Lynx's eyes clouded the way someone's did when they were seeing something projected on the backs by the tireless slideman of memory. The unmistakable Keep Out sign of the heart.

Abruptly, Ippolit felt again the keen sense of being an intruder on the connection between the two men, as though he were eavesdropping at a confessional being put to a far more tender and primal use.

As if in an effort to back away, he felt his mind drop back into thoughts of lightning, tripping from the ways of mechanics to aesthetics. The sublimity of the torrent striking his face unimpeded as he stared and his young untried heart went wild at each distant bright bolt, wishing with a child's flawless intensity that one would fall near him so that he could gather that searing, flowing light into his hand like a firefly gone supernova. Being dragged in out of the rain, pressing his face to cold glass as water struck the other side and listening to the muttering chant of an old voice yet to lose its last resonance.

Lynx's question took Rakitin by surprise, phonetics echoing and mixing with memory's stored storms.

"Kuwabara?" Polya guessed absurdly.