One by one they stripped out of their clothes under orders from the grim guards, their teeth chattering constantly in the bitter Siberian cold. Uriah averted his eyes when it was Emma’s turn to undress and he stood there, fists clenched, until one of the guards had gone through all the pockets and folds in their clothes to check them for hidden objects that they might use as weapons. By the time they returned his clothes to him in a jumbled bunch, his limbs had gone completely numb.
After that, numbers were pinned to the front of their jackets. Uriah didn’t even bother looking what number he was. The growled warning about removing the number being punishable by death washed over him like an icy wave. Next to him, Emma stifled a sob.
At last they were marched to a row of shabby barracks, where the guards proceeded to shove the new prisoners inside in random order. Most of them obeyed without protest, a few cried and begged not to be separated from others they’d arrived with.
Uriah was used to the murky darkness of the Ghettos. He’d never really paid much attention to the night sky back home. But when he looked up into the air, he saw that the firmament was peppered with stars – so many he couldn’t even count them, more than he ever knew existed. It was absurd. Surreal.
Franz Gabriel took him by the arm, Uriah grabbed Emma’s wrist in his turn, and Elizabeth looped her arm through Emma’s. Linked together, they slipped into the next barracks before the guards saw the need to push them.
Inside, the barracks were divided into three rooms, each of them filled with wooden pallets or ramshackle bunk beds, stocked with only a few blankets. Most beds were already taken.
The young woman with the baby had entered with them. She gently rocked her child against her shoulder and seemed at a total loss. Franz Gabriel offered her his coat.
There was one unoccupied pallet in the corner with a single blanket draped over it. Uriah lowered Emma onto the skid and wrapped his arms around her once more. Oy vey, she just wouldn’t stop shivering. He hoped she wouldn’t get sick. That’d kill her, no doubt.
He held her until she fell asleep. He couldn’t sleep a wink himself, though. Darkness was looming large, but Uriah took comfort in knowing that a thousand million stars were shining above the roof of this miserable place. What he wouldn’t give to escape from here with a space ship…
“Move.” A man with a five o’clock shadow kneeled down next to the pallet and shoved Uriah aside.
Grudgingly, Uriah scooted further into the corner, holding Emma to the wall side so he formed a shield between her and the stranger. He didn’t want to think about what they could do to her in this place now that she didn’t have a single shred of status left to protect herself.
The man didn’t seem to notice her. He lay down, stretched his legs, and moaned. Uriah tried to study the man’s face as well as he could in the darkness of the barrack.
“Baikal,” the man suddenly said.
“What?”
“Me. Call myself Baikal. You?” He spoke German with a heavy accent.
“Uriah.”
“And your friend?”
“Emma,” he replied after a short pause. “We’re new here.”
Baikal nodded. “It’s hard, being here.”
“I know all about hard.”
“Hmm.” Baikal leaned forward so his face was close to Uriah’s. Uriah smelled the sharp odor of tobacco. “Ghetto boy, no? Count yourself lucky. You’ll manage. The girl... fancy clothes. Beautiful hair. Not so lucky.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” Uriah inquired.
“Tomorrow they’ll give you a task. You have delicate hands?”
Uriah knew his hands were dirty and callused. “Why?”
“Oh, the ones with delicate fingers are allowed to tinker in the factories. Work on batteries, or chips. A horrible strain on the eyes, but it’s not as tough a job as some others. Working the fields or mines is tougher… Work hard and they’ll feed you. Miss your quota and they’ll let you rot. But don’t worry.” Uriah saw a flash of teeth. “You’ll die sooner or later.”
“And how do people get out?”
Baikal barked out a laugh, stirring Emma from sleep. “You don’t get out, mal’chik! No one does. Your best chance to escape is to join the woodchoppers, because they venture past the Fence sometimes.” He shrugged. “Not that you’d be quick enough to get away from the guards, of course.”
“But what if we are? Suppose everyone in the camp revolts…”
“Idiot,” Baikal scoffed. “A friend of mine tried. Slipped away when the guard was taking a leak. Three days later, they found him back, frozen solid. Cold will kill you faster than the wolves.”
“But what if…”
‘Chyort voz’mi! What’s wrong with you? Are you that eager to risk your life? If it’s not the cold, then it’s the wolves, or the bears. Why do you think they build the SIDR here? There’s nothing out there! So stop dreaming.” Baikal turned to lie on his other side.
But there was a slim chance, Uriah stubbornly mused. If they timed it well. And if they stole a few uniforms from the guards… they dressed well to keep warm…
“Uriah.” Emma’s voice was close to his ear. She shook his arm. “Forget it. It’s impossible.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“You heard what he said. We don’t know anything about this arctic cold, or the wilderness.”
“But we can...”
“No! We might as well jump in front of a firing squad and beg them to end it.” Emma almost squeezed his arm to a pulp. “We’ll have to be smart about this…”
11
Hope is something we create
Emma
BUT their new lives hardly gave them time to think, let alone talk to each other. Every morning, they were roused from sleep by a loud, penetrating bell. A single bowl of porridge was their hurried breakfast before they were shipped off to their work stations. Emma only had the chance to see Uriah at night, when he came back all worn out and grimy from a day in the mines. He didn’t want to talk about what it was like down there, but Emma saw the growing fear in his eyes.
Her task had at first been to work in the potato fields. The guards had mocked her thin arms, the soft skin of her hands. One of them had shaken his head with some pity before mumbling something in his own language, but even if he’d felt some kind of compassion for her, it hadn’t stopped him from hitting her on the head when she’d crouched down to catch her breath, her tattered clothes caked with mud and her hands covered in blisters.
At least she wasn’t alone during the day. Elizabeth was with her, just like Esmeralda, who was forced to carry her son in a papoose on her back during the long, dark hours in the factory where they had to take apart old computers, part by part. It was a boring chore that demanded precision. The child would cry all afternoon sometimes, despite his mother’s desperate attempts to cradle him in her arms and rock him to sleep.
“He’s hungry!” she said. “I’m not producing enough milk for him… Ssh, my darling, quiet...”
“Where’s his father?” Emma asked in a raspy voice. The cold air had affected her vocal chords – she was suffering from a sore throat every day.
Esmeralda’s face contorted with sadness. “Three months ago he got into debt. We hardly had enough money to feed Baby, let alone pay our state debt – so they shot him.” Her voice faltered. “They gave me one term to collect the money I owed them. I begged them for more time. Begged them for mercy.” Her sad expression turned into a bitter grimace. “My pleas fell on deaf ears. So we ended up here.”
They walked from the factory grounds back to the extra-security zone of the barracks. The frosty cold stabbed Emma’s lungs like a knife. At least let there be enough food tonight… Her thoughts were cut short, just like her breath, when they rounded the corner and were confronted with a row of men facing the clapboard wall of a barrack.
Five guards were keeping watch. One of them was holding a long whip in his fists, while another one bent down to pick up the bucket at his feet as he shouted at the poor men.
“… Or we’ll make you crawl through this damn snow with your weak, low-life asses until you know what’s good for you! Am I making myself clear?”
Before anyone could respond to his fuming rant, he threw the contents of the bucket across the prisoners’ bare backs. Emma heard them gasp for breath.
“Oh no,” she yelped. “Why are they doing that?”
“They’re being punished,” Elizabeth said through gritted teeth. “Stuff like that happens a lot in the Ghettos, actually. Just keep walking.”
“We have to talk to Franz Gabriel,” Emma whispered desperately as Elizabeth dragged her along.
Just then, Esmeralda’s baby began to wail again. He sounded quieter than before – maybe he’d given up hope about getting food as well. He won’t last much longer, Emma realized, her stomach twisting with the thought. Not if he doesn’t get the chance to gain strength soon…
Elizabeth nodded grimly. “Just leave that to me.”
Emma noticed that she preferred the nights above the daytime. On the rare occasions that she didn’t immediately crash down on her pallet with exhaustion, she’d peer through the one little window inside the barracks to stare at the night sky. The stars stood out brightly in the dim light of the oil lamps, and she could gaze up there for hours in wonder. Sometimes, the air did something even more magical than just clothing itself with twinkling stars – it would dance like green-yellow ribbons, coursing through the heavens like mystic rivers. The aurora…
On the night that Elizabeth chose to rouse her from sleep, she hadn’t had time or energy to sit in front of the window to admire the stars. Every time she’d made the slightest movement, her lower back smarted with sharp pains. Despite her agony, she’d still managed to fall asleep instantly, wrapped in Sophia’s coat on her makeshift bed.
In the darkness, Elizabeth’s face hung above her like a pale ghost.
Emma’s heart sped up as she sat up straight. “What’s up?”
“Ssh. Come with me.” She tiptoed past the other pallets and slipped out the door, which was slightly ajar. Emma cast an apprehensive look around her. If anybody saw them, they’d be the next naked prisoners lined up in front of the barrack wall.
But no guards were in sight as she followed Elizabeth to a place not far away – a tool shed crammed in between their barrack and the next. “I stole the keys from that dim-witted guy with the sideburns,” Elizabeth breathed into Emma’s ear.
Inside, a small troupe consisting of Franz Gabriel, Uriah, Baikal, and Esmeralda was waiting for them. The latter one looked just as sleepy as Emma was feeling. A single oil lamp was lit in the middle of the circle, casting the faintest glow.
“Finally we’re all here,” Elizabeth said softly. “But hurry. We have a half hour, tops.”
Emma squatted down on the floor close to the light. Her heart seemed to flutter out of her throat like a trapped bird.
“I’ve taken a look at the layout for the northeast side of the camp,” Franz Gabriel said. “It’s not so very different from the original design made twenty years ago…”
“So?” Elizabeth gasped. “You have a plan?”
“I have one,” the Angel said. “It’s big and it’s dangerous. And I’m warning you – it’s almost certainly doomed to fail.”
“Then why even try?” Baikal snarled.
Emma couldn’t utter a single word. It felt like an invisible hand was gripping her windpipe like a vise. If the plan failed, they’d die. Was it worth it?
“Because Franz still has a shimmer of hope,” Uriah replied quietly. His eyes flickered as he took in their faces. Emma’s skin began to glow under his gaze. “We haven’t been here long enough to abandon all hope. We still know what it feels like.”
“Well, I don’t, mal’chik.”
“Baikal, hope isn’t something you sit around waiting for,” Uriah said. “Hope is something we have to make for ourselves. And so is freedom.” He looked around the circle of people.
“I don’t want my child to grow up here,” Esmeralda whispered.
“It’s much better to fight,” Elizabeth mumbled. “At least that’s something.”
The Angel cleared his throat. “I’m a man of little faith. I don’t believe in the old God, nor do I believe in that new one. But now that I see the willpower of The Star – it makes me believe in Uriah and Elizabeth. And in you, Emma.”
In her? She hadn’t done anything worthwhile so far, and due to her stupidity they’d ended up in this mess in the first place! But maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t too late to make amends. Emma hugged herself against the cold. “I believe in the world that Sophia envisioned,” she whispered. “I want to help build it.”
Franz Gabriel nodded. “So here’s the plan. The prisoners far outnumber the guards in this camp, which is why the guards rely on the Fence. Each side of the SIDR is controlled by a separate unit that takes care of the electricity feeding into the Fence. This is why they can open Gate A1 without causing Gate B4 to malfunction, and vice versa. Besides these separate power units, they have a backup power supply that kicks in the moment they experience a complete power failure. Let me tell you, the ten thousand volts running through the cables of the Fence are enough to roast a dinosaur, and the cables are too close to each other to slip through – even though we’re all pretty skinny by now.” He grinned faintly.
“That’s not even funny,” Elizabeth mumbled. “And this is hopeless.”
“That’s what you think, but an electric fence is never powered up twenty-four seven. It can’t be. There’s usually an interval of five seconds every hour during which it’s not working. Now, the emergency power supply is stored in a bunker on the other side of the Fence, so an all-out power cut is out of the question. But if someone were to get close enough to the transformer box to increase that five-second interval… For example, someone who knows the SIDR layout like the back of his hand…” He chuckled, a bit more confidently. “The virus should have done the heavy lifting, but since we can’t use that anymore, my own two hands will have to do it.”
“How long do you think you can push the interval up to?” Uriah’s voice was filled with restrained tension.
“About twenty minutes after the system is disabled. After that, the power cut will cause an alarm to go off, but twenty minutes should give us enough time to open the gate and get to the forest edge…” He looked around the circle. “Only one gate will be disabled. The rest of the Fence will tick on as usual. And now comes the most difficult part…”
“… this wasn’t the most difficult part yet?” Elizabeth mumbled a comment.
“Safety in numbers,” Franz Gabriel replied softly. “Fish swim in schools to lower the risk of being eaten by a shark. My rough estimate is that there are close to five thousand people in the SIDR – and only five hundred guards. If we manage to get everyone in front of Gate B4 when it opens, we’ll be like an unstoppable tidal wave.”
Baikal shook his head. “How will you convince them to join us? Who says they can trust you? I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t heard you discussing your plan here with me. You’re the pale-skinned newcomers, after all.”
“That’s encouraging,” Uriah grumbled.
Baikal let out a soft and joyless laugh. “Oh, mal’chik, half of our brothers are scratching the superintendents’ backs to stay in their good books.”
Emma knew about some prisoners choosing to collaborate with the guards. They’d spy on their fellow inmates in the barracks and on the fie
lds, and they’d report back to their mighty friends about every single defiant word uttered. In exchange, they got better food, liquor, an occasional pack of cigarettes, and an extra blanket. She did understand why someone would eventually choose a better life within the camp borders over eking out an existence like a stray dog, but not everybody was able to share her acceptance. During her time here, Emma had seen more than once how this division between turncoats and victims had pitted people against each other, encouraged by SIDR guards eager for a bit of rioting. Prisoner against prisoner, as though complete insanity had struck in their midst.
Emma couldn’t help but think of her sister. This was her chance to redeem herself. She got up and pulled the hood of Sophia’s coat over her head. “Then tell us who we can trust. We’ll talk to them. Why else would you have a Red Messenger in your ranks?”
12
At sunrise
Emma
THREE days – no more. That’s what they’d decided on, and to Emma it seemed like an eternity away. But the next day, she discovered Baikal was right: people were afraid to take the risk. They’d rather stay within the safe confines of the Fence, even though it was a living nightmare. At least in here, they knew where the danger was coming from.
Uriah and Elizabeth did their rounds in the southern part of the camp. Uriah’s co-workers from the mines were convinced easily – a handful of men stained black with soot and cursed with bad eyesight. But at least they had pickaxes which they promised to use if necessary. Baikal, who’d been in the SIDR longer than the others, would join Franz Gabriel on his trip to the transformer box when the time came.
Esmeralda took Emma on an errand to the women’s quarters – a rectangular shack where women gathered to wash and repair their clothes with the minimal supplies on offer.
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