job at the port well—the girls couldn’t have left Kamchatka. Did everyone else in the city do theirs?
“Katyush,” Max said. “Please. They’re gone. The search isn’t useful anymore.”
Max, of all people, announcing what was or wasn’t useful. Katya shifted her fingers on his leg and he fell silent.
They stooped under her open trunk door to change into their bathing suits. Away from the fire, they had goose bumps. Their breath fogged. Katya adjusted her shoulder strap and Max grabbed her. He backed her up until her legs hit the car. They kissed for a long time under the metal canopy, where neither of them had room to stand up straight. They bent into each other like two praying hands, but Katya wasn’t thinking of God. She forgot lost children. She was thinking of Max, his arms, his fingers, his mouth, his fine teeth, the urgency under her skin.