By 4:00 AM, the assignment was done. But for the first time, Anton didn't feel like a cheater. He felt like he had finally cracked the code of a very difficult map.

The next day in class, Mrs. Ivanova, a woman whose love for grammar was matched only by her strictness, called Anton to the chalkboard. She pointed to a sentence even more complex than the one from the night before. The class went silent.

As he began to copy the answers into his notebook, a strange thing happened. Usually, Anton just wanted to get it over with. But the GDZ he had found didn't just give the answer; it explained why the author had chosen a dash instead of a colon. It broke down the archaic roots of the words that Babaytseva loved to include in her advanced curriculum.