Athanasius turned the envelope in his hands, an ordinary envelope with the hydroelectric power plant on the printed stamp. And not sealed. “What to do with the new girl?” asked Athanasius.

“As usual. Purely voluntary with a minimum of violence. And especially don’t get tangled in a lie: you yourself know, any lie will echo when you pass the swamp,” answered Kavaleria.

Octavius began to growl behind the tub, made a timid sudden move, and tried to attack the leaving Athanasius with a nip at his heel.

Athanasius carried out Kaleria Valerevna’s commission the very same day. He had to dash off to the university for this, about which he was only glad. Trips to the city did not happen to him particularly frequently, not counting the evenings when he arranged fake meetings with the cryptographer from Honduras.

Moscow was humming in a businesslike manner, like the hive of the golden bees. The cars recently gathered from the spaciousness of cottage country bellowed restlessly and, interfering with each other, crawled along the gas station. Everyone was hurrying somewhere, everyone’s eyes were clustered together. Even babies in strollers looked surly. Only the sun tried to cheer everyone up, but did not manage and was sad, wiping the damp-looking clouds.

Officials sat quietly on the Internet. The prisoners of offices smiled appropriately at their bosses and chose a country for the next two-week vacation. Schoolboys had their eyes on the new teachers, groped their weak sides, and mentally composed a list of tasks, which would not need to be done, and topics, which would not need to be studied. The same spirit reigned also at the university. The euphoria of beginning-of-school-year meetings had already died down, and now the students, spitting out marble aggregate, gnawed on the foundation of science.

Athanasius went out of the first humanities building of Moscow State University and stopped at the front entrance, not recognizing Moscow. It turned out that while he was walking, outside had time to have a downpour. The most surprising was that it was already not raining now. The sky had cleared. The horizon had teethed with precise rectangles of high-rises. It seemed the capital was smiling with that uncertain, freshly washed smile, the kind that appears on the face of a person just finished crying.

Along the asphalt flowed streams of water, in low places reaching halfway up the shin. The storm drains became seething pools. A stalled car stood in a pit. Water reached midway up its headlights. Other cars carefully travelled around it, scrambling onto the curb. Exactly like a herd going around a cow killed by lightning.

Athanasius continually met victims of the rain. Umbrellas, damaged by the downpour, did not save them. Many, despairing, went around barefoot, after throwing over the shoulder shoes with laces tied together.

After picking a long skirt up above her knees, a girl with a bag on her head walked towards Athanasius. The handles of the bag were dashingly tucked behind her ears. He moved aside, passing her, raised his head, and was immediately hailed. Athanasius looked around. He recognized the geometrical half-circle eyebrows and wheaten hair. It was Gulia. She grabbed his sleeve and, twittering, dragged him through the puddles. The sensation emerged in Athanasius that they had parted not three months ago but only yesterday.

“Where did you come from?” asked Gulia, trying to shove his head into the bag with hers.

Athanasius resisted, partly from dignity, partly because the rain had stopped. “From the university!” he said.

“You study here?”

“No.”

“And rightly so!” approved Gulia. “Suspicious place! Here friends speak well of each other. It’s unnatural.”

In the middle of the road full of cars splashing water, it came into Gulia’s head to stop and, arms akimbo, pose the question, “Where did you disappear to then? I waited for your call!”

Knowing that he would not be believed nevertheless, Athanasius craftily lied with the truth. “Was injured. Lying in the clinic. Supovna cursed me ninety-two times. Fed me regularly as much as… That’s because I never finished eating. Dealt her a blow.”

“Everything is clear, reindeer!” said Gulia in the magnanimous voice of a person willing to be taken in.

A car swept past. A canopy of water appeared above it. Athanasius hurriedly shut his mouth and eyes. It was already useless to cover the rest.

“Jerk!” Gulia yelled, jumping like a sparrow. “A natural jerk! Look where you’re going! People are walking here!”

Athanasius carefully grabbed Gulia with both arms and moved her onto the grass. But even on the grass Gulia continued to jump and threaten the cars. Her howls were laughable and silly. Like that of a child who beats the table for hitting him with a corner.

She finally calmed down. “I thought about you,” said Gulia, not making an acknowledgement but simply informatively.

Athanasius began to feel uneasy. He was not used to someone thinking about him. “How is your bear doing? Is it still so green?” he asked in a hurry.

They agreed to meet the next day. This time without excuses.

“I’ll bring a friend. And you’ll also bring one of yours!” ordered Gulia. “I’ve now adapted myself to finding in supermarkets bottles with winning codes! Felt one yesterday, but a woman already had it in her cart.”

“And your friend is also…” Athanasius carefully asked.

“Also what?”

Athanasius hesitated. His tongue was not in a hurry to utter “incubator for elbes.” “Well, does she possess abilities?”

Gulia looked around suspiciously at the elderly man with a professorial beard, who squatted across the street and examined an apple floating in the puddle. “Nina can find any object,” she said.

“She finds treasures?”

“Well, if she sees the one who buried it. Also any lost inanimate object… She’s unhappy. Introduce her to someone!”

Athanasius hesitated. “In order to make two unhappy at once? Certainly!”

“And your friend has abilities?”

“Only one. He ties construction nails into little bows,” answered Athanasius. He imagined that he would bring Max with him.

Athanasius showed up quickly in HDive. There were terribly long lines for the buses to the outlying regions and it seemed to Athanasius a good reason for teleportation. After turning up on the concrete area outside the gates, Athanasius wanted to take a step but realized that, having missed the mark by a centimetre, his soles were stuck. There was no chance of removing the shoes and nothing else to do. He had to take them off and go barefoot into HDive, leaving the boots sticking out in front of the bumper of Kuzepych’s bus.

Athanasius approached Max in the evening, when that one was busy with an important practical matter: pick out from the tangled mess a pair of socks of more or less similar colour. There were six washers for the entire HDive. They were all in the room next to the shower and, since there were many people in HDive, things were always mixed up. What they had not tried. Basins signed with markers, labels on things, ribbons sewn on, and allowing only several people to wash at the same time – nothing helped.

Max stated at first that he did not care. He was not going anywhere. Then he said that, so be it, he would go for the company, although he knew ahead of time that the girl would turn out to be this woofer.

“Why is that?”

“Law of the j-jungle! Pretty g-girls always have dogs as friends. Is your G-Gulia pretty?” he asked.

Athanasius wisely kept quiet. He would not rush to call Gulia “his.” It seemed to him that love at first sight is a TV cliché. It was totally different with Yara. Virus love is outside of the rules. Moreover, he had already recovered.

Max pulled a sock onto his enormous foot and wriggled his toes. “Forbidden to meet with w-warlocks!” he said.