Raisa tries to warn Leo that they are in danger, but he remains disoriented. The five criminals approach, and the leader grabs her. She strikes him in the eye, but he throws her down. The men pin her to the floor, intending to rape her; the leader threatens her with a jagged steel shard provided by the guards.

Leo suddenly focuses. He stands and is punched down by the leader, the blow clearing his mind. He stands again, deliberately appearing unsteady, and turns his back. When the leader lunges with the shard, Leo grabs the weapon and stabs him fatally in the neck. He wounds a second attacker, and the remaining three criminals retreat. Leo chokes the wounded man to prevent his screams from attracting attention.

Raisa tells Leo that the guards orchestrated the attack, and Leo concludes they must escape. When the train stops, Leo appeals to the other prisoners, explaining that he must escape to stop a man who has murdered over 40 children. The guards enter and discover the bodies, but even when threatened, the prisoners stay silent; one of the surviving criminals lies to the guards, claiming that the men killed each other. The guards leave the bodies in the carriage as punishment. After the train resumes, Leo reveals that he kept the steel shard.

Late at night, Leo works to remove the nails securing a floorboard, reaching through the toilet hole with the steel shard. He accidentally drops the shard through the hole, so Raisa smashes the jaw of one of the corpses, and Leo uses a tooth to finish the job. With help from other prisoners, they lift the freed plank, creating an escape hatch.

Leo explains that hooks hang beneath the final carriage to snag escapees. His plan is to drop onto the tracks and then throw down the corpses so that the hooks snag them instead of him and Raisa.

Raisa drops first, followed by the smaller corpse. She scrambles beneath it just as the hook-covered final carriage approaches, and the hooks rip the body away, leaving her unharmed. Leo discovers the larger corpse is too wide to fit through the opening, so he drops down and passes beneath the already-snagged body. A stray hook catches his arm, but he rips it free. Leo and Raisa reunite on the tracks, both safe.

In Moscow, Vasili occupies Leo and Raisa’s former apartment. Though he engineered their downfall, he feels empty without Leo to hate. When two MGB officers arrive and confirm that Leo and Raisa have escaped, his mood immediately improves.

Leo and Raisa flee through the countryside with an estimated four-hour head start. At a river, Raisa bandages Leo’s arm wound with spiderwebs, and Leo decides that they should follow the river for cover and to mask their scent.

Leo knows massive resources will be mobilized to hunt them, but he believes that authorities will assume that they are heading for a border, not south toward Rostov. When they reach a small collective farm village, Leo argues for stealing food, certain that the villagers will report them for a reward. However, Raisa insists that they must trust the people, as the train prisoners trusted them.

They walk openly into the village and are surrounded. The chairman suggests turning them over, but an elderly woman commands that they be fed, settling the matter. Inside a house, Leo tells the assembled villagers, who are cut off from the larger towns the killer targets, about the serial child murderer: “Leo realized their perspective on the world had been shaken. He apologized for introducing them to the reality of the killer’s existence” (377). As Leo finishes talking, a boy runs in reporting military trucks approaching from the north. Leo asks the boy for help.

The boy creates a diversion by spilling grain on the road, forcing the approaching trucks to stop. While the soldiers are distracted, Leo and Raisa hide beneath two of the trucks, clinging to the undercarriages.

When the vehicles continue into the village, Raisa struggles to maintain her grip and ties herself to the truck’s axle with cloth strips. One of the search dogs spots her as she does, so Leo silently signals to the boy, who runs out and distracts the pack. The soldiers search the village thoroughly but find nothing. As they prepare to leave, Raisa frantically works to untie herself before the axle begins spinning, finally freeing herself with her teeth and dropping to the road as the truck drives off. The villagers quickly surround her, hiding her from the departing soldiers. Leo drops down and runs back to rejoin them.

Vasili concludes that the widespread search will fail and summons Fyodor Andreev, a subordinate who once worked under Leo. Pretending that he wants to help Leo rather than execute him, Vasili tricks Fyodor into confirming that Leo is still pursuing the child murderer. Though Fyodor refuses to confirm that Leo approached him for help, he offers information about where the murderer is likely based (Rostov-on-Don), pretending to draw his conclusions from the pattern of the killings. Having extracted the information, Vasili kills him.

The villagers arrange to take Leo and Raisa to the nearby town of Ryazan. There, they are smuggled south in a crate on a cargo truck bound for Shakhty, near Rostov. In the darkness, Raisa suggests that they overpower the driver and steal the truck to ensure that they reach their destination. Leo refuses, arguing that killing a man as a precaution would make him “the same man [she] despised in Moscow” (393). Raisa admits she was testing him.

They discuss their future. Leo says that he will turn himself in after catching the killer; he does not want to defect to the West because he cannot live as a traitor. Raisa says that she wants to remain with him. They share secrets: Raisa confesses that she once spat in his tea. Leo speculates that she married him not out of fear but out of opportunism—to get close to an MGB agent. He cites the hollow coin as proof, but Raisa explains that the coin held cyanide paste she carried as protection during the war. She was raped several times as a refugee, and the injuries from that time prevent her from having children. She then reveals that she has fallen in love with him. Leo tells her a secret in return: He has a brother.

Nadya is home alone and breaks into her father’s forbidden basement. Inside, she finds a simple room with a wall collage of newspaper clippings showing the same photo of a soldier beside a burning tank.

Her father returns unexpectedly, and Nadya hides under the bed. Andrei sits down, unaware of her presence, until the family cat alerts him. He discovers Nadya and feels a dangerous urge toward her, removing his glasses so that she becomes a blurred shape. When Nadya takes his hand, the moment breaks, and he puts his glasses back on. He deflects by telling her that the soldier in the photos is his brother, Pavel, who he says will soon visit them.

The truck driver delivers Leo and Raisa to his mother-in-law, Sarra Karlovna, in Shakhty. Sarra’s extended family agrees to help, and Leo and Raisa travel into Rostov disguised as part of a family. At the Rostov station, officers stop and question them, but quick improvisations from the family allow them to pass.

Leo and Raisa take a taxi to the Rostelmash tractor factory, where Leo climbs the fence, poses as a tolkach (supply agent) from Voualsk, and is escorted to the administrative office. Once alone, he incapacitates his escort and forces the bookkeeper to provide employment files for the factory’s tolkachs. Comparing five men’s travel records against the murder dates and locations, he identifies the killer: a man named Andrei whose travels match every crime.

In a Rostov hotel, Vasili waits anxiously, knowing that his superiors will only forgive him for killing Fyodor if he delivers Leo. When an officer reports an incident at the Rostelmash factory where men were attacked and employment files stolen, Vasili realizes that Leo is in the city.

Leo stands outside Andrei’s house, reeling from the realization that the killer is his younger brother. He has not explained this to Raisa, who urges him to kill Andrei in his sleep. However, Leo insists on confronting him first.

Leo enters the house and follows the cat to the basement, where Andrei sits playing cards beneath a collage of newspaper photos of Leo. Andrei greets him calmly as Pavel, revealing that he expected him. He confesses that he murdered the children to communicate with Leo, leaving clues from their shared childhood so that Leo would find him. He describes how their mother descended into abuse and despair after Leo’s apparent death. Later, he was drafted into the army and captured by the Nazis. When he returned to the Soviet Union, he was imprisoned on suspicion of being a spy: “I told them, how could I be a traitor when I could hardly see [having lost his glasses when captured by the Germans]? For six months I had no glasses. The world beyond my own nose was a blur. And every child I saw was you” (418). After his release, he began killing animals in an attempt to attract Leo’s attention, but when that failed to work, he targeted children. He blames Leo for abandoning him as a child, describing the brief moment when they were trapping the cat as the “happiest” of his life.

Leo explains that he was abducted and did not leave willingly, but Andrei remains unconvinced. He asks to play one hand of cards before dying. Nadya comes downstairs, excited to meet her uncle. To get her to leave, Leo requests tea, and upstairs Nadya encounters Raisa, who had entered fearing that something was wrong. Raisa descends and finds Leo playing cards with Andrei.

Meanwhile, Vasili and 15 officers surround the house. He enters alone and forces Leo and Raisa to their knees. As he prepares to execute Raisa, Andrei calmly stabs him in the back, fatally wounding him. Leo takes Vasili’s gun and aims it at Andrei. Nadya watches from the stairs as Andrei tells Leo that he wants to die. Raisa places her hand over Leo’s and helps him pull the trigger.

Officers storm in at the gunshot. Leo invents a cover story claiming that Vasili died heroically trying to stop Andrei; a glass jar containing a child’s stomach provides proof that Andrei was the killer. Nadya stares at Leo with hatred.

Leo meets with Major Grachev, a new superior, in Moscow. Grachev explains that the state has determined that Andrei Sidorov was a Nazi collaborator corrupted during the war. He explains that Leo and Raisa’s records will be cleared and offers Leo a significant promotion. Leo declines, instead requesting permission to create and lead a homicide department in Moscow, arguing that “murder will become a weapon against [Soviet] society” (428). He also requests that General Nesterov be transferred to work with him. Grachev agrees to both. Leo exits the Lubyanka and meets Raisa.

Leo and Raisa wait nervously at Orphanage 12 to adopt Zoya and Elena Zinovieva. The director brings in the two sisters, gaunt with cropped hair from lice infestations. Leo and Raisa acknowledge that while Leo could not save the girls’ parents (and, indeed, intended to arrest their father), they want to offer the girls a home and a better future. They promise to expect nothing in return and tell the sisters the decision is entirely theirs. They leave the room to give the sisters privacy. Alone, Zoya gives her younger sister, Elena, a hug.