“Alert!” she yells in her strange accent, looking around the train station with wild eyes. Â “My postilion has been struck by lightning!”
Svetik starts toward her, but Zhenya puts a hand on her arm. Â “She’s just some coked-out tourist,” he says.
“She said someone’s been hit by–”
“It’s an old phrasebook thing,” says Zhenya. Â “Nonsense sentence to teach you some grammar rule.”
“The monkey has taken my self-defense device!”
“Ah,” says Svetik, “I see.”
Not far down the road, the boy from the stagecoach twitches in the dirt; a macaque hoots, and squeezes the trigger again.