Summary

Chapter 25 – Nadia is on the beach, collecting clams and thinking about how strange it is to be in the presence of another person. She flashes back to a month after her family left Ural, when she stole away from Altai in the middle of the night, planning to return to Niko, but the very day she arrived he had married someone else. She has a cryptic thought about how this led to her "death." A crashing sound wrests Nadia from this memory and she fires her gun in the air, thinking a bear is near. Kache finds her and they head back toward the cabin. When Kache leaves, he promises to return the next day.

Chapter 26 – Back at the nursing home, Lettie lectures Snag about her inertia, relating a story from when the twins were babies, that Glenn started crawling right away, but...