by Lauren Kate
And the city was a war zone.
Black smoke rose in the gray sky, marking the pockets of the city that had already been hit: to the left of the vast Kremlin, and just behind it, and again in the distance to the far right. There was no combat on the streets, no sign that enemy soldiers had crossed into the city yet on foot. But the flames licking the charred buildings, the incendiary smell of war everywhere, and the threat of more to come were somehow even worse.
This was by far the most messed-up thing Luce had ever done in her life—probably in any of her lives. Her parents would kill her if they knew where she was. Daniel might never speak to her again.
But then: What if they didn’t even have the chance to be furious with her? She could die, right here in this war zone.
Why had she done this?
Because she’d had to. It was hard to unearth that small hint of pride in the midst of her panic. But it must have been there somewhere.
She’d stepped through. On her own. Into a distant place and a faraway time, into the past she needed to understand. This was what she’d wanted. She’d been pushed around like a chess piece long enough.
But what was she supposed to do now?
She picked up her pace and held tight to her grandmother’s hand. Strange, this woman had no real sense of what Luce was going through, no real idea of who she even was, and yet the tug of her dry grip was the only thing keeping Luce moving.
“Where are we going?” Luce asked as her grandmother yanked her down another darkened street. The cobblestones tapered off and the road became unpaved and slippery. The snow had soaked through the canvas of Luce’s tennis shoes, and her toes were starting to burn with the cold.
“To collect your sister, Kristina.” The old woman scowled. “The one who works nights digging army trenches with her bare hands so you can get your beauty rest. Remember her?”
Where they stopped, there was no streetlamp to light the road. Luce blinked a few times to help her eyes adjust. They were standing in front of what looked like a very long ditch, right in the middle of the city.
There must have been a hundred people there. All of them bundled up to their ears. Some were down on their knees, digging with shovels. Some were digging with their hands. Some stood as if frozen, watching the sky. A few soldiers carted off heavy loads of earth and rock in splintery wheelbarrows and farm carts to add to the rubble barricade at the end of the street. Their bodies were hidden under thick army-issue wool coats that billowed out around their knees, but beneath their steel hats, their faces were as gaunt as any of the civilians’. Lucinda understood that they were all working together, the men in uniform and the women and children, turning their city into a fortress, doing anything they could, down to the very last minute, to keep the enemy tanks out.
“Kristina,” her grandmother called, the same notes of panic-washed love in her voice as when she’d been looking for Luce.
A girl appeared at their side almost instantly. “What took you so long?”
Tall and thin, with dark strands of hair escaping from under the porkpie hat on her head, Kristina was so beautiful, Luce had to swallow a lump in her throat. She recognized the girl as family right away.
Seeing Kristina reminded Luce of Vera, another past life’s sister. Luce must have had a hundred sisters across time. A thousand. All of them would have gone through something similar. Sisters and brothers and parents and friends whom Luce must have loved, then lost. None of them had known what was coming. All of them had been left behind to grieve.
Maybe there was a way to change that, to make it easier on the people who’d loved her. Maybe that was part of what Luce could do in her past lives.
The great boom of something exploding sounded across town. Close enough that the ground rocked under Luce’s feet and her right eardrum felt like it was splitting. On the corner, air-raid sirens started going off.
“Baba.” Kristina took hold of her grandmother’s arm. She was near tears. “The Nazis—they’re here, aren’t they?”
The Germans. Luce’s first time stepping through time on her own and she’d landed smack in World War II. “They’re attacking Moscow?” Her voice wobbled. “Tonight?”
“We should have left town with the others,” Kristina said bitterly. “Now it is too late.”
“And abandoned your mother and your father and your grandfather, too?” Baba shook her head. “Left them alone in their graves?”
“Better we should join them in the cemetery?” Kristina spat back. She reached for Luce, squeezing her arm. “Did you know about the raid? You and your kulak friend? Is that why you didn’t come to work this morning? You were with him, weren’t you?”
What did her sister think Luce could possibly have known? Who would she have been with?
Who but Daniel?
Of course. Luschka must be with him right now. And if her own family members were confusing that Luschka with Luce …
Her chest constricted. How much time did she have left before she died? What if Luce could find Luschka before it happened?
“Luschka.”
Her sister and grandmother were staring at her.
“What’s wrong with her tonight?” Kristina asked.
“Let’s go.” Baba scowled. “You think the Moscovitches are going to hold open their basement forever?”
The long drone of a fighter plane’s propellers sounded over them in the sky. Close enough that when Luce looked up, the dark swastika painted on the underside of its wings was clear. It sent a shiver through her. Then another boom rocked the city, and the air grew caustic with dark smoke. They’d hit something nearby. Two more massive explosions made the ground shudder beneath her feet.
It was chaos on the street. The crowd at the trenches was disappearing, everyone scattering up a dozen narrow streets. Some hustled down the stairs of the metro station on the corner to wait out the bombs underground; others disappeared into dark doorways.
A block away, Luce caught a glimpse of someone running: a girl, about her age, in a red hat and a long wool coat. She turned her head for just a second before she sprinted on. But it was long enough for Luce to know.
There she was.
Luschka.
She wrestled free of Baba’s arm. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
Luce took a deep breath and ran down the street, straight into the roiling smoke, toward the heaviest bombing.
“Are you crazy?” Kristina yelled. But they didn’t follow her. They would have had to be crazy themselves.
Luce’s feet were numb as she tried to run through the calf-high snow on the sidewalk. When she reached the corner where she’d seen her red-hatted past self dash by, she slowed. Then she sucked in her breath.
A building that took up half of the city block directly in front of her had caved in. White stone was streaked with black ash. A fire churned deep inside the crater in the building’s side.
The explosion had spat out heaps of unrecognizable debris from inside the building. The snow was streaked with red. Luce recoiled until she realized that the red streaks were not blood but shreds of red silk. It must have been a tailor’s shop. Several badly singed racks of clothes were scattered in the street. A mannequin lay on its side in a ditch. It was on fire. Luce had to cover her mouth with her grandmother’s scarf to keep from choking on the fumes. Everywhere she stepped, shattered glass and stone cut into the snow.
She should turn back, find the grandmother and sister who would help her get to shelter, but she couldn’t. She had to find Luschka. She’d never been so close to one of her past selves before. Luschka might be able to help her understand why Luce’s own lifetime was different. Why Cam had shot a starshot into her reflection, thinking it was her, and told Daniel, “It was a better end for her.” A better end than what?
She slowly turned around, trying to spot the flash of the red hat in the night.
There.
The girl was running downhill toward the river. Luce started running, too.
They ran at precisely the same pace. When Luce ducked at the sound of an explosion, Luschka ducked, too—in a weird echo of Luce’s own movement. And when they reached the riverbank, and the city came into view, Luschka froze into the exact same rigid stance as Luce herself.
Fifty yards in front of Luce, her mirror image began to sob.
So much of Moscow was burning. So many homes were being leveled. Luce tried to fathom the other lives being destroyed across the city tonight, but they felt distant and unreachable, like something she’d read about in a history book.
The girl was on the move again. Running so fast Luce couldn’t have caught her if she’d wanted to. They ran around giant craters cut into the cobblestone road. They ran past burning buildings, crackling with the awful racket a fire makes when it spreads to a new target. They ran past smashed, overturned military trucks, blackened arms hanging out at the sides.
Then Luschka hooked left down a street and Luce couldn’t see her anymore.
Adrenaline kicked in. Luce pressed forward, her feet pounding harder, faster on the snowy street. People only ran this fast when they were desperate. When something bigger than them spurred them on.
Luschka could only be running toward one thing.
“Luschka—”
His voice.
Where was he? For a moment, Luce forgot her past self, forgot the Russian girl whose life was in danger of ending at any moment, forgot that this Daniel wasn’t her Daniel, but then—
Of course he was.
He never died. He had always been there. He was always hers and she was always his. All she wanted was to find his arms, to bury herself in their grasp. He would know what she should be doing; he would be able to help her. Why had she doubted him before?
She ran, pulled in the direction of his voice. But she couldn’t see Daniel anywhere. Nor Luschka. A block away from the river, Luce stopped short in a barren intersection.
Her breath felt strangled in her frozen lungs. A cold, throbbing pain tunneled deep inside her ears, and the icy pinpricks stabbing her feet made standing still unbearable.
But which way should she go?
Before her was a vast and empty lot, filled with rubble and cordoned off from the street by scaffolding and an iron fence. But even in the darkness, Luce could tell that this was an older demolition, not something destroyed by a bomb in the air raids.
It didn’t look like much, just an ugly, abandoned sinkhole. She didn’t know why she was still standing in front of it. Why she’d stopped running after Daniel’s voice—
Until she gripped the fence, blinked, and saw a flash of something brilliant.
A church. A majestic white church filling this gaping hole. A huge triptych of marble arches on the front façade. Five golden spires extending high into the sky. And inside: rows of waxed wooden pews as far as the eye could see. An altar at the top of a white flight of stairs. And all the walls and high arched ceilings covered with gorgeously ornate frescoes. Angels everywhere.
The Church of Christ the Savior.
How did Luce know that? Why would she feel with every fiber of her being that this nothingness had once been a formidable white church?
Because she had been there moments before. She saw someone else’s handprints in the ash on the metal: Luschka had stopped here, too, had gazed at the ruins of the church and felt something.
Luce gripped the railing and blinked again and saw herself—or Luschka—as a girl.
She was seated inside on one of the pews in a white lace dress. An organ played as people filed in before a service. The handsome man to her left must have been her father, and the woman next to him, her mother. There was the grandmother Luce had just met, and Kristina. Both of them looked younger, better fed. Luce remembered her grandmother saying that both her parents were dead. But here they looked so alive. They seemed to know everyone, greeting each family passing their pew. Luce studied her past self watching her father as he shook hands with a good-looking young blond man. The young man leaned down over the pew and smiled at her. He had the most beautiful violet eyes.
She blinked again and the vision disappeared. The lot was once again little more than rubble. She was freezing. And alone. Another bomb went off across the river, and the shock of it dropped Luce to her knees. She covered her face with her hands—
Until she heard someone softly crying. She lifted her head and squinted into the deeper darkness of the ruins, and she saw him.
“Daniel,” she whispered. He looked just the same. Almost radiating light, even in the freezing darkness. The blond hair she never wanted to stop running her fingers through, the violet-gray eyes that seemed to have been made to lock with hers. That formidable face, the high cheekbones, those lips. Her heart pounded and she had to tighten her grip on the iron fence to keep from running to him.
Because he wasn’t alone.
He was with Luschka. Consoling her, stroking her cheek and kissing her tears away. Their arms were wrapped around one another, their heads tipped forward in a never-ending kiss. They were so lost in their embrace they didn’t seem to feel the street rolling and quaking with another explosion. They looked like all there was in the world was just the two of them.
There was no space between their bodies. It was too dim to see where one of them ended and the other one began.
Lucinda got to her feet and crept forward, moving from one pile of rubble in the dark to the next, just longing to be closer to him.
“I thought I’d never find you,” Luce heard her past self say.
“We will always find each other,” Daniel answered, lifting her off the ground and squeezing her closer. “Always.”
“Hey, you two!” A voice shouted from a doorway in a neighboring building. “Are you coming?”
Across the square from the empty lot, a small group of people were being herded into a solid stone building by a guy whose face Luce couldn’t make out. That was where Luschka and Daniel were headed. It must have been their plan all along, to take shelter from the bombs together.
“Yes,” Luschka called to the others. She looked at Daniel. “Let’s go with them.”
“No.” His voice was curt. Nervous. Luce knew that tone all too well.
“We’ll be safer off the street. Isn’t this why we agreed to meet here?”
Daniel turned to look back behind them, his eyes sweeping right past the place where Luce was hiding. When the sky lit up with another round of golden-red explosions, Luschka screamed and buried her face in Daniel’s chest. So Luce was the only one who saw his expression.
Something was weighing on him. Something greater than fear of the bombs.
Oh no.
“Daniil!” A boy near the building was still holding open the door to the shelter. “Luschka! Daniil!”
Everyone else was already inside.
That was when Daniil spun Luschka around, pulled her ear close to his lips. In her shadowy hiding place, Luce ached to know what he was whispering. If he was saying any of the things Daniel ever told her when she was upset or overwhelmed. She wanted to run to them, to pull Luschka away—but she couldn’t. Something deep inside her would not budge.
She fixed on Luschka’s expression as if her whole life depended on it.
Maybe it did.
Luschka nodded as Daniil spoke, and her face changed from terrified to calm, almost peaceful. She closed her eyes. She nodded one more time. Then she tipped back her head, and a smile spread slowly across her lips.
A smile?
But why? How? It was almost like she knew what was about to happen.
Daniil held her in his arms and dipped her low. He leaned in for another kiss, pressing his lips firmly against hers, running his hands through her hair, then down her sides, across every inch of her.
It was so passionate that Luce blushed, so intimate she couldn’t breathe, so gorgeous that she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Not for a second.
Not even when Luschka screamed.
And burst into a column
of searing white flame.
The cyclone of flames was otherworldly, fluid and almost elegant in a ghastly way, like a long silk scarf twisting around her pale body. It engulfed Luschka, flowed out of her and all around her, lighting up the spectacle of her burning limbs flailing, and flailing—and then not flailing anymore. Daniil didn’t let go, not when the fire singed his clothes, not when he had to support the full weight of her slack, unconscious body, not when the flames burned away her flesh with an ugly, acrid hiss, not when her skin began to char and blacken.
Only when the blaze fizzled out—so fast, in the end, like the snuffing of a single candle—and there was nothing left to hold on to, nothing left but ashes, did Daniil drop his arms to his sides.
In all of Luce’s wildest daydreams about going back and revisiting her past lives, she’d never once imagined this: her own death. The reality was more horrible than her darkest nightmares could ever have concocted. She stood in the cold snow, paralyzed by the vision, her body bereft of the capacity to move.
Daniil staggered back from the charred mass on the snow and began to weep. The tears streaming down his cheeks made clean tracks through the black soot that was all that was left of her. His face contorted. His hands shook. They looked bare and big and empty to Luce, as if—even though the thought made her oddly jealous—his hands belonged around Luschka’s waist, in her hair, cupping her cheeks. What on earth did you do with your hands when the one thing they wanted to hold was suddenly, gruesomely gone? A whole girl, an entire life—gone.
The pain on his face took hold of Luce’s heart and squeezed, wringing her out completely. On top of all the pain and confusion she felt, seeing his agony was worse.
This was how he felt every life.
Every death.
Over and over and over again.
Luce had been wrong to imagine that Daniel was selfish. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that he cared so much, it wrecked him. She still hated it, but she suddenly understood his bitterness, his reservations about everything. Miles might very well love her, but his love was nothing like Daniel’s.
It never could be.
“Daniel!” she cried, and left the shadows, racing toward him.