“Stop!” she yells, but they don’t seem to hear her. They are frozen in their bitterness and in their battle. She knows she can’t make them stop because they have already abandoned the safe perimeter of common sense and crossed into a place from which they cannot turn back, so she starts running toward home, as fast as she can. Her felt valenki sink in the wet snow, and as she runs, snow gets into her boots and melts inside them. She tenses her feet to keep her valenki from falling off as her heels make slurping sounds inside the soaked felt, as fir branches whip her in the face. She runs and runs, with every second adding to the distance between rage and reason, between her and danger.

Then from the forest behind her, there is an explosion. The sound bounces off the trees and then hollows out. The explosion freezes her heart and she knows, even without her mother having to tell her, that she did the right thing by running away from danger. But all she feels is the opposite of right. Would Uncle Kolya have left his fellow soldiers to be killed or captured by the Germans because they were in danger? Would he have abandoned his friends when they needed him?

She turns around and runs back, following her own footsteps in the snow. The road back to danger seems much shorter than the road away from it, and a few minutes later, she is where the fire they built sputters little ribbons of flame, tired and spent, wheezing like an old smoker.

She sees Andrei pressing his hands to his ears, walking around in circles, stumbling like their neighbor Semyon when he is drunk. She sees Marik lying on his side, as if he were smelling the snow, a stupid thing to do, since everyone knows that snow has no smell.

“Marik!” she shouts, but he continues to smell the snow as if he hasn’t heard her, and there is a trickle of blood coming from his mouth.

“Andrei!” she shouts, but he is oblivious to her yelling, too. He is hitting his ears and jumping, as if his feet were on fire.

At least Andrei is moving, but Marik is not. She kneels next to him to do what her mother does when someone is sick, to wrap her fingers around his wrist and feel for a pulse. But the fire is still hissing, so she can’t feel any pulse, and she can’t hear anything, either, when she opens Marik’s coat and presses her ear to his chest.