Sasha learned that prior to being sent to Tomsk to retrieve him, Nikita and his men had been running reconnaissance missions to the villages outside of Moscow, searching for what the major general had described as “artifacts valuable to the war effort.”
“Black magic shit,” Nikita muttered under his breath.
In a voice that managed to be softly scolding and informative, Monsieur Philippe corrected, “Russia has always been a wellspring of the mystical. Stalin is a practical man, but no doubt he’s heard the old stories. He’s manufacturing his guns, and bullets, and tanks, yes, but it never hurts to turn over every stone. You never know when you might find something useful.”
“Like me?” Sasha asked.
“Yes, dear boy. Like you.”
Whoever wasn’t in Nikita’s company would take Sasha with them on errands to buy food, and clothes, showing him the sights of the city – as soot-blackened and war-ready as it was.
He and Pyotr stood for long moments on the bank of the Volga one afternoon, the sun directly overhead, glinting off the icy surface of the water. It had a certain wet shine to it.
“Soon,” Pyotr said, “it’ll break up enough for a ship to get through.”
And then they would leave for Stalingrad.
~*~
Monsieur Philippe decided that Sasha should learn a bit about magic.
Sasha was still trying to wrap his head around the idea of magic. He found he’d never dismissed it, no. When you lived on the very edge of the wilderness, it was impossible not to take the folk tales seriously. He knew well the magic of the forest, its rhythms and its wisdom.
But it was another thing to watch a man light fire from thin air and talk about power in the way that Philippe did.
“Magic is not a gun,” he told Sasha late one afternoon as they sipped tea mixed with a few precious dollops of strawberry jam in Nikita’s loft office. Ivan was working over the punching bag and Feliks lifted weights, their regular breaths an unobtrusive white noise. “It isn’t a matter of having the necessary pieces, arranging them the right way, and pulling the trigger. It requires a spiritual contribution as well. You have to feel it – it has to fill you up, and you have to trust it.”
Sasha stared at him over the rim of his mug.
“You don’t understand?”
“Where does it come from? Before it ‘fills you up,’ where is it?”
Philippe gestured to the room around them. “Everywhere. It exists constantly. It takes great concentration and practice to be able to feel it, and then even more to harness it.”
“Will I be able to start fire like you?”
“No, no.” He shook his head. “Your magic will be of a very different sort.”
But later that night, lying on his bed and staring at the water-marked ceiling, Sasha closed his eyes and breathed out carefully, tried to empty his mind of all distracting thoughts. He smelled damp socks on the radiator, the tang of grease and onions from their dinner of fried-up pickled mackerel. His stomach clenched unhappily on the food as he thought of it, and he pushed the thought of sickness away too. He had to be receptive, had to concentrate, had to be calm and let the magic fill him.
But all he felt was the musty air against his skin, the strain of waiting and wondering.
If magic existed in this tiny room, it wasn’t the kind that Sasha could reach out and touch.
~*~
Sasha was helping Pyotr wash the supper dishes one night when he felt a soft touch at his elbow and turned to find Nikita standing beside him at the sink, a hardbound book and a few sheets of loose-leaf paper in one hand, a pencil in the other. “Come on, Sasha, I want to show you something.”
Sasha wiped his hands dry and followed the captain out to the table behind the sofa, where Ivan and Feliks had made themselves scarce. He heard the murmur of voices in the bedroom, and realized they’d given them a moment of privacy, something hard to come by around here.
“What is it?” Sasha asked as he sat down. He’d long since given up on being timid or deferential with all of them. They’d welcomed him in as one of their own, and he didn’t question that anymore.
Nikita moved his chair around so they sat beside each other on the same side of the table, and laid out the paper he’d brought. The top sheet was a list of some sort – the names of cities, railway stations, villages. Nikita opened the book next and flipped it to a two-page spread that was a map of the Soviet Union.
“This is where we are now,” Nikita said, voice quiet. He touched the tip of the pencil to a far-west dot labeled Moscow. “And this is where you came from.” Tomsk. “Have you seen a map like this before?”
Sasha nodded, because he had, but it was always easy to forget what it looked like. Standing with your own two feet on the ground was so different from looking down at the entire country spready out as a sequence of lines and dots.
“This is where we’re going.” Stalingrad. “I’ve written out here the way you would go home.”
Sasha read the directions again, taking his time now, absorbing their meaning. He realized, as he read Nikita’s careful, step-by-step instructions, that at this moment, had the opportunity to get away and get back home to Tomsk presented itself, he wouldn’t have a clue how to start.
“It’s been a few months since I was in Stalingrad,” Nikita said, a note of apology in his voice. “And with the war on, some of the roads and metro stations might be closed. But I think you could travel overland well, yes? So here.” He produced a small silver disc from his pocket that he set on the table between them. A compass. “If you get lost, follow the river. The Volga will take you back to Moscow. And then you have to go east. The Trakt will take you all the way to Omsk, and once you cross the Ob, you’ll find Tomsk. Follow the compass, always east, Sasha, remember that.”
Sasha could only nod, staring down at the map, at the compass, at the painstaking bits of advice worked into Nikita’s directions, all of it written in a delicate, tiny font that belied everything his Chekist image projected. Sasha’s eyes started to burn, and then the page blurred. He blinked the tears away, not wanting Nikita to see.
But this. This. This was the moment, looking back later, when Sasha knew that he trusted him. A monster might take a boy from his home and drag him into a war. But only a kind man would give him the means to escape and run back home – only a friend.
Nikita put an arm around his shoulders, warm and grounding, and Sasha leaned into him. He missed his father terribly in that moment, fighting tears and the overwhelming weight of simple kindness.
“I promised I would look out for you,” Nikita said. “And I will. But if something goes wrong, and I can’t anymore, I want you to run. Run and go home. Okay?”
Sasha nodded, throat too tight to speak.
~*~
Pyotr was the one who did most of the shopping, his sweet face and kind smile generally enough to win over those staffing and waiting in the queues. The Cheka could buy most of their essentials at the Workers’ Cooperative Stores alongside the factory workers, but indulgences, like fresh fish and meat, had to be bought alongside everyone else.
One morning, human breath coalescing into a dense cloud above their heads, a small, wormy potato thunked into the side of Pyotr’s head. When Sasha turned to find the culprit, he saw an old woman in a babushka, all but three or four teeth missing. She looked away quickly, knowing that to strike an officer was a crime punishable by Siberian exile – or death, if she was lucky.
Pyotr shook his head grimly, and pretended it hadn’t happened.
~*~
Nikita finally did what Kolya had been warning of, and passed out one morning. They were walking as a group to the offices, not a hundred yards from the apartment building. Feliks asked Nikita a question, and the captain opened his mouth to reply – and then his eyes went skyward, the tension left his body, and he fainted face-first into a snow bank.
“Oh!” Sasha gasped, startled and alarmed.
The others looked on with exa
speration and weariness.
“How many times have I told him?” Kolya said, bending to take hold of the back of Nikita’s jacket. “Huh? Eat breakfast. You should eat something. Have you eaten? It’s all I ever say. Stubborn damn fool.”
Kolya managed to drag him up with his hands beneath his armpits so that his face was at least clear of the snow, but it took Ivan to actually get him up in the air. The big man plucked his captain up like he was a doll and slung him carefully over one shoulder.
Sasha didn’t realize he was standing there like an idiot, breathing through his open mouth, worry skittering down all his nerve endings, until Feliks clapped him on the shoulder and said, “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”
“But he–”
“He didn’t eat breakfast. It catches up to him sometimes,” Feliks said, making a face that expressed what can you do?
And then Sasha understood why the others got so angry with him, why they badgered him about eating, because he felt the same way, suddenly, his worry hardening into the kind of impotent anger that clenched his teeth and curled his hands into fists.
“People are starving,” Sasha hissed. “To death. I stepped over a dead woman on the way to the market yesterday. And he chooses not to eat.”
Feliks’s brows jumped, a smile catching one corner of his mouth. “You gonna give him hell about it?”
“I ought to.”
“That’s the spirit.”
~*~
Nikita woke to the warm rim of a tea mug pressed to his lips. He could smell the strawberry jam in it - the ratio was at least three-quarters jam to one-quarter tea.
“What?” he asked, just in general.
“You passed out, you stupid fuck, that’s what,” Kolya said.
“Oh.”
“That’s all you say. ‘Oh.’ How about, ‘You’re right, Kolya, I am a stupid fuck.’”
Nikita looked up at his second in command, perched on the edge of the bed, one hand steady on the mug of tea at Nikita’s lips, the other gesticulating angrily. “You’re right,” Nikita said. “I am.”
But that didn’t seem to help. “You’re damn right I’m right. Look at you, carried to bed like a child. Having to have tea forced down your throat – take a sip of that, fuck, come on.”
Nikita took two swallows, teeth aching from the sweetness. It wasn’t until he’d taken a third and then a fourth that Kolya pulled the cup back and gave him space to breathe.
“Do you know how bad you frightened the little ones?”
Nikita winced; he hadn’t thought of that. “Are they–”
“Sasha went white as a sheet. And Pyotr, well, he’s seen it before, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get him upset. He’s making you breakfast, and when he brings it in here, you’re going to eat it.” His thunderous scowl suggested that attempts to avoid eating would result in Kolya shoving it down his gullet by the fistful. Possibly while Ivan sat on him.
“Alright, alright.”
“What are you thinking?” Kolya ranted. It was the most emotional Nikita had ever seen him. “What we’re doing is important. It’s what we’ve been working toward our entire lives. And we’re following you – you’re our leader, Nik, and you’re letting yourself fall apart.” His shoulders slumped and he swiped his too-long hair back off his face with one hand, a dramatic gesture that revealed a glimpse of the pale, vulnerable lines of his throat. “We can’t do this without you,” he said, quiet now. He looked at the wall. “I know that losing Dima…broke something…inside you. But we’re still here, and we still need you.” His eyes cut over then, glinting in the sunlight, uncertain in a way he never liked to show.
Nikita sighed and let his head fall back on the pillow. Clouds scudded across the sun, patterns of stripes in the sunlight that played across the ceiling. He thought a proper leader would condemn his subordinate for such boldness – suggesting he was broken in some way. But even if he was their leader, Nikita was also their friend, and that was the side of Kolya he was seeing now: the angry friend. The steadfast comrade who, though understanding of his grief, was hurt that Nikita was eschewing all of them in favor of nursing his own guilt.
And damn. The boys had lost Dima too. Pyotr was his brother, for God’s sakes. They were all hurting.
“You’re right,” he said, voice coming out thick and clotted. The tea mug pressed into his hand and he curled his fingers around it. “I’ve been an idiot. I’m sorry.”
“Drink.”
He lifted his head and did.
Kolya sat forward with his elbows on his knees, picking at loose skin around his thumbnail with the opposite hand, face obscured by his hair. It was the reason he wore it too long, Nikita knew, to shield his eyes in the moments he dared to allow emotion to bubble to the surface.
“He wouldn’t regret it, you know,” Kolya said, and Nikita felt the tea like a lead ball in his gut. “Some days, I thought Dima was more committed to the cause than you.” He snorted, like that was impossible. “He believed in it, Nik, and he was willing to do anything. You know that.” He turned to give Nikita a look, eyes dark and open, gaze raw through the thin veil of his hair. “He knew – just like we all know – that we could die any moment. We understand the risk. He wouldn’t want you to make yourself sick over what happened. I know he wouldn’t.”
He grabbed Nikita’s knee and squeezed. “Don’t let it be in vain, okay? Because that old man’s crazy, but so are we, and I have the feeling something important is about to happen.”
Nikita hitched himself up against the wall into a proper sit, tea cradled in both hands. He sighed. “Yeah. I hear you.” He frowned. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a shit captain.”
Kolya said, “Don’t be sorry. Just do better.”
12
THE SHARPSHOOTER
Her weapon was a 7.62mm Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle with a PU optical sight. She carried a Nagant M1895 revolver on her hip, and a NR-40 combat knife strapped to her thigh, but it was the Mosin-Nagant that turned her from girl to predator.
Or maybe she’d been a predator all along, she just needed the weight of the rifle to point her in the right direction.
“Ladies,” Madame Vishnyak called. She paced down the line, hands clasped behind her back, scanning their faces with a critical eye. Searching for weaknesses. “Take your posts,” she instructed, and everyone scrambled.
Katya had been scouting all morning, and she knew just which tree would suit her needs. She set off across the training yard at a jog, following her classmates as they hit the head of the game trail and went through the snow-dusted underbrush into the tangled labyrinth of pines and birches. They were all dressed in winter whites, only their tidy braids distinguishing them from behind – and those would be covered with white hoods once they had taken up their positions.
One by one, they branched off onto smaller trails, gone with a rustle, a flash of polished steel, and then nothing, silent as whispers through the underbrush.
When Katya spied the pine with the forked trunk, she stepped over the snow-covered fallen log to her right and took an exact thirty-two strides before she reached the perch she’d selected earlier. Above her stretched a massive spruce with wide-spaced branches, its needles sharp and itchy against her face as she tipped her head back to search its trunk for hand- and toeholds. The palms of her leather gloves were rough from activity like this, and they gripped tight as she climbed, up and up, until she reached the gap that offered an impressive view of the rolling forested hills below.
Winded in an exhilarated way from climbing, she swung up into the hollow where branch met trunk and snuggled down, feet and back braced, cradled by the wood. She was small, and for that she was thankful, always able to perch in tight places. It took a moment to get settled, to pull her hood up and situate her legs in a way that would ensure she could stay comfortable for hours – if need be. She brought the Mosin-Nagant’s stock up to her shoulder and leveled her sights on the road at the base of the hill, toyed with her grip until it fe
lt right.
Then came the calculations.
The spruce needles swayed in the breeze: gentle, west-to-east. She would need to account for that. The hill sloped down at a thirty degree angle. She would need to account for that too.
Then came the waiting.
In some ways, waiting was her favorite part. It was the truest peace she’d ever known.
Peace had been scarce at home – and that was before the Germans razed it to the ground. She thought about that day, sometimes, when she was wedged between the branches of a tree; let the pain wash over her, let the exhaustion of loss lull her into that twilight space between grief and fantasy when the truth felt like a nightmare she could shake off when she finally chose to. She drifted there, as often and for as long as she could.
But then she’d hear the snap of a twig, and the training exercise would snatch her back to the present. The truth of being a girl without a family, doing the best she could with the hand she’d been dealt.
She didn’t pray anymore. Or sleep. Or feel anything besides determined. Fear was a luxury for those with something left to lose.
Movement on the road drew her attention, and she shoved all extraneous thoughts to the side. A Jeep drove slowly into view, a real American one, part of the shipment sent over after the victory at Moscow, the US sending munitions and rations over to help “Uncle Joe” in the war effort against the Axis. The ground, melted and frozen and melted and frozen again, was a jagged, frosted, slippery mess, and the Jeep struggled to gain purchase, lurching and bucking in the deep ruts of the track. It didn’t help that the driver had no idea what he was doing – there was a good chance he’d never driven anything besides a pony cart before.
No matter.
Several boards had been set up in the back of the Jeep, sticking up through the open roof, paper targets wrapped around the end of each. Katya’s had her name written above it.
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